I was talking with my son about Star Wars and the disconnect between the original three movies and the prequels (while constantly saying "Boooo!" in a loud voice every time he said the words "Expanded Universe.") and came to the notion that Luke was a shoddy bit of hack work as far as Jedi training went.

Luke got the down-and-dirty version of everything without any of the details. The Force is this thing that is all around us that you can tap into and move stuff with. You can pull stuff to you (Accio light saber!), levitate things (windardium leviosa!), and sometimes see things that may or may not happen in the future, which is a pretty useless skill IMHO.

"But why can I sense the Force and others can't?"
"Shut up and do more flips and handstands."
"How come we're not just lousy with Force Ghosts like Kenobi? Weren't there like thousands of Jedi? And what about all those Siths? Can they become ghosts, too?"
"It's a secret thing that only a couple of us can do, and it's only a Light Side thing. Now, close your eyes and try to find out where your girlfriend is. What's she wearing, and please describe it in detail for me."
"On the light side and a dark side - isn't the Force actually neutral and the only difference is in how one taps into it?"
"Look, you're thinking too much. Using reason and logic leads to the Dark Side. So does pissing me off. Just blank your mind and let the Force guide you."
"Speaking of which, isn't using the 'Jedi Mind Trick' to force the weak willed to do our bidding pretty much in the Dark Side territory of actions?"
"Well, no more than some mild incest."
"What?"
"Never mind, I'll tell you about that later."

They didn't bother with any theory or historical context in training our sacrificial lamb - they gave him just enough practical knowledge to get him into a position to where his Dad would either A) try to go easy on the kid and get killed, or B) do something self-destructive that would ruin him (and knowing the self-destructive nature of Little Orphan Annie before he became Darth Vader wasn't much of a gamble).

Even then Yoda thought of Luke as expendable. "There is another," he says to Kenobi's ghost, who as a ghost apparently has very selective memory.

If one thinks Luke was a rushed hack job of a Jedi-in-training, imagine what the backup plan for Leia was. "By the way, can use the force, and Darth Vader is also your Dad. This is a light saber, the 'on' button is right here. Don't think about it; just swish it around in front of you while feeling for the Force, m'kay?"

You really ought to read this webcomic, it'll explain everything: http://darthsanddroids.net/episodes/0001.html

IMO, the Jedi got WAY too big for their breaches and their downfall was inevitable. Otherwise they would eventually just become the Empire themselves.
Luke had it better than the "younglings" in their BS, posh, military school with their neat little power points, 3D holographic star maps, air conditioning, fancy little uniforms, field trips, expense accounts and super nice living conditions on the big city planet.
He got one on one, in the wilderness, no fluff classes to attend...PURE TRAINING. He didn't stand in a crowded room waiving around baby light sabers playing withe the drones---he got SHOT by one on the MF with the visor down on DAY ONE. He didn't have a bunch of teachers, he had two and one was friggin DEAD!
Hard. Core. Rock on Luke.

I dunno, Luke was pretty dumb and gullible to the point of it being laughable. Uncle Owen used the Jedi Mind Trick on him, for jimney's sake.

"I'm going to the academy this fall."
"You're going to stay on this moisture farm for another season."
"I'm going to stay on this moisture farm for another season."

"I'm going to sell my speeder for enough to get us off planet."
[salesman]
"They just aren't worth much now that the other kind of speeder is available."
"My speeder just isn't worth much now that the other speeder is available."

"Your father was a spice trader that was killed when you were an infant."
"Your father was killed by Darth Vader."
"Your father is Darth Vader."

All three fully accepted as hard truth one after another with only mild complaint that is instantly abandoned.

Yoda is straight up pervert, no doubt using Force Voyerism to watch him get it on with his sister. In this Luke doesn't even blink - "Your girlfriend is your sister" followed by a blank "My girlfriend is my sister." The careful viewer will note that neither Yoda or Ghost Kenobi tell him to stop pursuing her romantically; he just sort of gives up on it and he and Leia give each other little sly grins when he tells her. Leia tells him to relax, it's cool, she knew they were siblings for awhile now.

Luke is a meathead grunt, disposable cannon fodder. His great act of diplomacy is to give Jabba a droid that has his only light saber inside it. What if the gambit worked and Jabba accepted it as trade for Han, or decided that maybe Luke really is an actual Jedi and not worth the risk of offending? Was Luke going to show up and ask for it back?

Jedi Knights are feared for their ruthlessness and acts of violence. In the first three movies they joke around about settling diplomatic negotiations with their light sabers, and when they show up on the Trade Federation ship the dudes are frightened because the Jedi will "force a settlement."

Luke is even worse than the Episode I-III Jedi in that he has no training other than a couple months with Yoda in how to do just the very basics. He's culturally illiterate, naive, gullible, and has no loyalties other than to himself and some romantic, ill informed notion of what being a Jedi means.

I should hope so! We don't want the Jedi back as they were.
Of course he was weak in the beginning, that makes for a better hero to rise from. The lower they are when they start, the more dramatic the change. That's the recipe that's been done to death over and over in books and movies. If Harry Potter had lived with Daddy Warbucks in a loving family to begin with, no one would know who JK Rowling is. He wouldn't have left! LOL

As for ROTJ, there was no doubt the Han rescue would have to take place. They confronted Jabba in front of his crew. Even so, getting a droid or two out wouldn't be that big a deal. IIRC, he did have more than one saber, but that was the one that he made. He still had Annakin's somewhere and could build one regardless.

On Leia...ok I got nothing. Keep it in the family I suppose. She was Han's from ESB on anyway, they all knew it. If it wasn't so cold on Hoth he'd have tapped her earlier on.

All that aside, what makes the original movies so good is that it WASN'T all about the Force, it was merely a curiosity. It was a straight up rebellion with big scifi battles, fighters, capital ships and the occasional laser sword fight. IMO what ruined the following 3 movies was the Force centered storyline and feeble attempts at humor and humorous characters.

According to the EU the force ghost thing was actually first used by the Sith. But I guess the EU doesn't matter much anymore.

Great.

It's only 8:47am here and I've already read the funniest thread I'm going to read all day.

Way to go, Dart.

Expanded Universe?

Booooooooo! and a raspberry on top of it. It's like dragging Schindler's List into a discussion about The Battle of the Bulge. The EU is just too convoluted and long winded to allow for straightforward discussion. Of the movies, that is. Not continental politics. Well, it is, but that's a different topic completely best left in the PWEC forum.

In the movies there are only four Force Ghosts, and only three are shown. Well, five with four shown, but that's because they remastered ROTJ to show Darth Vader as Anakin Skywalker if we're going to nitpick.

In ROTJ, Luke is in full poseur mode. He claims to be a Jedi Knight to Jabba in his recorded message, which is funny since all the actual Jedi are dead at that time so he's just awarding himself the title. Vader toys with him and the Emperor smirks at him and then starts zapping him when he gets bored.

It's clear that Yoda never taught him to use the Force in any meaningful way in combat (when someone is throwing things at you by using the Force, stand in one spot with your feet planted, sway slightly from side to side with your light saber in front of you, and trust me, you won't get knocked out of a window) or about the offensive nature of Force powers. Yoda knew darned well the Emperor was a big fan of force lightning but didn't warn Luke about it or bother to tell him it could be negated by simply blocking it with his light saber? Clearly Luke was being set up for failure in a terrible way.

Oh come on, we all know "that guy" who has to name-drop somebody famous he knows/ met/ stood in line behind at Whole Foods once to try to sneak into the party/ club/ midnight showing of Rocky Horror Picture Show. Same thing when's he trying to get into Jabba's palace. I mean, holy crap, that music video in the middle of the palace scene was like something out of "MTV's Spring Break In A Galaxy Far, Far Away." You humor that guy until he starts getting annoying, then you smack him around a little bit.

Supposedly Qui Gon "rediscovered" the method for living after dying and managed to connect with Yoda accidentally (when Anakin slaughters the Sand People in Ep 2). Yoda teaches Obi Wan and the two spend the next 20 years meditating and communing with Qui Gon so that when they die they have even more control than Qui Gon did.
How Anakin managed it is a gimme, it was just so that you could see him at the end for that big happy feeling, the story didn't actually need it. Maybe his strength in the Force allowed Obi Wan and Yoda to come to him after he died before he totally evaporated?
The new films might alter how this works. Pray they don't alter it further.



The Jedi Master

I believe it all goes deeper and in fact started out as a clever (and rather convoluted) conspiracy by Yoda, Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan:

Yoda had noticed that the Jedi order was pretty much even less than a shadow of its better days: the Jedi council was corrupted, Jedi Knights were laughably clumsy - latest proof was their shameful conduct during the Arena fight on Geonosis, where the alleged Elite of the Galaxy had to be rescued from utter defeat by the Clone Army. Also, the "Old Republic" was so caught up in gridlock that it was virtually ungovernable: it, too, had to go.

So Yoda decided to purge the ranks and start over: that's why he coaxed the Council to reject Anakin (the alleged "chosen one"! The one who was supposed to be the strongest force user ever), thereby ensuring his Jedi training to be incomplete and shoddy, keeping Anakin prone to rash decisions and emotional instability. What Qui-Gon and later Obi-Wan didn't botch (deliberately), Padme managed to do: she basically sent Anakin over the edge. The Naboo-connection also ensured that Anakin formed a father-son relationship with Palpatine (which will neatly lead to step two).

Sometime during Episode 3 (that scene was conveniently cut from the documentary), Yoda and Obi-Wan convinced Anakin to go deep cover and join Palpatine (in return they would let him marry Padme)...the convoluted Light Sabre "battle" was just a ruse to make it more convincing - Anakin's love for Padme was so "true and deep" that he even let himself be dismembered by Obi-Wan, who conveniently "let" Anakin live (instead of just shoving him into the Lava stream and be done with it). The goal was to ensure Palpatine utterly destroys both the Jedi and the Old Republic. Once that was accomplished, Anakin was to assassinate Palpatine by throwing him down some ventilation shaft. At which point Yoda would come in at the head of the proxy "Rebellion" he had set up with Bail Organa and take over.

Unfortunately, young Anakin - like an intergalactic Donny Brasco - got a little carried away serving the new Emperor, probably enjoying all the power and responsibilities and the attention from his "Master" a little too much. He also was sulking and depressed because Padme actually managed to die from a broken heart, which must have been the pinnacle of passive-aggressiveness in the history of the Galaxy. So Yoda and Obi-Wan had to send in Anakins son Luke, to remind him of his real mission. To reach out to him, they gave Luke an even worse training than they gave Anakin, and faked his "rap sheet" to build him up just enough to have Palpatine perceive him either as a threat, or a potential Sith candidate.

Luke managed to pull Anakin back to the conspirators side (which their PR department dubbed "the light side"); unfortunately, since the process took way too long, all had become force ghosts by the end, which left Luke (!) to rebuild the Jedi Order, which was certainly not planned. That's why - in the end - they thought "aww crap"!...and dissolved.

Let this serve as a reminder why conspiracies rarely work, especially when you have to rely on bloody amateurs.

You truly have a dizzying intellect.



The Jedi Master

In related conspiracy news...

http://9gag.com/gag/a8WAy3p/the-death-star-massacre-was-an-inside-job

Brilliant.

Since we're on Battle of Endor conspiracies I need to break these two out:

For awhile I was reading a lot of the Star Wars spinoff books. I liked the X-Wing series for its obvious "Fighter Pilots in SPAAAAAAACE!" appeal, and some of the other series were OK. I started on the Jedi Academy series, but it was immediately obvious that Luke was in so far above his head trying to teach aspiring Jedi, when just about ALL OF THEM had more raw FORCE power than he did, and he barely knew enough to teach ANYONE...

I put the first one down about 1/3 of the way into it and never read another Star Wars "expanded Universe" book.

The X-Wing series was probably one of the best, and part of that is largely due to focusing on the grunts and pilots in the trenches of the rebellion instead of the froofy sissy Jedi and other assorted lame movie characters.

There is a lot of EU crap out there though.

That's what happens when you have product saturation. Both Star Wars and Star Trek in the 1980's and 1990's had a crapload of novels published and the sheer volume was so much that the overall quality dropped.

I went through about 75% of them in the early 2000s. More than I should have read to be honest. There was a website that had them all in chronological order in PDFs. Some were a lot better than others to say the least.