By Chris Snellgrove | Published
If you asked the average excited Star Wars fan what’s wrong with the Sequel Trilogy, they’d answer with a longer screed than all the opening crawls in the franchise combined. If you ask them what even worse However, they may have indicated that Luke Skywalker was reduced to a tough old man who sacrificed his life to protect the galaxy from evil. It’s hard to explain why or why Luke has fallen so far from the heights of heroism, but Disney can offer a simple explanation and right their wrong further with one bold move: officially adding Mara Jade to the canon.
Mara Jade Is The Key To All This
Mara Jade, of course, was the Emperor’s Hand, someone trained to do Palpatine’s bidding from a very young age. He lost his Imperial job and became a smuggler after the Emperor’s death, something Luke Skywalker suspected. Eventually, she learns the truth, befriends and later becomes Luke’s wife, the two have a child together before he is brutally murdered by Jacen Solo, the fallen Jedi son of Han Solo and Leia Organa.
Now, all of this information about Mara Jade comes from the Star Wars Expanded Universe, and Disney has announced that all of these stories (now reprinted under the Legends banner) are no longer valid. However, Jade was introduced in Timothy Zahn’s Thrawn Trilogy, and Grand Admiral Thrawn himself has also been included in the book due to Star Wars Rebels again Ahsoka. Mara Jade may be reintroduced, but how would this fix the problem with Luke Skywalker’s portrayal The Last Jedi?
Mara Jade How to fix Luke
In the old EU stories, Mara Jade was the love of Luke Skywalker’s life, and she was understandably devastated by his death…so devastated that she sought revenge and ended up killing the wrong person. Like Luke Skywalker of The Last Jedithese actions (especially hunting and brutally killing someone for revenge) seemed out of character for the Luke we know and love, but they were motivated by grief and loss. And if Disney was willing to bring Mara Jade into the current lineup and especially dramatize her EU story, then her eventual death will help explain why Luke later becomes a sad sack.
This will require a little finesse. Mara Jade will need to be introduced to the post-Return of the Jedi period of The Mandalorian and other shows to logically explain how she would have had time to meet Luke, fall in love, and die before the events of The Last Jedi. And Disney will either need to recast a young Luke character in a live-action show or make an animated series so Mark Hamill can just voice Luke. Finally, they will need to (like the EU writers before them) accept that the Jedi of this new age can fall in love and marry without falling to the Dark Side.
Disney obviously has a lot of catching up to do to do Mara Jade’s story justice, but for now, the studio giant probably has nothing to lose. A Mara Jade-centric show could appeal to old-school fans who are turned off by shows like this The Acolyte as it softens Luke Skywalker’s much-hated image in the Sequel Trilogy. And considering that Disney is canceling projects left and right and dropping the ball on projects that finally see the light of day, bringing back Mara Jade might be the only thing that can bring back something else: our collective love of Star Wars.
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