Star Wars: The Acolyte official trailer

[gbaji]

First off. A number of posters have commented on Kenobi's presentation of the Jedi order as this perfect thing, when his own history should have shown him otherwise. I don't know if that was so much about him personally viewing the Order though rose tinted glasses (or even retcon stuff), but the fact that he's trying to teach Luke to be a Jedi (or at least to embrace the Jedi teachings).

If you were trying to teach someone to embrace the ideals of some philsophy, would you focus on the failures of a previous organization in their application of said philosohy? Or would you focus on the actual ideals and hope that if those ideals were to be accepted, embraced, and then taught, that whatever new organization grows out of that, would be "better than" the one that failed? Put another way, if Kenobi taught Luke that "The Jedi were this failed order that got everything wrong about the force and how to use it, and then ultimately failed and allowed the Empire to rise", would Luke have ever spent the time and effort and gone on to proudlly proclaim "I'm a Jedi. Like my father", and actually thought that meant something significant/important?

No. Sometimes you have to focus on the positives if you want a positive result.

I'm sorry but that's a terrible argument. Why wouldn't you factor in how your decisions will make someone feel?
Or are you arguing the Jedi Council was right to not tell Anakin "hey it's okay Obi-Wan isn't actually dead he's just going undercover for us so we had to fake his death"?

Because the council expected Anakin to act like a Jedi Knight, and to set aside his personal feelings, and all of that other stuff that they thought they'd taught him, and he had learned and embraced, and should be embodying in his day to day actions and decisions.

I think folks are missing that the point of the Clone Wars is to show us the process by which the Republic and Jedi failed, one small step at a time. This is one of those steps. Is it a bit heavy handed? Sure. But they have to establish how Anakin comes to become Darth Vader. To do that they must show that he doesn't ever actually fully embrace (much less master) the Jedi teachings. Had he done so, he would have behaved as the Council expected, and accepted what they told them. He might even have meditated on it, and felt that there was something more to this, that he wasn't being told, but also accepted that. He might even have acted on that, but not gone in like full on bull in china shop, without ever even considering that the whole thing might have been a set up.

He *should* have sensed the truth of things. He *should* have felt that his master was still alive. And he *should* have therefore intuited what was going on, even without being told. That he failed to do those things, isn't a reflection of the council not realizing how he felt about things, but of his own inability to master the more subtle aspects of the force (ie: "be one with the force. follow where it leads. don't force it to your will, but let it guide your actions"). The council made the mistake of assuming that Anakin had learned these lessons. That he didn't shows us one of the reasons why he falls and becomes Vader later on.

They did not believe the trial would be fair. They knew it wouldn't be. Mace Windu even argued that they had to banish Ahsoka from the Order so she could stand trial as a civilian otherwise it would be seen as an act of opposition to the Senate. They were sending Ahsoka to die so that the Republic wouldn't lose faith in them, just like they didn't tell anyone that the clones were bankrolled by Count Dooku because the Republic would lose faith in the Jedi and the war itself.

It's pretty clear where the Jedi Order's allegiance lied in the final years of the Republic.

Right. And this was another one of those (again somewhat hamfisted) arcs in Clone Wars that is showing us how/why the Republic and Jedi fell. At this point in time, the Jedi themselves are so intertwined with the war going on, and the political factors going on, that they are basically trapped by it.

Siddious has been slowly corrupting the Jedi Order though the entire process of the Clone Wars. The moment they take the clone army and use it to fight against the Separatists at Genosia, the Jedi are set on a path that traps them. They have to conceal things that become increasingly problematic. The origin of the clones themselves, being one. And yeah, as they personally become more involved in the day to day operations of the war, the more they become tied to the processes and politics of it. Which is not something the Order is actually very good at.

One small step at a time, they've been manipulated into a position where it is actually quite easy for Palpatine to make his "Jedi have betayed us!" claim, and actually have a boatload of evidence to support the claim.

Which, again, was the point of this arc. Well, that and to remove Ahsoka from Anakin, so as to align things up with the final bits that are detailed in RotS.

This argument does not withstand scrutiny. The Jedi Council did not want Anakin to become a Jedi and they treated him quite coldly as a result. They couldn't exactly stop Anakin from becoming a Jedi after all, because Obi-Wan was going to train him regardless, so they put the kid on a leash instead. The distance they kept Anakin at allowed Palpatine to get his claws into him, turning who would have been the Jedi Order's greatest defense against the Sith into their greatest weakness.

Eh. We could also argue that they were actually correct, and that Anakin was too old to begin training, and they should have refused it. They didn't put Anakin on any tighter leash than they put all of the other Jedi Kights on. He just couldn't handle it, having lived too many of his formative years not in a Jedi temple being trained in the mindset needed to actually be a Jedi.

If anything, their mistake was in giving Anakin that much training and power and trust in the first place. But... again... small steps taken over time, each one seeming minor, add up to a major effect over time. That's kinda the whole theme/point of the PT (and CW). There is no one single conflict or decision that leads them to disaster here. There's no one point where you can say "if they'd just done this one thing differently, everything would have been fine".

Even the training of Anakin, while significant based on what did happen, was not a single definiing thing. Palpatine's plan did not require Anakin to work. He could have continued to use Doku, or found another apprentice who was properly placed and/or groomed for the role. Anakin just happened to be the exact right set of things he was looking for. I suppose we could argue that the biggest faiilng of the Jedi is that they could not see the same patterns that Palpatine could, and thus failed to react to them (which was like totally foreshadowed multiple times by Windu and Yoda talking about how their sight was being blocked/shrouded/whatever). I suppose we could also say that the Jedi knew that they were flying blind into danger, but continued anyway, because that was all they knew how to do. One of the problems with a group trained to "trust in the force", and allow themselves to be guided by it, is that if someone can manipulate what you can see (and what you can't), they can manipulate you very very easily.

It's one of the reasons I actually like the PT a lot. Yes, it has flaws. But the overall story is quite good. And I particularly like the theme of "you can't stop being who you are", which is prevalent through the whole thing. It's also a wonderful set up to the events in the OT, and makes Luke's actions and decisions all the more meaningful and powerful (which was kind of the whole point). It's an excellent setup and bookend for the OT, so it absolutely succeeds at what it was intended to do.

The ST, on the other hand...