As considered one of, if not typically the, major protagonists of Star Wars, the saga at giant has typically existed in varied kinds to ask one single query, with a thousand solutions: who is Luke Skywalker? Farm boy, pilot, Jedi, instructor, learner, grasp, legend, Luke has been so many issues throughout his life, in so many tales, that it’s uncommon to see a job unsuited to him. His newest story might need discovered one although.

Watching myself re-encounter Luke Skywalker this week as we see him coaching with Grogu in The Book of Boba Fett’s sixth chapter, “From the Desert Comes a Stranger,” was, very similar to his first “return” from the grave in The Mandalorian’s season two finale, a heady mixture of conflicting feelings. Straying away from its titular protagonist once more, The Book of Boba Fett centered in on a Luke we didn’t get to totally see on display screen, this evolutionary step between the brilliant younger Jedi Knight we left in Return of the Jedi, and the haunted Master that Rey and we meet in The Last Jedi. We discover a younger man in some methods solid within the shadow of his personal academics, as he himself turns into one to Grogu, and with it a satisfaction of the legacy Luke carries as the way forward for what it means to be Jedi. This isn’t the swordbearing hero we noticed in flashes of The Mandalorian, however, with echoes of Ben Kenobi and Yoda alike, a person attempting to cross on the teachings he discovered to a brand new era. Almost identically even, operating via wooded forests, leaping from rock to rock, offering the surprise of nature to permit his scholar to only see and breathe the dwelling world round them.

All this feels pure and proper. In a world the place Luke doesn’t have the construction of the Jedi Order to fall again on—though, as we be taught, he has made an acquaintance in Ahsoka Tano, somebody who may very simply inform him the warts and all detailing of the Order because it was—how else would he educate if not as he was taught himself? In Star Wars’ ever-present story of cycles and generational understanding, is it not smart to cause that Luke will cross on all the pieces he discovered in such an identical method? If The Last Jedi is to provide us a Luke who’s an altogether totally different instructor, one traumatized by the classes he re-endured shedding Ben Solo, then it’s maybe befitting that The Book of Boba Fett offers us a hopeful foil earlier than that fall, a Luke who’s coming to grips with being the guardian of the Jedi’s future.

And but one thing didn’t sit proper. By the top of “From the Desert Comes a Stranger,” when the stage is ready for Book of Boba Fett’s finale, Luke’s teachings with Grogu hundreds of thousands of sunshine years away from the sands of Tatooine come to a shuddering halt, as Luke turns to his younger ward and provides a selection: take the lightsaber of Yoda himself, and grow to be the good Jedi Luke can educate him to be, or take the reward of a beskar chainmail shirt, and with it the symbolic acceptance of Grogu’s connection to Din Djarin. The Luke that provides this ultimatum isn’t loving as he was educating Grogu earlier, however within the second chilly. the reflection of a Jedi dogma that Luke has by no means abided to earlier than.

It’s the reflection of a person who very all of the sudden doesn’t really feel like Luke Skywalker. To hear Luke, of all folks, preach of the ills of attachment—of acknowledging the love folks can have for one another—despatched a chill down my backbone. After all, that is Luke Skywalker. A Jedi, sure, however not something just like the dogmatic warrior monks we noticed fall with the Old Republic. A person who outlined himself, in his brightest moments, by his connection to his mates and family members. In Empire Strikes Back, when Yoda and Obi-Wan—representatives of that outdated Order and outdated method of doing issues—warned Luke to not face Darth Vader at Cloud City, he went anyway, as a result of the folks he cherished and cared for had been at risk. In his best second as a Jedi Knight in Return of the Jedi, Luke casts his weapon apart and refuses to strike his father down, due to not simply his love for the person beneath Vader’s masks, however as a result of he has spent all of Return of the Jedi believing, hoping, that if he holds on to his father and tells him that he’s not alone, the nice in him will shine via.

Time and time once more in Star Wars, we’re informed that what makes Luke such a luminous drive, the hero that he’s, is his capability to kind these bonds of affection and care with the folks round him. From his fellow pilots in Rogue Squadron, to his sister and his finest pal, to a father feared and loathed by the galaxy, Luke was the foil to Anakin’s personal attachments offering the trail to his undoing, the Skywalker whose love burned with the facility of the Light within the Force. The Jedi who, many years later, confronted that attachment and the worry of it to nice catastrophe, resulting in the lack of Ben Solo to the Dark Side and the destruction of his Jedi Academy. The Jedi who, once we return to him in The Last Jedi, is a person who cares for others so extremely a lot that the best punishment he may style for himself was non secular and bodily exile, lower off from the Force and the bonds he had cast. One who then re-learned to open himself again as much as these connections for one ultimate, lovely sacrifice, sealing the legend of Luke Skywalker as soon as and for all as a person who fought to the very finish and past for the issues he tied himself to.

To then see that man this week—in the course of that evolution we’ve already seen play out—attempt to educate Grogu the failure of attachment, that to just accept it’s to not be Jedi, can by no means really feel proper to me. There could also be a lesson once more in Star Wars’ cyclical nature right here, that simply as Luke repeats the teachings that taught him to be an awesome Jedi, he repeats the identical errors Ben and Yoda made in educating him. Star Wars is in some ways the story of how hope and tragedy beget one another repeatedly alongside these cycles, the ever-present concern that every era, regardless of the way it struggles, is in some methods doomed to fall again on the misjudgments of their elders. But Luke Skywalker is the product of these errors throughout generations, in methods literal and ideological. He is the kid of the chosen one, born from a love hidden from the Jedi’s dogma. He is the Jedi that proved himself to be in his father’s footsteps with an act of unparalleled religion within the energy of attachment. That is a lesson he by no means un-learns, even at his darkest moments.

The Book of Boba Fett could have wished to create the sensation of a tough selection for its small inexperienced foundling by having Luke place Grogu at this ethical crossroad, and with it a window into the longer term struggles the Luke of its timeframe has but to face. But in framing that selection as a rejection or acceptance of the very factor that defines Luke’s strengths, it solely supplied a shade of what Luke Skywalker has all the time been to Star Wars.

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