The Worst Star Wars Mistake Is Fixed With One Character
If you asked the average jaded Star Wars fan what was wrong with the Sequel Trilogy, they’d likely respond with a screed lengthier than every opening crawl in the franchise put together. If you asked them what the worst thing was, though, they’d likely point to Luke Skywalker being reduced to a grumpy old man who has given up on his life and on protecting the galaxy from evil. It’s hard to explain how or why Luke could have fallen so far from the heights of heroism, but Disney could provide an easy explanation and retroactively fix their mistake with one bold move: officially adding Mara Jade to canon.
Mara Jade Is The Key To All This
Mara Jade was, of course, the Emperor’s Hand, someone trained to do the bidding of Palpatine from a very early age. She lost her cushy Imperial job and became a smuggler after the Emperor died, something she blamed Luke Skywalker for. Eventually, she learns the truth, becoming Luke’s ally and later wife, with the two of them having a child before she is tragically killed by Jacen Solo, the fallen Jedi son of Han Solo and Leia Organa.
Now, all of these details about Mara Jade come from the Star Wars Expanded Universe, and Disney has decreed that all such stories (now reprinted under the Legends banner) are no longer canonical. However, Jade was introduced in prolific author Timothy Zahn’s Thrawn Trilogy, and Grand Admiral Thrawn himself has been re-introduced into the canon thanks to Star Wars Rebels and Ahsoka. Mara Jade could similarly be re-introduced, but how the heck would this fix the problem with Luke Skywalker’s portrayal in The Last Jedi?
How Mara Jade Fixes Luke
In the old EU stories, Mara Jade was the love of Luke Skywalker’s life, and he was understandably traumatized by her death…so traumatized that he went on a revenge quest and ultimately killed the wrong person. As with the Luke Skywalker of The Last Jedi, these actions (mostly the whole hunt down and brutally kill someone in revenge thing) seemed out-of-character for the Luke we know and loved, but they were motivated by grief and loss. And if Disney were willing to bring Mara Jade into current canon and mostly mirror her EU storyline, then her eventual death would help explain why Luke later becomes a grumpy sad sack.
This would require a bit of finesse. Mara Jade would need to be introduced into the post-Return of the Jedi era of The Mandalorian and other shows to reasonably explain how she would have time to meet Luke, fall in love, and die before the events of The Last Jedi. And Disney would need to either recast a younger actor for Luke for a live-action show or create an animated series so Mark Hamill simply voice Luke. Finally, they’d need to (like the EU writers before them) accept that the Jedi of this new era can fall in love and marry without falling to the Dark Side.
Disney obviously has plenty of conditions to meet to do the Mara Jade story justice, but at this point, the studio giant has almost nothing to lose. A Mara Jade-centric show would appeal to old-school fans turned off by shows like The Acolyte even as it softens Luke Skywalker’s much-hated portrayal in the Sequel Trilogy. And considering that Disney is canceling projects left and right and dropping the ball with the projects that finally see the light of day, bringing Mara Jade back may be the only thing that can bring something else back: our collective passion for Star Wars
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