I LOVE (hate) how the progression of the Inquistors’ representation in the narrative has evolved over the years.
In Rebels, we’re first introduced to them as mysterious scary Dark Siders who serve the Empire, and we also get the tidbit about them stealing force-sensitive kids (that goes nowhere). That’s pretty interesting, lots of potential there, and oh, the Grand Inquisitor was a Jedi Temple Guard? That makes sense, what happened there?
We get to Fallen Order after that and we get the answers—holy shit, Palpatine and Vader literally took the already-traumatized survivors of the genocide they carried out, primarily children, and tortured and indoctrinated them into killing the rest of their own kind. We hear Masana’s dialogue about making Cal into an Inquisitor and isolation, torture, mutilation, and then we actually see Trilla’s backstory of being tortured until she broke. It’s brutal, but it fits perfectly with what we got in Rebels about the Inquisitors being ex-Jedi, the Empire stealing kids, and what they were planning to do with Kanan in the Mustafar system. Extremely fascinating and fucked-up concept, the execution maybe leans a little too much into Being Tortured Makes You Evil territory, but nothing that can’t be improved on later.
They kinda fade out for a while—they show up a little in the Vader comics, but they don’t get a ton of focus or much exploration beyond a few interesting tidbits. That’s fine, they’re the Vader comics, they’re not meant for the Inquisitors, at least we get to see the ‘mutilation’ bit of their training.
And then we get to the Kenobi Show, and, oh, one of the main characters is an Inquisitor! That’s great, we can finally get some stuff from their point of view! But then they’re like oh, no, she’s different from all the other Inquisitors, because she’s a former Jedi youngling who Fell to the Dark Side after Order 66 and is serving the Empire because she thinks she has to. Like?? I get that there’s a lot about Reva’s story that is different from the other Inquisitors, but that’s already been established to be the backstory for all of them!
And then there’s a bizarre line where Obi-Wan says smth like “[Inquisitors are] former Jedi who Fell to the Dark. Now they hunt their own kind” in like a very judgy tone. 1. He shouldn’t know that?? He went no-contact Tatooine hermit at most the week after the Empire rose. Considering that Jedi like Cal and Kanan, who were actually out in the galaxy for years and had access to news about the continuing Jedi Purge, didn’t know anything about the Inquisitors before meeting them, it seems very weird that desert hermit Ben just automatically knows what seems to be something of a secret? Like, I can buy him having heard of the Inquisition because he’d realistically have kept an ear out for stuff related to the Purge, but it really seems like a stretch that he’d know their backstory.
2. I do not buy the mild disgust communicated here as Obi-Wan’s feelings on the Inquisitors. The show never communicates much about Obi-Wan’s prior knowledge of the Inquisition beyond that 1 line, so he could plausibly be aware that they were mainly tortured kids or not. If he knows, I’d expect him to have a hell of a lot more sympathy. If he doesn’t, I expect he’d assume that they’ve basically got the same story as Vader: Jedi who Fell at least somewhat on their own and joined the Empire willingly in the aftermath of Order 66. Considering the absolute complex he has about Vader in the show, I’d expect something more than… polite disapproval. Either way, the tone’s off for how I feel Obi-Wan would react.
And of course this whole thing is mostly to prop up Reva and distinguish her as the different, important Inquisitor—which, fair, let it never be said that I do not love Reva and think she deserves as much narrative weight as she got and more, but I don’t feel this was the best way to go about it. Reva’s similarities to the other Inquisitors are just as important and interesting as her differences. They really seemed to be trying to take all the sympathy away from the other Inquisitors and give it to her so that the audience would buy her as a deuteragonist, but she’s the strongest character in the show, she can stand on her own.
So, kind of a letdown with the overall portrayal of the Inquisition in Kenobi, but we got so much more from that show than we had before and such a great character out of it that I could mostly forgive it. And then we get to the goddamn Inquisitor book. To be clear: I have not read the Inquisitor book, because I heard its premise and was instantly enraged because I knew what they were doing with it from the jump (and this has been confirmed by those who actually did read the book).
But holy shit. They said: what if we took this fascinating and tragic premise and completely ruined it? What if the Inquisitors weren’t traumatized young survivors who were tortured into breaking and indoctrinated into hating their own people—no, what if they were just already guys who were kind of evil, were specifically selected by Palpatine to become Dark-side wielding servants of the Empire years beforehand, and eventually made an active choice to serve the Empire? Y’know. EXACTLY like the guy we already made an entire trilogy about, but worse.
And then they also decided to sprinkle the most played-straight version of Being Tortured Makes You Evil (a very shitty trope), and make it so that a few of them were indeed tortured, and instead of that being a part of the cult indoctrination, it was just the whole thing. They were tortured and that instantly made them hate the Jedi and want to be evil. All of the interesting bits just squeezed out.
It’s just. Star Wars is the king of taking cool and interesting premises with tons of potential, and then ruining them completely. Lucasfilm put me in charge I can fix this.
