When Obi-Wan Kenobi told Luke Skywalker about the Jedi in the first Star Wars film, he presented the time before the Empire as some sort of lost utopia. “For over a thousand generations the Jedi Knights were the guardians of peace and justice in the Old Republic,” he explained. George Lucas’ prequel trilogy revealed that Obi-Wan was being overly nostalgic at best, downright deceitful at worst, because the Jedi Order was flawed and falling long before Palpatine issued Order 66.
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Over the last few years, Star Wars has revealed just how incorrect Obi-Wan’s assessment really was. We’ve been treated to a range of novels, comics, audiobooks, and manga all set in the High Republic Era, roughly 200 years before the Skywalker saga. This was the golden age of the Jedi and the Republic, a time when the Republic expanded into the Outer Rim and the Jedi established new temples across the galaxy. But the light of the Jedi did not go unopposed, and this expansion led to one of the greatest Jedi defeats in history.
The Destruction of Starlight Beacon
The Republic established a major outpost in the Outer Rim, Starlight Beacon, a space station designed to help with hyperspace navigation. Site of a major Jedi Temple, Starlight Beacon was actually capable of jumping through hyperspace and propelling all the forces of the Jedi and the Republic to the scene of any catastrophe – but it also became a tempting target to opponents of the Jedi, space pirates and raiders known as the Nihil who resented the Republic’s imposing order on the chaos of the Outer Rim.
The conflict between the Jedi and the Nihil build to a climax in Claudia Gray’s “The Fallen Star,” published four years ago. The Nihil believed Starlight Beacon to be a direct challenge to their power and an imposition in territory they considered to belong to them, and so they launched an infiltration mission while Starlight Beacon was over the planet Eiram. They were assisted by Force predators known as the Nameless, creatures they’d acquired who hunted Jedi and whose mere presence subjected them to terrifying distortions in the Force.
The Nihil attack on Starlight Beacon was a success, and the space station was destroyed, its two halves plummeting down to Eiram’s surface – with Jedi sacrificing themselves to prevent catastrophic loss of life. Ironically, part of Starlight Beacon was almost saved by Nihil renegades, but Jedi Master Elzar Mann made a costly mistake while influenced by fear and anger, and killed them. Jedi have always been more vulnerable to the dark side than they like to admit, and Elzar Mann’s actions often felt as though they foreshadowed Anakin Skywalker himself.
Palpatine & the Sith Surely Learned from the Fall of Starlight Beacon
In response, the Jedi reactivated the ancient “Guardian Protocols” – essentially a call to militarize the Order. These protocols are:
- Acceleration of Youngling combat instruction
- Outposts staffed by droids
- Independent research paused
- Early Padawan trials
- Resource management restrictions
- Offensive combat as required
- No Jedi travels alone
If some of these ideas sound familiar, there’s a good reason; these all correspond with Jedi actions during the Clone Wars, suggesting the Jedi initiated the Guardian Protocols then too. For the Sith, the fall of Starlight Beacon no doubt proved to be a useful lesson in how the Jedi responded to crises, ensuring their actions could be predicted with ease.
This is the true tragedy of Starlight Beacon. The Jedi did not truly learn from its fall, nor from the mistakes they made in the aftermath. Instead, they simply repeated them, and it proved to be their downfall. Obi-Wan’s words to Luke suggest he never figured it out, taking personal responsibility for Darth Vader’s fall rather than looking back and recognizing the scale and nature of what truly happened in the centuries before Luke Skywalker’s birth.
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