1x13 The Jedi and the Thief

[8.0/10] I actually really liked this one. Frankyl, it gets Star Wars in a way that a lot of franchise projects meant for adults don’t. It’s natural for Kai to want to defeat his rival Taborr and to take him down in a fight. For a lot of kids, the power fantasy of being a Jedi was getting to swing around a lightsaber and take out the bad guys.

But that wasn’t actually what the Original Trilogy was about, despite the cool elements therein. It was Yoda in The Empire Strikes Back who said that a Jedi uses the Force for defense, never to attack. And the big emotional journey of Luke Skywalker is going from wanting to kill Darth Vader, to recognizing that a lifetime of bad choices doesn’t mean that Anakin can’t start making good choices.

I love how Master Zia embodies those values and instills them in Kai. The show does a nice job of paralleling Kai’s feelings about Taborr with her own relationship with Ace (Tig Notaro, the latest actor to bridge the Star Trek/Star Wars divide). The notion that Zia was herself a rambunctious young Jedi who got into scrapes and scraps and had her recurring foes in her training days is a neat one. It gives her authority when trying to teach Kai the lessons that it took her some time to learn.

So of course, they get caught in a cave, and need to trust a scoundrel like Ace for help. Kai’s skeptical, but it takes cleverness, not fighting, for him to do his part, and in the end, Ace comes through despite her mistakes in the past. Kai taking the Taborr helmet off the lightsaber training droid is a good way to dramatize Kai learning the lesson. And I continue to love the idea that one of the core principles of the Jedi is not using violence for the sake of violence, and not believing that people are inherently bad or incapable of change. Those are big ideas, but Young Jedi Adventures modulates them for a younger audience well. It’s nice to see the show hit some of the key ideals of Star Wars in such a digestible form.