WARNING: The following article contains spoilers for director Rian Johnson's Star Wars: The Last Jedi, in theaters now.


Since the arrival of Star Wars: The Force Awakens two years ago, Luke Skywalker has been on everyone's mind, both in real life and in the film itself. The characters spent half of a whole movie hunting for him, their desire to find him reflecting our own. After seeing that Han and Leia both went back to what they're best at--smuggling and leading, respectively--one could only wonder what was going on with Luke. Once we finally saw him shed his hood at the end of Awakens, we held beliefs that all it would take would be the return of his old lightsaber to get him back into the fray.

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Instead, the first thing Luke does in Last Jedi is immediately throw his old lightsaber aside and get back to living out his days on Ach-to. Safe to say, fans were not pleased with this take on Luke, nor the revelation that he went into isolation because he was ashamed for having created Kylo Ren. This in turn has led to some fans claiming the film and Rian Johnson butchered both Luke's legacy, and that of the Skywalker family as a whole.

The thing is, that's not exactly true. Luke leaving everything behind to just be some old weirdo on a strange planet out of shame isn't exactly new ground for the Jedi, as both Obi-Wan Kenobi and Yoda did the same thing in the interim between Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope. Sure, they didn't spend their mornings milking aliens, but it's very clear that neither Yoda nor Kenobi seemed to have much of a real plan beyond living on their respective planets and dying. Having Luke continue to be the powerful, wise Jedi running at full capacity 30 years after Return wouldn't have just been inconsistent and raised questions about what was stopping him from taking out the First Order some time ago, it would've been boring. Star Wars doesn't always indulge itself in those fan service moments where a beloved character has effectively turned on God Mode, but when they do, it rarely looks good, as we learned with Attack of the Clones' much derided lightsaber fight between Yoda and Dooku.

In following that same trend as previous Jedi, Johnson makes it clear from the start that Luke made the same mistake with Kylo Ren as the earlier Jedi did with his own father, ignoring the signs and taking the most drastic course of action, only for everything to go horribly wrong. Say what you will about the prequels, they and the subsequent Prequel era media made it abundantly clear that the Jedi in their prime failed spectacularly to see their mythical "Chosen One" was a ticking time bomb of emotional problems, and lacked any real capacity to help him deal with his issues. At best, they told Anakin to suck it up, and their disapproval of emotional attachments is why Anakin went to Palpatine instead of them for guidance. It's doubtful that Kenobi or Yoda told Luke the full story of how things went so badly, and without that full context, Luke would of course wind up starting the Jedi again without realizing why that went badly last time around. Is it really improbable that he'd be so eager or arrogant to restart the Jedi that he'd fail to see his own nephew didn't need a Master or teacher, so much as he just needed an uncle?

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It's understandable why fans would be upset that Luke of all people turned out to be the one to really set Kylo Ren on his path. Sure, Snoke was already whispering in his ear and preying on him, but you get the sense that more than anything, Kylo would've been fine if Luke had either talked to him one on one or gotten Han and Leia involved for a good family session. Lucasfilm has made it clear that the main saga of films will focus on the Skywalker family, and so far both Awakens and Jedi have established that the Skywalker family is really no better than any of ours in real life. Tough of a pill as it is to swallow, Luke needed to be a terrible father figure and have a redemption story in this movie instead of just being all powerful and biding his time, ready to teach again. There'd be no point in casting Daisy Ridley, John Boyega, and Oscar Isaac otherwise if all they had to do was just gawk about how awesome Luke and the others are for the duration of the new trilogy. He could never really be anything but a relic of the old ways of the Jedi, one whose insistence on sticking the old ways turned out to ultimately be his undoing.

And with that aforementioned rigid adherence to tradition in mind, you likely couldn't consider the elder Skywalker to be the best Jedi anymore when he went through the exact same mistake as his predecessors. When you look at Rey, or Kanan and Ezra from Star Wars Rebels, you see just how they can be better Jedi, even if they're classified as such by name more than anything else. Kanan was already a terrible Jedi when he was a child during Order 66, and as a result of no real teachers, he and Ezra have become stronger through the emotional attachments originally considered taboo by the Order. Likewise, Rey has become something greater because she ignored all of Luke's warnings and tried to actually reach out to Kylo Ren with a hand instead of a lightsaber.

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None of this invalidates Luke's heroic actions over the course of his life. At the end of the day, Luke is still a good person, but a great Jedi he is not. He never fully examined the flaws in the system he was led to believe as the ultimate force for good, to the point where he couldn't even let the old texts go. "The greatest teacher, failure is," said the apparition of Master Yoda on Ach-to.

Luke was afraid to fail, and that, in the end, is what prevents him from being truly great.