WARNING: LAST JEDI SPOILERS BELOW
Ever since The Force Awakens came out, but especially now that TLJ has definitely slammed the door shut on the original trilogy’s storyline, fans have complained that the mere existence of the sequel trilogy means that Luke, Leia, Han, etc were all failures because the First Order came to power, Luke lost his new Jedi Order, and evil once more runs rampant through the galaxy. Even some positive reviews of these two movies have agreed that the Rebel Alliance failed, or that Luke and Leia’s actions in the OT have been invalidated by the sequels. Frankly, this is crap.
Luke Skywalker isn’t a failure. He certainly feels like one in TLJ, and he certainly failed in his task of guiding Ben Solo, but he did not fail in his role as the chosen one who brought balance to the force, nor did he fail in the task handed down to him by Yoda to pass on what he has learned. Emperor Palpatine remains the greatest threat that the galaxy ever faced up until this point. The fact that Supreme Leader Snoke is dispatched so swiftly and easily in the Last Jedi, annoying all of the many fan theorists, is proof that he was never actually Palpatine’s inheritor. He was a bully strong in the force who managed to step into a power vacuum at the top of the First Order hierarchy, but he was not the cunning master strategist that Palpatine was. The Aftermath books and other new canon supplemental info has made clear that the First Order rose directly from Palpatine’s own contingency plan for the Empire in the event of his demise. Even from the grave he was more of a threat than Snoke, a man that was just capable of intimidating his way to the throne and who then overplayed his hand by taunting his own apprentice into killing him. Luke, by helping to defeat Palpatine, ensured that the a man who had nearly completed his plan for total domination of the galaxy was defeated, and that the imperial remnant that became the First Order had to start over from a position of weakness. The bulk of the galaxy enjoyed several decades of freedom because of this. Force sensitive children like Rey were no longer hunted and killed by Inquisitors in order to prevent them from becoming a threat. The total eradication of the Jedi and their teachings was prevented.
Yes, Luke had one apprentice fall to the dark side, and yes he lost his other original crop of students. Training Jedi is really hard. It took thousands of years for the Jedi to reach the height of their power, and for most of that time one master trained one student at a time. Luke tried to train twelve at once, including his willful and conflicted and incredibly powerful nephew. Obi-Wan received an entire lifetime of Jedi training and still failed miserably at training Anakin, and that’s without adding a dozen other students on top of the pile. It’s not surprising Luke’s first batch failed, it’s more significant that, in Rey, he has at least ensured the continuation of the Jedi Order. It will take time for the order to grow to the kind of numbers it had before the purge, but to assume that Luke’s mission to bring about the return of the Jedi meant a complete restoration of the old order is crazy. One successful, powerful Jedi to carry the light forward is enough for now.
Leia, likewise, is not a failure. For one, she never really stopped fighting. Even in her time as a senator for the New Republic she was constantly urging vigilance against a resurgent empire, warning against the encroachment of tyranny, and taking action when needed. For another, the New Republic is ultimately a failure, and yet it cannot be compared to the Empire, folks. The New Republic fails simply by trying to re-set the clock to a Pre-Palpatine Republic, ignoring that the one truly good thing the Prequels did was establish that Palpatine was voted all the way to Emperor for a reason and that he’d never have been able to do so if the Republic hadn’t already become weak, bloated, riddled with inequality, and unresponsive to the needs of its citizens. A lasting peace would have needed both a stalwart refusal to tolerate any kind of resurgence of the Empire and a complete overhaul of the systems that allowed the emperor to rise in the first place. Leia knew this, and certainly tried to accomplish both, but an imperfect democracy is still better than a dictatorship. 30 years of peace and liberty is not a thing to shrug off as a failure.
The statement these sequels are trying to make is that the battle for what is good and right against evil and fascism never truly ends, and each generation needs to take up the mantle and defend liberty at some point. That it is cyclical does not mean the previous generation’s own temporary victory over evil is ultimately futile. We all have to take the torch and carry it even farther than our predecessors were able to. Luke Skywalker sees only his failure when talking to Rey, and speaks of his “legend” with contempt. The movie tells us that legends and even Jedi Masters are still just humans in the end and are limited in their ability to change the galaxy. The ending of the movie, though, shows us that even if a man falls short of his legend, the legend can inspire the multitudes needed to make the massive, sweeping changes that will be needed.
So no, the original trilogy is not pointless. Luke and Leia did not fail. The message, instead, is that we can’t rely on heroes alone to save us. We must take inspiration from their heroism and match it with our own, and then pass on the lesson to those who come after us. Otherwise the failure is ours.
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