Star Wars’ Jedi are boring, but so are the Sith

In the esteemed circles of People Who Think Too Much About Star Wars, there is a persistent and popular diagnosis of what ails the franchise. It’s got to do with the Jedi: Frankly, they’re boring. The fact that they have laser swords does a lot to mitigate this; people love a laser sword. The magic powers are also cool, cool enough to tolerate the idea that one must become an ascetic to obtain them. Their interior life, however? It’s not very sexy — which is probably why the big Jedi stories of the films involve the temptation of the Dark Side.

This is the uphill battle faced by stories like the forthcoming Disney Plus series The Acolyte, which will be the first live-action Star Wars show to dive into the world of the Jedi at their peak. It’s got a bit of a leg up thanks to its murder-mystery structure and its wuxia-influenced action, and perhaps it will be successful in surmounting this challenge. Jedi, however, are not the real problem. The problem is that the Sith are boring, too.

Like the New England Patriots in the late Tom Brady era, no fictional group has ever won so consistently yet remained so dull. Their primary appeal is mostly twofold — cooler Force powers (lightning, choking) and sick accessories (masks, the color red). Going just by the movies, the Sith hardly make sense — motivated by lust for power and a grave threat to the galaxy, yet there are only two, per Yoda? Come on.

One of the funnier bits of old Expanded Universe Star Wars lore came from fan-favorite writer Drew Karpyshyn’s efforts to explain the so-called Rule of Two, and how a massive force of selfish strivers can even function if everyone wants to usurp the person above them. The result, the Darth Bane trilogy, is a fun read about a Sith’s rise to power that doesn’t originate from any inherent malice, but great talent gone sour in the margins of society. The short of it: Once upon a time there was a ton of Sith, until the conniving and powerful Darth Bane found a way to wipe out all the competition so he could rebuild the order from scratch. Unfortunately, the books depict the Sith at their peak as just as monastic as the Jedi, only super into recreational cruelty and beating each other’s ass.

This is especially amusing considering the central thrust of Anakin Skywalker’s fall from grace is love for Padmé Amidala, forbidden under the Jedi Order and the fulcrum by which he is turned by Palpatine into becoming Darth Vader. It doesn’t actually seem any better on the other side, pal! Just virgins, all the way down.

To paraphrase the late Roger Ebert, this sucks! Maybe the Jedi are locked into their dogma — exploring that is a whole other essay — but why can’t the Dark Side users have a little swagger, an interior life with interesting motivations, the freedom to move through the world independently, their selfish schemes enhanced by the Force? It’s baffling that the Sith, like their light-aligned counterparts, get very little on-screen interiority. They are merely the extra-crispy version of Original Recipe Jedi, and reading or watching stories about them just feels like following a bunch of slightly edgier nerds. Or, perhaps more accurately, the very religious.

The end result is that just about anyone in Star Wars feels a million times more interesting than a Jedi or Sith. Hell, Kieron Gillen and Salvador Larroca’s Darth Vader comic introduced evil counterparts to C-3PO and R2-D2 and they practically stole the damn show.

Current canon doesn’t really have a deep-dive exploration of the Sith, instead preferring to root around the margins of the Force-sensitive populace like the Witches of Dathomir, or establishing the Inquisitors as a new branch of baddies that operate under slightly different rules. This could be a great opportunity — maybe even one The Acolyte might explore — to introduce a dimension that Star Wars has been lacking.

Love it or hate it, The Last Jedi articulated the potent idea of the Jedi religion as extremely limiting to the story potential of the franchise. While The Rise of Skywalker didn’t quite run in the same direction, it arguably agrees that the way forward is something more nuanced than the hard moralistic lines previously drawn for the Jedi. The same is true for the Sith. Villains are important in stories — interesting, engaging villains only drive heroes to become more compelling in response as they struggle to meet the challenges posed to them. The grand, operatic paragons of good and evil worked quite well for the epic sweep of the films, but as Star Wars gets narrower and (hopefully) deeper on television, some of those rules could stand to get bent a little.

Let the Sith fuck, man.

The Acolyte premieres with two episodes on June 4 at 9 p.m. EDT.