Since Luke turned up last week, I've been thinking about
the old post about how Luke taking down Jabba wasn't just to rescue Han, it was personal.
It’s not just that he carries out the plan—he carries it out with extreme prejudice. He doesn’t merely rescue his friends, he slaughters Jabba’s whole entourage. He slices people open left and right, he knocks them into a pit where they will be slowly and painfully devoured, then directs Leia to a gun turret that will blow the sail barge sky high. It doesn’t seem very Jedi-like does it? So why would he do it? Why would he so callously murder all those (admittedly not very nice) people? It’s true that they were complicit in the capture and humiliation of his friends, but there’s more going on here:
“I used to live here, you know.”
Let’s give this a good long think. Luke lived on Tatooine, and knowing that, we can also know for certain that Luke grew up with Jabba’s name on his mind. That he grew up knowing better than to cross the path of anyone who worked with or for Jabba, that he heard about what happened to innocent people on his planet who did. Luke knew exactly who Jabba the Hutt was, how he hurt people, how he ruined their lives. He had a chance to eradicate the world of Jabba, and he took his shot. He didn’t want to be nice about it—he wanted to be efficient.
I don't know, maybe it's a little
attach-y to give a shit about what happens after you Jedi into your hometown and overturn the corrupt local power-structure and just leave again for some new gangsters to start oppressing everyone, but I'd like to think Luke has enough investment to care if his actions have led to Tatooine becoming a worse place to live or if things are going to work out. On the other hand, such a reaction (and the complex emotional interactions among characters necessary to portray it) will depend on if Luke has been all wooden, charmless, and generally prequel-y because of technical limitations, or because the writers and directors genuinely want him to come off as a distant, aloof space-god, and not as the exuberant, passionate, and occasionally gleefully petty man we saw in five movies. Given how Boba's own arc in the show has been sub-subtext, I think it might be the latter, and this show simply doesn't have the emotional bandwidth necessary to put Luke Skywalker and Boba Fett into a room, have them figure out how to have bygones be gone, and decide they both want the same thing for the planet, completely ignoring whether they have the practical capability to have Luke perform such a scene. At best what we'd end up with is them just teaming up with no acknowledgement that Fett tracked and froze Luke's best friend and brother-in-law* and haded him to a murderous gangster, and Luke sent Fett tumbling into the gullet of a sand-monster, they'd just love each other off the bat because it's been so long all the fans will have forgotten everything but how much they like both characters and so two characters they like liking each other is even better.
*As I've seen going around, just imagine Grogu's accusingly sad big eyes when he sees Leia, Han, and Ben drop by Luke's academy for a visit. "Oh, Grogu, this is a work meeting. I swear, if I didn't deal with these people professionally, I would have no need or desire to see them."
I honestly don't know how this Ashoka show is supposed to work, since everything post-TLJ has seemed to indicate Lucasfilm both needs to use legacy characters, and is too terrified by those legacies to do anything with them.
