S01.E06: Chapter Six - From the Desert Comes a Stranger

[Shanna Marie]

I've been rewatching all the Star Wars live action stuff in chronological order (I've seen the animated stuff, but I wanted this project to take less than a year, so I'm not trying to fit it into this rewatch), and got to a rewatch of this series. This episode in particular is interesting to watch soon after having rewatched the original trilogy.

On 2/2/2022 at 2:22 PM, thuganomics85 said:

The CGI for younger Luke was better than last time at least, but I found Mark Hamill's line reading to be very stiff here.  Not sure if he was directed this way or; as I saw suggested somewhere else; maybe some kind of device was used to make his voice sound younger and it threw things off.

I actually thought his voice was pretty consistent with the way he was in Return of the Jedi. I guess they were trying to go with the concept of him having become all Zen-like, but he was very different in that movie than in the previous two films, coming across as rather stilted and stiff. The fact that Mark Hamill himself is so animated and is such a strong voice actor makes me think that it was a deliberate presentation of Luke, and he did have a few moments when it seemed like "real" Luke came through before he went back to that super-calm tone, like he was trying to hold all his emotions in. So the way he is here fits with that "I'm a Jedi master, really!" trying too hard vibe he had in Jedi.

On 2/2/2022 at 10:26 PM, Boadicea said:

How could anyone ever think that Luke, who canonically had next to no training, could capably train another generation of Jedi?

That struck me while rewatching this episode. It's hard to tell how long he was with Yoda, since there's no clue about the passage of time. It was however long it took for Han and the others to get to Cloud City with a busted hyperdrive. Being generous, that was probably a matter of weeks, at most, definitely not years, which means Grogu actually has spent more time training to be a Jedi than Luke did. Grogu's time was probably in the Jedi equivalent of kindergarten while Luke got an accelerated crash course, so he probably got to more advanced concepts, but Grogu probably has a more solid foundation on the basics.

The fact that Yoda told Luke that he'd learned everything he needed and didn't need to continue his training when he returned to Dagobah, in spite of him starting as an adult and only having a couple of weeks does make you wonder about the fact that the Jedi took kids from their families at a young age and made them devote their entire lives to training. Why do all that when you can give an adult a crash course and they're still a full Jedi?

It seems like both Luke and Ahsoka are going all-in on the no attachments thing because of Anakin (I wonder if Luke learned it from her, since in the trilogy he doesn't seem to have been all that aware of it. Yoda just told him not to stop his training and rush into a potential trap to save his friends, not that he couldn't have ties to his friends) when Anakin's problem was more that the no attachments rule left him isolated, with no one he could go to with his concerns. Luke seemed to have been an example of the Buffy thing, where someone in a role where they usually have to give up attachments turns out to be better at it because they have a big bunch of friends that creates a support network. In the old days, maybe you'd get that network from other Jedi, but in Luke's era, it seems like people would be less likely to turn to the dark side if they have healthy relationships. It's one thing to have a kindergarten full of Jedi younglings who have a bunch of masters serving in semi-parental roles. It's another to take a kid away from his family security and isolate him with one teacher and some droids. That just seems like a recipe for emotional health issues down the line.

[ICantDoThatDave]

On 2/23/2023 at 2:11 PM, Shanna Marie said:

It's hard to tell how long he was with Yoda, since there's no clue about the passage of time. It was however long it took for Han and the others to get to Cloud City with a busted hyperdrive. Being generous, that was probably a matter of weeks, at most, definitely not years...

I've always assumed this was several months, at the very least.   The Millennium Falcon had to get to a whole 'nother Star System to reach Cloud City.  Didn't take long in the movie, of course, but with no lightspeed, that would take forever* even assuming "extremely fast" stellar travel.

* realistically, I doubt it would even be possible, but... even granting movie magic, it would take a long time

[Shanna Marie]

On 3/8/2023 at 9:49 PM, ICantDoThatDave said:

I've always assumed this was several months, at the very least.   The Millennium Falcon had to get to a whole 'nother Star System to reach Cloud City.  Didn't take long in the movie, of course, but with no lightspeed, that would take forever* even assuming "extremely fast" stellar travel.

* realistically, I doubt it would even be possible, but... even granting movie magic, it would take a long time

It would have helped with a line of dialogue, like Han saying something like, "It'll take us a month to get there, so I hope you like ration bars," or maybe 3PO griping on arrival about Han shutting him off a day into the journey and Han saying, "If I'd had to listen to you for two months, you'd have been floating in space, so I did you a favor." The weird thing is that the characters don't behave as though time has passed. They don't interact like people who've been trapped on a ship together for weeks, let alone months. Vader was awfully patient to wait around for months for them to arrive at Bespin, and was Boba Fett tracking them that slowly all that time? If Boba Fett was tracking them, they'd have been sitting ducks for the Empire to swoop in and pick up long before they got to Bespin. I guess Vader really wanted Luke in Carbonite.

The whole saga has been pretty bad about showing the passage of time or any awareness of the time/distance between worlds. They treat interplanetary travel like traveling between suburbs of a city. And then there are the revelations that years have passed, like on this show, when we learn later that Boba spent years with the Tuskens when there weren't really any cues to the passage of time.

At any rate, it still seems like Grogu spent more time in Jedi training than Luke did, and Luke managed to become a full-on Jedi in less than a year, starting in adulthood, which makes that whole "take them away from their families as young children and devote their lives to training" thing look even more sketchy.