Miller’s got it spot on. There isn’t any Dark Side or Light Side to the Force, the Force just is. It’s the people who superimpose their own beliefs over the Force that creates this artifical separation.
The Jedi are weakening because they just don’t get it. They’re intensely focused on only one artifical side of the Force; and, more importantly, teaching only their small window of it - everything else is off limits. They’re bureaucratic, inflexible, rules-oriented; imposing a structure on the Force that shouldn’t be there. And it’s limited their view: the Force they now offer to their padawans is distilled and artifical, and becomes more and more distilled with each generation. It’s but a copy of what it once was, but because they’re so small-minded and bounded in by limitations, they cannot see or use the Force to their full potential. The Jedi are complicit in their own corruption. I don’t think Sidious really has to do much to disguise his intentions - most Jedi are too blind to see it anyway. Only a few can feel that something’s wrong, but even they really don’t know what it is that’s out of kilter or how to solve it.
Anakin restores balance, but not in the way they expect.
The Jedi code is also one of emotional repression- yeah, it’s supposed to be all Eastern & about non-attachment & all that, but it’s just a matter of time before any Jedi without a stick up his butt can have a melt-down. It’s amazing there’s not tons of Sith.
Anakin goes Dark because - HE FRIGGIN’ CARES! He cares about his Mom, about his wife, about who knows what. The Jedi code set him up to go Dark.
And in all the Jedi-Sith history, when a Jedi went Black, he could never come back.
How does ROTJ end- Luke cares, if he ever knew about the Jedi code of non-attachment, he never bought into it. And his plight at the hands of the Emperor awakens the love & compassion that Darth has supposedly killed in himself. And for the first time in the millenia-old Jedi-Sith conflict, a Dark Lord of the Sith comes back to become a Jedi Master. It’s like at Armageddon, when seeing the millions of humans in agony, and those about to join him in damnation by fighting Christ- if the AntiChrist calls it off & kneels in surrender before Jesus, getting himself killed by Satan in the process.
And THAT is how Anakin/Darth brings restores the balance of the Force- by showing danger of the Jedi non-attachment code, and by proving that for those seduced by the Dark Side, repentance & redemption are possible.
Earlier someone was posting on relative power rankings of the Jedi/Sith. A friend of mine pointed me to the following so thought I’d post some of it here. I do not know how this list was derived so how much faith you put in it is up to you but here it is just the same…
Who the hell is Ben Skywalker? I stopped reading the books after the debacle that was Darksaber. Luke went and had a son, did he? sigh Now I’ll have to start reading again, dammit.
I’m surprised to see Jaina and Jacen so low on the list … and I’m very surprised to see Luke with less than half of Anakin’s potential. But I’m sure whoever made the list put much more effort into the research than I could ever be bothered to.
The problem, of course, is to love and care, but to have non-attachment to things which may lead to hatred and anger. It’s a fine balancing line because a lot of times love does end up leading to hate. Luke shows at the end of RotJ that while he shows love and compassion for Anakin, he also shows some non-attachment when Palpatine tells Luke to finish off Vader for good. So the lesson is to love without allowing hate and anger to creep in.
That can’t be right. I remember that either in the Clone Wars microseries or Episode 2 (I can’t remember which one or who exactly said it… It was late and I don’t have the CW series on this computer, nor the Ep2 DVD) Either Anakin or Obi-Wan (pretty sure it’s Obi Wan) says: “You’re as powerful as Master Windu and as wise as Master Yoda.” Which implies that Windu is an extremely powerful and talented Jedi, whereas Yoda was endowed with the wisdom of his advanced age and while strong in the force, he’s not the top.
So by that logic, Windu should be higher than Yoda.
Wasn’t all of that meaty chloride (or whatever) garbage jettisoned after Ep. I? Seems that nonsense, and a general toning-down of Jar Jar Dinks, were the only aspects of the films which the exhortations of the vox populi moved GL enough that he deigned to alter his vision to accommodate market forces.
I think Power in this case was supposed to be about his ability to kick butt in combat. Mace Windu is generally accepted as being near, if not at, the absolute pinnacle of the Jedi combat tecniques. He might lose to Yoda, Count Dooku, Kenobi, or maybe Anikin. But he’d be the one the smart better put his credits on.
