Job hunting has not been going well, so I am going to pin this post! Help a disabled queer artist pay rent AND get custom-made art just for you in the deal!
I've been meaning to dive into how much I love Cal and Cere's tension, and their relationship, in Fallen Order. It's so well-written and well-acted, and I love how much both of them grow throughout their time together. Buckle in, folks, this is a long one!
Here, Cal's just been rescued by the Mantis crew after being kidnapped to fight the Haxion Brood. This is something he has every right to be furious at Greez about. Greez's gambling debts led the Brood to put out bounties on him, and when they couldn't get him, they snagged a kid who just happened to fall into Greez's orbit. Cal and BD-1 were both at risk of losing their lives for Greez's mistakes. While Greez is appropriately apologetic, Cal barely even pays attention. He stares at Cere, his shoulders slumped, expression barely hiding his hurt.
He's still reeling from what he learned on Zeffo the day before. From who he learned it from.
The Second Sister cornered and nearly killed him, goading him about being a weak Padawan, about Jaro Tapal. But she also revealed that she was Cere's former Padawan, that Cere had lied to Cal, and that Cere was responsible for what had happened to Trilla.
This devastates Cal.
He holds it together as much as he can. While still on Zeffo, he allows himself a moment of real vulnerability, asking quietly, "Cere, why didn't you tell me?" But by the time he's rescued from the Brood, that vulnerability shifts into disappointment and a desperate hope that somehow Trilla was lying to him.
I love what they do with him here. He's sarcastic. Angry. "I had a nice chat with the Second Sister." He waits a second to drop the bomb. "Trilla." This is Cal Kestis at his most teenaged, snarky and hurt and venomous. He still keeps it reeled in -- he did grow up a Jedi, after all, he's not gonna cuss her out or anything absurd like that -- but he's so human here, and so young.
There's that desperate hope. He asks Cere if it's true, if she really betrayed Trilla to the Empire.
But Cere, for her part, can't go there yet. How she can explain to this traumatized Padawan whose connection to the Force is still so fragile, that not all masters sacrificed themselves for their Padawans? How can she admit it to herself? She tries to deflect and to tell Cal that Trilla would do anything to compromise their mission, because she can't yet say "Yes. I tried to protect her, and I failed, and she paid the price." Because who can just say that? Who can take a look at the lowest they have ever been and stare at it with the cold light of honesty and say yes, the bad things you've heard about me are absolutely true? And imagine trying to do that when you're also trying to make amends, to move forward, to protect other children -- and you know that that protection starts right here, right now, with this one boy, and you've got to do anything you can to earn his trust?
So she deflects, and avoids saying anything of substance, and Cal's having none of it.
Check the subtitle here. We got the ?! in the house!!! Cal has to know, how can she not know how important this is? Because now that he's off Bracca, the safety valve's gone. He's got to do something of meaning now, got to help people the way he should have been doing all along. His own survival? Fine. Who needs it now. If he can just do something meaningful, if he can just keep someone else from having to go through what he did, then by the Force he's going to do it. Once in motion a Cal Kestis in motion must stay in motion, for the alternative is terrifying.
"Is it true?!" and he doesn't know what to think about the former Jedi before him, if he can trust anything she'd told him so far, if she'll protect him if the time comes, if she'll give in to the Empire again. He's pissed off and wounded and scared. Cere and Trilla's relationship has nothing to do with him and everything to do with him.
And Cere just acquiesces that Trilla was her apprentice, and Cal snaps, "You should have told me."
They don't get any more time to deal with it, because Kashyyyk needs them.
If you keep having Cal and Cere interact after this point, Cal is noticeably brittle. Cere tries to apologize, but Cal has thrown up his walls, deciding that fine, this is how it is now, and the trust they were starting to share is over. He doesn't want to talk about it when Cere tries to bring it up... but he lets Greez see how hurt he still is. That's safer than trying to talk to Cere about it directly.
Compare Cal asking why she couldn't tell him, and sharing how he feels like she broke their sense of being a team...
... To Cal's response after Cere admits she should have told him the truth from the beginning. That's what he said earlier that he wanted, but here, he's having none of it. It's too hard to get into with her. He's too afraid of what he'll find if they're really honest at this point, so he tries to shift the focus back to the mission. Things are broken between him and Cere, fine, but they can still do their work. He clings to that. As hurt as Cal is, he knows what they're doing still makes sense, and he still wants to fight against the Empire. If he has to do that with someone he can't trust, well, so be it.
And Cere understands. Despite her fear of going into the truth, she knows she's the one with greater wisdom and experience here. She doesn't tell him he's being a petulant child about something that has nothing to do with him, or tell him he needs to get over it. If she can't be fully honest with him, not yet, she does an admirable job of being otherwise open and accepting of his feelings. She knows he'll either come around, or he won't, and all she can do is offer the space for him to do so.
By the end of the second Kashyyyk mission, Cere's hoping that enough time has passed that maybe Cal's ready to hear more. Perhaps she's also guilty that Trilla went after him again, and that the Ninth Sister also put Cal's life in danger. Whatever the reason, she tries to reach out to him again. She gives more explanation that she has so far, and you can see just how difficult this is for her. All three characters are acted so well here -- Greez awkwardly in the middle putting way too much salt on his food, Cere's halting explanation, and Cal's completely closed off body language. H
ell, we practically even get an eye roll from him. Yeah. This dude's still a teenager.
...but one who's acting this way out of hurt, and out of not knowing/being afraid to know the whole story. Once you know everything that happened to Cere and Trilla, it's not wrong to want to shake Cal and tell him to be more understanding! They were in an impossible situation! There was no way to win and they both lost!
But he doesn't know that, and at this point, it's easier -- less painful for him -- not to know. So he tells Cere it's okay, but the message is, I don't want to hear it. He's been thinking about it all along when he goes off on his missions, and he's come to the conclusion that yeah, Cere probably did the best she could, there's no point dwelling on it, and that's good enough to go on with the mission. It's fine. (He's fine.)
And then we get... Dathomir and Kujet's Tomb, and all of Cal's efforts to move forward in the Force, to be strong when Cere let him down, to focus on the mission, it all goes to hell.
Suddenly Cal's the one overwhelmed by regret and self-blame. He's forced to examine his own darkest day, and when confronted with it, he falls apart. He's heartbroken all over again and convinced that what happened to Master Tapal was entirely his own fault, even though Cere tries to absolve him by telling him the truth, that he was just a child. Cal can't hear a thing she's saying.
Both actors here are so, so good. Cal is scared and small and a hurt, grieving child so desperate to find a sense of control about what happened that he blamed himself. His voice breaks, he hunkers down into himself, he holds his ruined lightsaber as tight as he can. And Cere finally lets the poison spill out, the self-hatred she's been carrying so long, she gets down on his level and manages to say everything she's been holding in. It comes out in a frantic, breathless rush, and honestly, both of them bring tears to my eyes in this scene.
So she's finally open. Finally lays it all out. What happened to her, how she used the dark side, how she failed both Trilla and herself.
More importantly, both for herself and for Cal, she reveals how she kept going. How she found a new hope. How she decided that this was not the end of her story.
Now we see what Cere was like as a Jedi truly. She's compassionate, but commanding. She instructs Cal to get up. Tells him he's going to make a new lightsaber. That it isn't over. That he can move on. He just has to take the first step.
And Cal wipes the tears from his eyes, and nods, and he believes her.
The lesson stays with him. He always was a fast learner. He goes to Ilum and rebuilds his lightsaber, goes to Dathomir and confronts his past again and this time succeeds. He learns that failure is not the end, but a part of the path. He starts to thaw towards Cere, grateful that she didn't turn away from him when he fell to his lowest and confessed what had happened to Master Tapal.
Then Trilla confronts him on Bogano, and he sees what happened first hand.
The entire sequence is gutting. Trilla's fear and agony are palpable, and Cere's devastation -- both emotional and dark side -- are so painful to see. Cal's utterly overwhelmed by it, sent into a partial seizure from the intensity of the flashback. (That dazed expression afterward sure looked post-ictal to me.) And when he gets back to the Mantis, bereft a Holocron, instead of telling Cere the next thing they need to do for the mission....
Cal Kestis halts everything because he has to apologize.
He wastes no time. He tells Cere immediately he saw what they went through. He says "I'm so sorry." And he takes responsibility for his own behavior, that arrogance that he clung to that told him he would never fail someone that way.
The thing is, Cere was comfortable never hearing this apology from him. She had started making peace with it, ever since Dathomir, with what she had done. She never expected him to empathize like this, but hearing it must have been such a powerful, emotional feeling. It's only after Cal apologizes and makes things right between them that he goes forward to discuss what happened to the Holocron and what they need to do next.
When it's Cere who takes the news hard, who blames herself... look who's there, reflecting his master's teachings right back at her. He tells her that mistakes are in the past, that they're in this together, that she won't be going after the Holocron alone; he even reaches out and puts a hand on her shoulder, starting to grow from a mentee to an equal, to someone who can support her as she's been supporting him.
Seeing how Cal lifts Cere up during her darkest time, both here on the Mantis and later in Nur, as a reflection of what she did for him after Dathomir... I could scream about it, okay??? In fact I have been screaming about it! Right here! In this post! For several thousand words!!! Just seeing these two respect each other! Care for each other! Lift each other up!!! I can't even with it! They have both grown SO MUCH!
SHE'S SO PROUD OF HIM JUST LOOK
and then she KNIGHTS HIM and my heart just bursts with pride at how far they've both come, Cere finally embracing the Force again, Cal kneeling to accept a Knighthood he thought he would never, ever see....
you can't tell me he wasn't tearing up here. I saw how bright they made his eyes look in this split second. YOU CAN'T FOOL ME. Damn, I wish I could gif the little looks on his face right at this moment, because you can see so many emotions wash over him. Cameron Monaghan over here just exploding my heart. This kid!!!
...
anyway, I think that's all I've got. Just... CAL AND CERE! They mean a lot to me, okay???
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the
Organization for Transformative Works
first chapter of My Little Dark Age (MLDA) is now out! it's a Cal Kestis is shunted back into the past and becomes obi-wan's padawan because I have a soft spot for those.
listen i KNOW that it works that way for video game reasons, but i am obsessed with how little Dathomir makes sense from what they show you in fallen order. I haven’t gotten up to the dathomir stuff in my clone wars rewatching and I don’t count legends, so caveat that there may be bountiful lore there about dathomir (and I hope so) that I am just not aware of, but holy shit
how do these dathomirian villages function? Where are their domesticated animals for fibre, meat, milk etc? where are the families and kids?? As I understand it Cal landed in an area formerly under nightsister control so it make sense they’d be prepared for and focused on combat, but like. People gotta live lives when they’re not fighting. Where were they making things??
What kinds of indigenous plants have been domesticated/semi-domesticated for food production? Do they have things that can work well with their mystifying rocky mesa biomes that are interspersed with swamps? I know they have the mushblooms and spiders, and the big fruit on the trees, but it just seems unrealistic to me that that’s the whole scope of what they subsist off of.
Can a star wars media please take us on a tour of the whole of Dathomir, I want to know how this society even remotely functions from what we’ve been shown thus far
One of my favorite parts about jedi fallen order is how Cal's psychometry function both within the narrative and as a game-play mechanic.
As a game-play mechanic it allowed the developers to tell the player background information in a way that made more sense in-universe than there just being a random npc around to lore drop or finding some old journal, ect. It also means the developers don't need to animate cut scenes for every little thing but can still share this information. It also functions as a collectable and a way to reward exploration.
But its use in the narrative is the most interesting. Cal is a survivor of genocide, he is on the run from a government than wants to kill him for existing. He is so traumatized by the loss of his people and the memory of his master who died protecting him that he can't even use most of his powers at the beginning of the game.
Cal is literally haunted by his past.
And that is why giving him psychometry was a stroke of genius on the part of the developers. No amount of running or hiding will ever stop the past from clinging to him. It will always be there in every random object he touches. And this is shown through the plot of the game and his overall goal too. He wants to restart the jedi order, rebuild his family, which is a noble and understandable goal, but under the rule of the empire, not a safe one.
It is only at the end of the game, after he sees the possible result of chasing the past, that he lets it go. He knows that being a jedi is not being held down by your attachments and putting other's needs before your own. He gives up on restarting the order to protect those children from the empire and in doing so lets go of his attachment to the past.
The past is always with him, but it doesn't need to control him.
