The Jedi’s own dogmatism and partisanship caused their downfall. If they hadn’t alienated the Separatists and seen the Republic for the autocracy it was becoming, they could have maintained peace and kept the Republic in check. But instead the peacekeeping monks became army generals.
TCW S6E10, “The Lost Ones”, was the last chance for the Jedi to avoid Order 66, and they utterly bungled it. To quote the last part of the episode as best I remember:
Yoda: “Know now we do, that guide the creation of the clones from the beginning, Dooku did. Hmm…our enemy created an army, for us.”
Mace Windu: “If this was known, public support for the war effort, the Jedi, and the Republic would vanish; there would be mass chaos.”
Y: “ Cover up this discovery, we must; no one, not even the Chancellor, may know. Valiant men, the clones have proven to be; saved my life, and yours, they have, many times. Believe in them, we must; win the war swiftly, we must, before our enemy’s designs reach completion…whatever they may be.”
MW: “Are you sure we’re taking the right path?”
Y: “Hmm…the right path, no. The only path…yes. Designed by the Dark Lord of the Sith, this web is. For now, play his game, we must.”
I know things had to be in line with RotS, but Jesus Fucking Christ.
Defund the Jedi
Query: Did someone call for a good guy with a gun?
Incidentally there was an EU series kinda about that. I never finished it (lost the will after Disney came in), but one of the premises was around the Jedi going around creating messes for the government to clean up and the citizens being increasingly unhappy with the Jedi being an extra government authority.
The only thing that can stop a bad guy with the force is a good guy with the force. We would be a much safer society if everyone could use the force
/S
Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side, kid.
That’s why I’m voting for the Rey Palpatine/Broom Boy ticket! Make The Force Great Again!
Yoda a damn liberal. There is always another path.
Or Filoni is a hack given too much canonical freedom. One of those.
All they had to do was listen to Fives.
Those younglings were promised to him three thousand years ago.
Part of the genius of the clones was that, as far as the Jedi knew, one of their own had commissioned it due to his visions of the future war.
It’s like, your old best bud pre-ordered specialty beer for your party but couldn’t make it. So you use the beer, and then surprise! It’s your highschool nemesis who bought shitty ipas and put them into fancy beer cans all along! Who could have seen this coming?
Yeah, but their association with Jango Fett, who the Jedi knew worked for Dooku, probably should have raised a red flag.
I mean I don’t know if I even agree with that; they were suspicious of him. But being suspicious that a mercenary who now works for the enemy, was also hired by your best bro, isn’t really enough to go on and say that the work of your best bro is completely untrustworthy.
I disagree. Jango Fett, coupled with Sifo Dyas (who was also buddies with Dooku) disappearing, and the fact the order for the clone army went ahead despite his disappearance makes it reasonable to suspect the clone army was part of the trap.
It doesn’t rise to the level of “plot hole” but the plot is far from airtight.
They (the Jedi council) discovered that Dooku was evil after/during the time they were forced to use the clones to rescue anakin and co. So like, yeah, the group of people involved in the clone creation was sus, but at the same time they were already neck deep in a war when it all came out and they had a moment to think about things.
A better Jedi council wouldn’t have accepted the positions of generals over a slave army.
A better Jedi council would’ve stopped at using slave soldiers to rescue a pair of Jedi and a politician.
A better Jedi council would have been suspicious of a slave army being made in their name.
A better Jedi council would have treated anakin as a person first, instead of as child soldier / prophesied savior.
The better Jedi council didn’t exist. It was an indolent, slow, and prideful Jedi council, and that’s why they failed. That was the whole point; to stuck up in their own assess to see what’s going on right in front of them.
I think it makes for a great story, if not the one that we might’ve hoped for.
Realistically the problem is that Lucas never stopped to ask himself “wait, isn’t this a slave army?” and no one had the power to call him out because he was George Lucas.
I think Lucas was pretty decided in his portrayal of declining republics and their fall into empire. The plot was a mess, and his inability to write dialog gives an even worse impression of it all, but I think the themes were well laid.
The council would’ve been better if Yaddle and Yarael Poof had avoided their deaths.
If you say so. AFAIK that’s legends stuff which I am not actually versed in.
Yaddle’s death by the hands of Dooku appears in current Canon in the series Tales of the Jedi, which is a pretty good mini-series in the Clone Wars art style.
The big driver was necessity though. They were just on the cusp of war with the trade federation so it was either use the clone army or the republic straight up loses the war. The Jedi alone couldn’t take on the trade federation. Even if they were suspicious, there were very few options on the table.
Yeah, but technically the Trade Federation was the Republic’s problem, not necessarily the Jedi’s. They could’ve just refused to be involved to begin with.
I always felt like there was a gap in this portion with regards to my understanding. The galactic republic is billions of citizens and thousands of worlds but no one can form an army to defend it without the clones? I mean, Naboo had Star fighters, other worlds have defense forces, but no one can raise an army without the clones? It seems like the republic citizens were ambivalent to the defense of the republic and just shirked responsibility to the senate who only had the Jedi to lean on. It was “someone else’s problem”. So maybe the Jedi could have said “fix yo own shit” but it would have shown the shakiness of the republic and without the republic, the Jedi were just a small magical sect of individuals who did not have the numbers to be statistically relevant in the galaxy.
and this is where “the Jedi are corrupt bureaucrats” starts to make sense. At the time they were already view as the republic’s police instead of a religion that promotes peace.
Palpatine was betting on the jedi being corrupt idiots and he won easy
That’s all true, but the Jedi still had every reason to probe every aspect of the clone program, closely enough to find out about Order 66. Especially since they already suspected Sidious was high up in Palpatine’s government and may have a degree of control over the clones.
LOL, yeah that is fair. Just assign at least a committee to evaluate the reliability of your only effective weapon against your opposing military force. That’s fair and when you put it that way, it makes it seem like the Jedi were just like, “massive army created by our opposition? Why shouldn’t I use it?”
The funniest part is that ‘straight up lose the war’ was actually a pretty solid choice for the Jedi. It’d force the republic to face the consequences of its actions with regards to the outer rim, force palpatine to stall and delay the droid army, and it would give dooku and the separatists time to get a solid outer rim government going. There’s a lot of negatives too I’m sure, but at least they wouldn’t be personally leading enslaved people to their deaths against a droid army.
Oh and also, here’s a fancy that does exactly that, which I adore. https://m.fanfiction.net/s/12986683/5/
Chapter 5 is a jump cut to post using the clones to rescue anakin, but before the rest of the war. The earlier chapters are an intro on why obiwan is different enough to stop things.
I feel like ‘The Acolyte’ series was going to explore the corruption and bureaucratic malaise of the Jedi order. Which was really missing from the prequel series and the Clone Wars. Anakin’s fall never had the proper weight; we never find out why “from my perspective, the Jedi are evil”.
Too bad.
Anakin thought they were evil because they separated him from his mother and left her to die in slavery, ignored his visions of the future, tried to commit a coup against a democratically elected official and attempted to use extrajudicial force to execute said official, didn’t let him pursue love, blocked him from accessing educational materials relating to the dark side that he wanted because he was both hunting a sith lord and trying to learn about his visions said sith lord implanted in him after the Jedi wouldn’t take him seriously about it and finally, he was sick and tired of fighting in a war for his entire adult life that he felt could’ve ended long ago if not for the jedi’s incompetence and when it came down to directing an Inquisition or letting your kids who are about to be born grow up in a time of war just like you did he said fuck it and proceeded to actually solve all those problems overnight but did it evil style.
I agree. We needed more legit (and ultimately tragic) cracks in the Jedi order for Ani to not look like an idiot. What we got was basically:
Anakin: “I want more power!”
Jedi Counsel: “No.”
Anakin:
To be fair, some of it got fleshed out in The Clone Wars, but a lot of people skipped the cartoons.
And they’re a children’s show written by a hack.
What do you have against Filoni
Slop. What, too hard to find a template of a meme that’s been around for like 15+ fucking years? Had to remake it with AI? Jfc
also, maybe tone it down with the “light side/dark side” stuff, it makes you look like you have the political savvy of 13-year-olds…
Well it’s not political per se, it’s mystic philosophy. So, yes.
You can talk about the Taoist, Dharmic, and Eastern martial art philosophy behind it all and Japanese cinema tropes but part of Lucas’s problem with the Force is he took all that then made it a moral binary that says emotion is bad unless I agree with it so…
see this is why the gray jedi stuff is so interesting to me. like what direction would the franchise have taken if there were more people like qui-gon? there was a lot of that in the expanded universe, the world was more complex than just prophecy and good vs bad and where you have to be a super-special boi with thetans in your blood or whatever to get into the magic school (boy there was a lot of that at the time) and there’s a very clear good and bad side but WHOOOOA the good guys were actually evil and they joined with all the evil guys so now they’re double evil but now there’s a new good side to balance it out but now that the evil guys are gone there has to be a new evil guy so we just make some up…
george had something with the political intrigue, and i think rian saw it too. but none of that came to fruition.
