“The time of the Jedi is over.“
It’s painful enough that Obi-Wan can’t use the Force because people would know he was a Jedi, that he can’t even speak about the trauma of living through his people’s genocide, that he can’t even practice his own religious culture, but what’s really destroying me is that it isn’t just the Force stuff that Obi-Wan is no longer doing, it’s the Jedi philosophy of emotional regulation that comes with the Force and being a Jedi.
Obi-Wan has fallen to his grief, it is consuming him, it is warping him, it’s not just that he’s turning away people like Nari, but that he’s also holding onto his pain, he’s not letting it go. The Force is based on your emotional wellbeing, if you connect to the Force through anger and fear and pain, that is the dark side. If you connect to it through compassion and calm and love, that is the light side. Jedi have to accept the circumstances they find themselves in, they have to let go of their hurts, because their connection to the Force is fundamentally about that emotional wellbeing, it’s not just Jedi philosophy, it’s literally how the Force works.
But Obi-Wan isn’t a Jedi anymore. The time of the Jedi is over.
So he holds onto his pain, he holds onto his hurt, he holds onto his attachment to Anakin, which is the inability to accept that life changes and you have to let go when it’s time, you cannot grasp onto something so hard that you crush it because you are afraid to live without it, that’s what attachment is. It is everything the Jedi have trained against doing.
But the time of the Jedi is over.
The Jedi and their light and their teachings and their ways are gone, so he holds on because he doesn’t know how to let go of mourning Anakin and the Jedi, even when Bail Organa himself calls him desperately and pleads with him to help save Leia. It’s not until Bail hauls his ass all the way out to Tatooine and tells him, right to his face, “Move on. Be done with it.”
Those words brought me to tears, because Bail Organa isn’t just telling Obi-Wan to rescue his daughter to be a Jedi again, but telling him to let it fucking go, because that’s what Jedi do. Protect people with your lightsaber when you can, love them and help them when you can, but when the time comes, if you can’t save them, you have to train yourself to let go.
George Lucas says that’s how the Force and Star Wars and the Jedi work and I am IN PAIN because Obi-Wan truly believes that the Jedi are dead, that his old life is dead, and it’s not just swinging his lightsaber around or making people float that he’s buried in the ground, but his willingness to accept the circumstances he’s in and to move with the flow of what’s happened.
The Jedi say you can’t destroy yourself in your grief–and Obi-Wan is destroying himself in his grief here, he is doing exactly everything that the Jedi warn will happen when you don’t let go.
He’s been unwilling to let go of his feelings, because he’s not a Jedi anymore.
He doesn’t connect to the Force because that would mean he would need to let go of his feelings and he can’t do that.
The time of the Jedi is over, he says, and we see what it’s doing to him, how it destroys him day by day. He may not be sinking into the dark side, only because he’s not using the Force, but he is suffering all the same for it, because he has forsaken the lessons of the Jedi. Because the time of the Jedi is over.
