Six Years Ago Today, Star Wars Gave Baby Yoda a Force Power That Breaks All the Rules

Six years ago, the world got to meet Grogu for the first time in The Mandalorian Season 1. He wasn’t known as Grogu back then, of course; we wouldn’t learn his real name into Season 2. Lucasfilm officially called him the Child, but the internet swiftly named him “Baby Yoda,” and the name caught on. Baby Yoda’s debut was all the more impressive given Lucasfilm had managed to keep his very existence a secret, deliberately missing out on millions in terms of merchandise opportunities in order to get a hit.

The Mandalorian Season 1 wasted little time revealing that, like Yoda and Yaddle, Grogu could wield the Force. His first feats were pretty standard fare, with Grogu levitating one rampaging mudhorn, but it didn’t take long for him to start demonstrating some rather more exotic Force powers. Probably the greatest was in The Mandalorian Season 1, episode 7, “The Reckoning.” There, Baby Yoda revealed he could actually heal using the Force.

Force Healing Changes Everything for Star Wars

There’s a sense in which “Force healing” was nothing new for Star Wars; it had been part of the old Star Wars Expanded Universe for years, with one Jedi healer named Cilghal introduced in 1994’s Dark Apprentice (by Kevin J. Anderson). Everything changed with the sequel trilogy, though, because George Lucas wove Anakin Skywalker’s fear for Padmé’s death into Revenge of the Sith as a key reason he fell to the dark side. When Disney rebooted the canon in 2014, branding the Expanded Universe as “Legends,” Force heal was carefully written out because it sat uncomfortably with that famous Anakin Skywalker plot.

Everything changed in 2019, though, when Star Wars reintroduced Force healing in both The Mandalorian and The Rise of Skywalker. This new version of the power was slightly different, because it saw a person transfer their life energy to another. The Rise of Skywalker seemed to suggest it was an ancient Force power that had been lost in the mists of time, with Rey discovering it from the sacred Jedi texts. That, at least, would make a measure of sense; if the Jedi had forgotten this power, it would explain why Anakin couldn’t learn it as an alternative way to save Padmé.

This doesn’t work in the light of Grogu’s Force healing, though. The clear implication is that this is an instinctive ability that powerful Force sensitives can spontaneously develop with little training, which means it’s pretty much impossible for the Jedi to simply forget it existed. What’s more, as powerful as Grogu may be, there’s no way he compares to Anakin Skywalker – the Chosen One, conceived by the will of the Force, with a higher midi-chlorian count than Yoda himself. If anyone can Force heal, it should be Anakin, meaning he didn’t need to fear Padmé dying in childbirth.

Star Wars Keeps Making Force Healing Even More Confusing

Star Wars spent the next few years trying to figure out how to make sense of this Force healing power. Some tie-ins seemed to hint that it was a power available only to Rey and Kylo Ren because they were part of a Force Dyad, but that only led to some confusion over whether Grogu himself was in a Force Dyad with an unknown character. More recently, Andor actually introduced a Force healer who lived on Yavin 4 shortly before the events of A New Hope, proving the power isn’t just available to Dyads.

The best explanation is that Force healing is a sort of “balance power,” one wielded by beings who are not aligned with either the light or the dark. According to Secrets of the Jedi, Force-sensitive children do not originally have any alignment, and thus it’s possibly “young” characters like Grogu possess powers that aren’t typical of the Jedi. The Dyad appears to be a thing of balance, involving both light and dark, explaining why Rey and Kylo Ren could heal. And the Force healer in Andor isn’t a Jedi, so may have been a servant of balance rather than the light.

This is only a theory, of course. One thing is certain; Grogu’s most unusual Force power has opened up a whole new Force power to the Disney canon, and the repercussions are still being explored. Six years on, it’s still unclear just how Grogu heals, and it’s notable that he hasn’t done it again in recent seasons. It’s quite possible Lucasfilm has come to regret this particular scene, realizing it caused more trouble than it was worth.

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