Obi-Wan Kenobi is an iconic character within the modern cultural zeitgeist. He is the archetype of the Mentor. To those who grew up with the Prequel Trilogy and The Clone Wars (both the Tartakovsky version and Filoni version), he is a paragon of both the virtues and struggles of a Jedi. The only Jedi of the Prequel era whom I personally ran higher than him are Qui-Gon Jin and Plo “We Are Justice” Koon. He may feel that he failed Anakin Skywalker, but he never failed the fanbase.
Obi-Wan Kenobi is a Disney+ series that, for a fanbase battered and weary after the Sequel Trilogy and the malicious marketing tactics of Lucasfilm, was seen as the only hope for the franchise. It failed them.
Now, I personally have not watched this series (given that I still do not have Disney+). However, the reviews and clips that I’ve watched paint a rather vivid and rather dire picture. This series had so much potential, and it squandered it.
It didn’t help that Lucasfilm started gaslighting the audience even before the series released. Serious advice for any creators in my audience, whether you be writers, YouTubers, or whatever else: take time to actually listen to the criticism you are receiving before you paint all criticism as coming from morally broken people. Your audience may forgive of your mistakes and ignore flaws if you are at least neutral to criticism, but if you resort to preemptive, ad-hominem attacks to deflect their criticism, then you lose that leeway.
Back on topic … Obi-Wan Kenobi (hereafter just referred to as Kenobi, while the character shall be referred to as Obi-Wan) has a great many issues. I will go into greater detail on these in Part 1. However, to start off this series, I want to preview the one flaw that I feel is the most fundamental and provide much-needed context on my own perspective of Star Wars. That way, when we get to my proposed means to correct it, you’ll fully understand where I’m coming from, even if you don’t necessarily agree with it.
A Broken Character (Arc)
Kenobi was always going to be a story with the severe limitations – to be precise, the limitations of an anime filler arc. It is both a prequel and a sequel. As a sequel, the starting point of the character is locked in place; as a prequel, so is the end point. The obvious casualty in this scenario is the stakes. The story can’t kill Obi-Wan or subject him to irreversible injury or disfigurement, so the danger is sucked right out of any action scene he’s in. A less commented-upon casualty to filler arcs, however, is character development. If Obi-Wan’s arc at any point takes him away from who he is in A New Hope, then we know the change is meaningless, as he will need to reset by the start of that film.
(Also, to address the rancor in the room – I empathize with everyone who believes that this series should never have happened, that Obi-Wan should have spent the time between Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope doing nothing but meditating and watching over Luke with little of important happening. For the purposes of this series, we will treat the making of this series as something inevitable. I will get more into this in Part 1.)
So, how did the creators of Kenobi address the limitations of being a filler story?
They pulled a Jake Skywalker.
A Jake Skywalker, for those not familiar with the fallout to The Last Jedi, was a term coined by Mark Hamil during that film’s press tour. It refers to a beloved or iconic character who is assassinated specifically to crowbar a certain narrative that otherwise could not coincide with that character.
How does this apply to Kenobi? Well, much like Luke in The Last Jedi, Obi-Wan was turned into a broken, defeated husk of his former self. Much like Luke, it fell to the actual main characters of the new story (more on that in Part 1) to breathe life back into him and return him to his former glory. However, I’d argue that what happened to Obi-Wan was worse than what happened to Luke. As much The Last Jedi messed up Luke’s characterization, there was a 30-year time gap in which significant character changes could have occurred, and we did not have an established end point that Luke needed to reconnect to. When I was in the theaters, I bought that Luke could be reduced to this state. It was only afterwards, after much thought, that I began to understand the problem.
Obi-Wan does not have that leeway. The man we saw at the end of Revenger of the Sith was filled with a sense of sorrow and grim purpose, sure, but he had his mission before him. By A New Hope, he has that same mission and drive, albeit with a sense of inner peace. There was nothing setting up him becoming what he was at the start of Kenobi. Turning him into Jake Skywalker was a blatantly artificial attempt to manufacture conflict for the sake of a character arc.
Fallen Jedi
At least of few of you may be thinking something to the effect of: “Well, Star Wars has always been grounded in characters. We can’t tell an Obi-Wan story and have him be a static figure. He needs to have some struggle that we can relate to.”
Assuming that I didn’t just punch a strawman, I agree with this point. Dynamic characters have a certain appeal to them that static characters don’t (though, of course, you can tell meaningful character stories with static characters). I, too, would like Obi-Wan to have some sort of arc in Kenobi.
The problem, as mentioned at the start, is that our start and end points are set. We can’t just fabricate a character conflict from the Cosmic Force, shrug, and say, “Well, it makes sense, doesn’t it?” We need to find something that fits Obi-Wan’s established characterization. We need to find something for the character to learn, something they can grow from, or an assumption that can be corrected. This needs to be something that already exists at the end of the Prequels but is not essential to A New Hope.
And thus, after roughly 1,100 words, I get to my point: Kenobi should not have been about Obi-Wan rediscovering what it means to be a Jedi. It should have been about coming to terms with how the Jedi failed, and in the process, learning how they needed to move forward.
Fallen (?) Order
That raises the core question, though: what was the nature of the Jedi Order’s failure in the time of the Prequel Trilogy?
This is a question that ignites a lot of heated emotions. There are people who criticize the Jedi Order for everything from their monastic lifestyle to their views on attachment to their dedication to selflessness and serving the Light side of the Force. At least a portion of this criticism has nothing to do with the Jedi Order themselves – rather, they are used to indirectly (and sometimes directly) criticize real-world groups and ideologies. If you want an example, just look up James Troughton’s article about Obi-Wan’s sexuality. This criticism of the Jedi has ignited an equally passionate defense of the Order. I am sure that a least a portion of that defense is people whose real-world beliefs share some commonalities with the Jedi and are using the Jedi as a proxy battlefront.
All this is to say that the discourse about the failures of the Jedi is extremely messy. It is rarely confined to just the facts as they are presented in either Canon or Legends. All of us have our biases, and they seep through into our work.
That’s why I wanted to open this series with a Part 0. Before presenting how I would personally rewrite Obi-Wan’s story to reflect on the failures of the Jedi, it’s only fair that I clarify what exactly my views on the Jedi are. I’m not here to convince other people that my perspective is the objectively correct, merely say how I feel and express why I feel that way. You’re free to agree or disagree as you choose. Either way, I’m hoping this will lend critical context to the proposed rewrite.
If you’re not interested in my ramblings about the Jedi, Part 1 of the proper Missed the Mark essay will be out very soon. The rest of you, strap in. There’s a lot of ground to cover.
The Road to Order 66
Do I feel that the fall of the Jedi Order at the end of the Clone Wars represents a failure on the part of the Jedi?
Yes.
Do I think the Jedi are corrupt? Do I think their ideology and doctrine are fundamentally broken?
No on both counts.
Would I prefer the Jedi Order took a slightly different approach to things like attachment, recruitment, and how they interact with the galaxy?
It’s complicated.
There’s obviously a lot to break down here. Criticisms of the Jedi tend to blend together and interconnect. For the sake of simplicity, I’m going to break things down into four categories: Jedi ideology, Jedi doctrine, the New Jedi Order of the Legends continuity, and where I feel the Jedi ultimately failed. I will support my views with examples where I can, but I’ll only be drawing examples from Legends, the films, The Clone Wars, and The Mandalorian. I haven’t watched Rebels or Book of Boba Fett (again, not having access to Disney+). I also won’t refer to anything from the new comics. The High Republic era will also be ignored here. (I apologize – I do realize that shutting out an entire era comes across as me cherry-picking data, but from the snippets of that series I’ve seen, it reads as fan fiction created by people who have no understanding or passion for Star Wars. Judging the Jedi based upon the philosophy of the High Republic would be like judging the Federation based upon the Bad Robot era of Star Trek.)
Also, if anyone feels that I am oversimplifying or misrepresenting your criticisms of the Jedi, please understand that I am not trying to strawman anyone here. I am simply presenting my understanding of the criticism. If I get it wrong, that’s on me.
Jedi Ideology: The Balance and the Light
A common argument against the Jedi is that they failed to maintain Balance in the Force. The line of reasoning is that Light and Dark can (or, perhaps, should) be used in equal measure. There is a portion of the fanbase that proclaims that so-called “Grey Jedi”, wielding both Light and Dark, are the correct path. This is often mingled with general discussions of philosophy, and the need to not neglect the self (the Dark Side) while thinking of others (the Light Side). George Lucas himself has indicated in an interview that the Jedi Order of the Prequel era failed because of this imbalance.
I don’t agree with this criticism, and it does not reflect what we are shown on screen.
The Original Trilogy and Prequel Trilogy both showed us a universe in which the Light is Balance and the Dark is Imbalance. The Jedi were always trying to help people, and the worst among their number were people who had either fallen to the Dark Side or were somewhere along the road to it. To use a pair of notable examples, Pong Krell was not a zealot for the Light when he sent the 501st Legion on suicide runs, and Jorus C’Baoth had stopped seeing Jedi as servants of the Force by the time he started his bid to become the new Emperor. Both had become Dark Jedi. The closest that could be said to the Jedi being “blinded by the Light”, so to speak, was the fact that their selfless service to the Republic allowed Palpatine to manipulate and exterminate them. That’s really more about Palpatine being cunning than their ideology being broken. If Lucas really intended to indicate that some tribute needed to be paid to the Dark, he Missed the Mark (a topic I’m considering for a future entry of this series, as I do think he could have presented this viewpoint without fundamentally changing the overall story).
Even the Sequel Trilogy realized that Balance doesn’t mean equal Light and Dark. Sure, they paid lip service to it in The Last Jedi, and Rey chose the Dark Side on a few occasions with no lasting consequence, but at the end of the day, Disney defaulted to the Light triumphing over the Dark for the happy ending.
There is the matter of the Mortis arc of The Clone Wars, of course. However, that story exists in near-total isolation (to the point that the Legends series Fate of the Jedi is the only outside story that I know to have referenced it, and Troy Denning has gone on record saying that it was a happy coincidence of timing that he decided to capitalize upon). As much as I enjoyed Mortis when I was younger, it doesn’t mesh well with the realities we are presented with throughout the rest of the series. Perhaps if it had been longer, or if it had a greater impact on the stories in The Clone Wars, I would have a very different perspective on the Jedi. As it is, I find it very hard to grasp exactly what Lucas wanted to say with this story or how much weight he wanted it to have in the franchise.
Now, there certainly are Grey Jedi in Star Wars. They don’t dabble with the Dark Side – they serve the Light, regardless of what the Council thought of them. Qui-Gon was a mystic who did was the Force told him. As for Ahsoka Tano, Filoni felt it was so important to establish that she was still a servant of the Light that he gave her white lightsabers to hammer home the point.
Do I think that a fascinating story could be told about a world where Balance does mean equality of Light and Dark? Absolutely. There are many great stories to be told there. However, that is not the foundation that was laid with the Original, Prequel, or even Sequel Trilogy. Once an ideology or axis of morality is baked into the very fabric of the universe, we can’t simply change it without toppling the entire narrative.
So, long story short, I think the Jedi Order’s decision to serve the Light alone is completely reasonable within the established setting.
Jedi Doctrine: Monasticism and Attachment
Another popular criticism of the Jedi is that their lifestyle and methods are broken, unsustainable, or simply evil. There are many facets to this, ranging from them being baby snatchers who indoctrinate children to being heartless and broken people who deny themselves love. This sometimes is extended to the Jedi being blamed for Anakin turning to the Dark Side.
Again, this simply isn’t held up by Canon or Legends, and it fails to consider the worldbuilding of Star Wars.
Force-sensitive people are not mutants from X-Men or wizards from Harry Potter. They as family-friendly versions of psykers from Warhammer 40k. Their fragile mortal psyches are connected to an eldritch power source that amplifies their emotions and manifests their desires as reality-warping power. Every Force-sensitive who receives any amount of training is a ticking time bomb with the potential to become a galactic-scale megalomaniac.
With that in mind, I find it hard to criticize the Jedi Order for their monasticism. Oh, I’d have my share of uncomfortable questions for the Council if I were in a room with them, but I struggle to criticize their lifestyle choices. If anything, I commend them for having the self-awareness to make themselves as little a threat to the galaxy as possible while still using the Force to help people.
Why take children as babies and raise them as monks? Well, it’s not to train them in the Force. It’s because the minds of children are malleable and more accepting of new ideas, so the Jedi can reliably nurture those children into individuals of sound mind who can live in Balance with the Force. They don’t snatch the kids – they ask the parents to turn them over. (The only source I found of the Jedi being “baby-snatchers” was merely a line stating that they were perceived as such, without any actual examples.) I don’t think they even change the kids’ names. Note that Count Dooku, upon leaving the Order, was able to not only go back to his home world but also to reclaim a noble title.
Why shun attachment? To be clear, this doesn’t mean that Jedi don’t love. It just means that they don’t put any worldly connection over their duty to serve the Force. A YouTuber I quite enjoy, Thor Skywalker, has even pointed out that the Jedi aren’t technically required to be celibate. The issue with attachments is purely that, when you try to hold on to something, it can lead you into negative emotions, and Force-sensitives have the power to take this to an unhealthy extreme (as Anakin plainly demonstrated). This is also why recruiting young was so important. Once a child develops a deep attachment to parental figures and any family outside of the Order, it would be dangerous to everyone involved to try breaking that bond. Ahsoka herself stated this very fact when she refused to separate Grogu from Din Djarin.
All things considered, the bulk of the Jedi we are shown in the Prequel era were living happy, fulfilling lives, surrounding by people they loved. And, if they didn’t like how the Order conducted itself, no one was forcing them to stay. True, living as a monk your whole life leaves few opportunities or connections outside of the monastery, but with the powers at their disposal, a dissatisfied Jedi had the means to carve out a comfortable place in the galaxy.
Regarding the specific example of Anakin … I’ll go into this more a little further down, but by and large, the only person to blame of Anakin’s fall is Anakin. Looser rules by the Jedi Order would not have made a difference in the end. Anakin’s entitlement and lack of control over his emotions didn’t come from Jedi training, and Palpatine could have manipulated him and twisted him to the Dark Side just as easily if Jedi lived like everyone else. The advice Yoda gave to Anakin about accepting loss was sound advice for a family-friendly psyker. Accepting loss is not a pleasant process, but it is a necessary part of the human experience, and Jedi power cannot save everyone.
The New Jedi Order: What Luke Did (in Legends)
Someone will probably ask the obvious here: what about Luke?
Luke’s decision to go against Obi-Wan and Yoda’s guidance and to try to redeem Vader is sometimes spun as an example of “healthy attachment”. The argument goes that Luke proved the Jedi Order and the Sith wrong as the same time by choosing to save his father. (This is argued by both defenders and critics of the Jedi Order, with defenders arguing that Luke provided an example that the Order, while not wrong, was only taking one of the available paths.)
While I see the merits of this argument, I again must fall back on what we’re shown. Luke feels a connection to his father, yes, and he feels compassion for him. He surrendered to Vader and went to the Emperor because he believed his father would not kill him or let him die. However, he doesn’t display attachment (in the sense that the Jedi Order condemned) until Vader threatened to corrupt Leia, at which point he went berserk and nearly fell to the Dark Side. He then passes his spiritual trial and becomes a Jedi in full by reflecting on how he was becoming his father and sparing Vader. At the end of the day, I think Obi-Wan and Yoda weren’t condemned Luke’s love of Vader so much as insisting that he serve the galaxy above all personal interests.
Then there is the New Jedi Order of Legends continuity. Luke opted for a very different approach for his Order. He recruited students of all ages. He allowed Jedi to marry and have families. His Order weren’t monastic, even if they did sometimes dress like monks. If anything, they were a very spiritual paramilitary organization.
I personally prefer this model over the Jedi Order of the Prequels. Again, though, there are big-picture considerations that need to be acknowledged. The galaxy in which the New Jedi Order flourished is almost incomprehensibly different from the Prequel era. It was in a state of constant violence and upheaval. Luke didn’t have the resources, manpower, time, experience, or millennia of tradition to rebuild the Jedi as they once were. He made what he believed to be necessary concessions in the name of serving the Force.
As Legends continued, Luke also took a first step in walking back the liberties he’d given his students. During the Dark Nest crisis (which, timeline-wise, happened at roughly the same time in Legends that Rise of Skywalker happened in Canon), he saw several of his pupils go rogue and start a war between the Killiks and the Chiss, all due to their attachment to the Killiks. (Granted, there was some pheromonal mind control at work, but they all had a chance to walk away from the conflict, and the ones who didn’t fell to the Dark Side.) In response, Luke rallied the Order and bluntly told them that their focus needed to be on serving the Light and the greater galaxy over any personal connections, giving anyone who disagreed a chance to walk away with no hard feelings. A few people did.
It would not surprise me if the New Jedi Order gradually became monastic again over thousands of years, especially if the galaxy settled back into its old state of peace and stasis. The pressures that necessitated Luke’s looser rules were already falling away by the Dark Next crisis, and those pressures would likely continue to fade as time when on. (The war with the One Sith in the Legacy era would reset things, of course, but that would only be a reset.) All it takes are the reappearance of Dark Jedi over time to demonstrate why each of the old rules was valuable.
Order 66
Hopefully, a few of you are still hanging on at this point. I hope you’ll forgive me for putting words in your mouths one last time: “If you don’t think the Jedi Order messed up on any of those things, then what is the problem?”
The thing is, while the Jedi Order may not have been fundamentally flawed, they made three understandable yet fatal mistakes.
1. They assumed that the Sith were truly destroyed, and that no equivalent Dark Side threats existed.
2. They formed an attachment to the Republic, equating service to the Republic to service to the Light Side.
3. They failed to commit to a cohesive strategy for dealing with Anakin
“The Sith Have Been Extinct for a Millennium”
The obvious aspect of this is that the Jedi failed to be vigilant for Sith meddling. While Sith following the Rule of Two certainly contributed to this, the fact remains that the Jedi knew how easily a person could fall to the Dark Side. They should have constantly been on watch for interference and should have taken the appearance of Darth Maul as cause to scour the Republic for other Dark Side individuals.
There’s a deeper layer, though. The mistaken belief that there was no Dark Side threat explains Jedi recruiting. After all, without training, the average Force-sensitive isn’t going to be a significant threat to anyone. The most likely source of Dark Siders would be Jedi falling to the Dark. So the Jedi Order recruited young, selecting only the best candidates, and turned down any candidates they found later in life for being too old. They left thousands of Force-sensitive individuals open to Sith recruitment.
I have no idea if this failure represents arrogance, ignorance, or both. Either way, constant vigilance might have saved the Jedi Order and the galaxy at large.
“My Allegiance is to the Republic!”
This is a much murkier issue. Supporting a unified galactic government seems like an obvious decision for peacekeepers, and the Jedi had a long history of defending the Republic against external threats. The Republic also supported the activities of the Jedi and granted them legal authority to intervene in situations. It’s easy to see how the Jedi came to associate the Republic with Balance in the galaxy.
However, that’s not how the Force works, and the Jedi should have been aware of that. By the time the Clone Wars rolled around, the Jedi were so tightly bound to the Republic that they couldn’t justify backing out from commanding the Grand Army of the Republic (though many individual Jedi did object and left the Order because of it). Some Jedi, in particular Mace Windu, developed a personal attachment to the Republic that was so deep that that it rivalled Anakin’s obsessive love for Padme.
Then there is detachment from society. As much as I love Plo Koon, there is a scene of his from The Clone Wars which stands out to me as exemplifying this problem. Plo Koon walks into a bar in a crime-infested layer of Coruscant and seems to expect that everyone will recognize him as an agent of goodness and order. The man who rallied his soldiers by affirming that their lives were not expendable to him seems utterly oblivious to how people living a few levels down from the Jedi Temple feel abandoned by the Jedi. I think this goes back to their attachment to the Republic. When your focus in on big-picture things like galactic peace, it’s easy to lose sight of how much people are struggling to survive within that peaceful world.
Perhaps the most sinister angle of this attachment was the politics. The Jedi Council became distracted by public perception and currying political favor. They had a reputation to defend, and they were wholly dependent on the Republic government for resources. The much-maligned trial of Ahsoka Tano was a perfect example of how they were willing to compromise their values to play ball with Palpatine and other political entities within the Republic.
Granted, I think the absence of the Jedi Order would have made it that much easier for the Sith to seize control of the Republic from within, but that doesn’t change the fact that their loyalty blinded them to the actual needs of the Force.
“He is too old!”
The Council should have picked a lane when dealing with Anakin. Instead, they chose perhaps the worst combination of options to deal with him, all because Obi-Wan threatened to pull a Grey Jedi stunt and train Anakin anyway. Despite knowing full well that Anakin was an enormous risk, they allowed the training to proceed. They also expected Anakin to fit the same monastic mold that they knew he couldn’t fit – which was, after all, why they rejected him in the first place.
If the Council was going to stick to doctrine and refuse to budge on how Jedi were to be trained, they should have called Obi-Wan’s bluff. Let him try to train Anakin without the Council’s support. If that wasn’t an option, then they should have accepted that concessions needed to be made. At a bare minimum, they should have mitigated the risk presented by Anakin’s attachment to Shimi.
I’ve heard people propose that the Jedi should have freed Shimi, set her up with an apartment on Coruscant, and let Anakin visit her. That’s not a terrible idea (though, in the end, that would have made it that much easier for Palpatine to manipulate Anakin, since he could easily target her). Personally, I think they should have set up Shimi, Anakin, and Obi-Wan in some shop or homestead in an isolated place and had Obi-Wan give Anakin an adult-learners version of Jedi training, perhaps with Yoda visiting every year or so to monitor Anakin’s progress. That way, Anakin could be trained differently from other Jedi without worrying about the example this set for other students.
Redemption of a Jedi
In terms of points of failure of the Jedi Order, Anakin was rather situational. Blindness to the Dark Side and attachment to the Republic, though, are broader flaws. These are what I believe Obi-Wan’s story arc in Kenobi should have explored.
Missed the Mark
Next time, we shall dive into Kenobi properly. Perhaps, with the right tweaks, we can salvage Obi-Wan’s character arc and the broad strokes of the show’s plot. It’s all coming very soon in Missed the Mark – Obi-Wan Kenobi. Have a great day, and I hope to see you all soon.