Wow, yeah, that’s a lot to process.
One thing is how the Jedi here get to be so messy, and flawed, and vulnerable. They messed up. Without it being going to the dark side or ill-intent.
Nothing about Star Wars has ever intended to say the Jedi order was perfect, or Jedi are perfect, unfeeling, always serene who can do no wrong and don’t ever battle with their emotions. It can be messy and they can screw up without it being an epic downspiral into the dark side.
Torbin’s a restless kid who hasn’t yet learned the patience he needs to be a fully effective Jedi. Master Indara tries to guide him and keep everyone on her team from going off the rails and she does her best but she can’t keep things from falling apart.
Indara’s wise, calm, strategic, diplomatic, and her team should have listened to her or this maybe could have been avoided.
Poor Kelnacca, like Torbin, gets mind-controlled by the witches, and a mind-controlled Jedi wookie, that’s just adding to the chaos.
Sol acted entirely on emotion in ways that are exactly what the Jedi warn against, but the problem isn’t inherently that he led with his heart and his feelings, it’s that he allowed that to cloud his judgment so badly. Even if Torbin is actually the one who pulls them all back into the fortress and it sort of spirals from there, it’s not Torbin’s fault, per se. It’s Sol’s attachment to Osha that’s the main driver and how that governed his actions.
It’s also not simple where it’s Jedi bad. They thought they were doing the right thing, but lack of ill-intentions doesn’t mean they were in the right to intrude the way they did. This is also a situation with multiple pov and misunderstandings from both sides. It also shows how conflict can explode even in a situation where most of the players go into it wanting to avoid violence.
There were wild cards on both sides. The Jedi themselves, Mae’s fire (not blaming Mae, she immediately was terrified and regretful and didn’t realize how it would spread, but hey, making things even spicier and more chaotic, throw some fire into the mix). Mother Koril leads with aggression, which was a contributing factor.
Mother Aniseya is a mirror for Indara—both of them are calm, measured, and conduct themselves in ways designed to de-escalate and avoid violence. But they weren’t enough to keep it from spiraling.
Everything that could have gone wrong, did.
Then Sol makes a terrible choice where if he’d tried to hold both twins with the force as the bridge collapsed, he’d lose them both. He’s not strong enough to hold both sides of the broken bridge. So he makes a choice.
And after all that, the part that actually hurts the most, is Indara and Sol’s decision to lie. I appreciate that Sol wanted to tell the truth, and face up to his mistakes, and Indara—so calm, so wise, so competent—is the one who pressures him to lie. And again, with good intentions—because she wants to spare Osha the pain of learning the truth.
It’s heartbreaking. The fact that Master Sol lied is what I think Osha’s bond with him won’t be able to recover from the most when she finds out the truth.
I wonder how much these events haunted the Jedi order. If the story gets told and used as a cautionary tale.
There’s also a cohesion thematically between these events to the prequel trilogy, and The Clone Wars. The flaws and weaknesses of the Jedi order. Which, in their attempt to course correct, might have actually compounded the issues.
