I WOULD ARGUE THAT THIS WAS KIND OF A NECESSARY SCENE given that this season is about connecting us to Revenge of the Sith, that the previous arc was focused on giving Rex and Echo closure, but it was also sprinkled with moments (like seeing Padme pregnant, Anakin giving Rex a speech about hoping for the best but accepting that the worst might be true) that were specifically designed to understand how the characters are in the places they are for ROTS, how the galaxy is in the place they are for ROTS.



This scene reminded me very much of the episode “Bounty Hunters”, where Sugi criticizes the Jedi for “failing to keep the peace” and Obi-Wan (who is one of TCW’s most reliable narrators) responds with how the war is not their fault and if more people were willing to actually stand up, they wouldn’t be in the position they’re in.

But it also reminds me of the Star Wars: Propaganda by Pablo Hidalgo book makes this incredibly clear, that the image of the Jedi is painted by other people:

“Once again, the Jedi Order’s eschewing of the galactic spotlight allowed another to reshape the image of the Jedi, and for nearly a decade, the most famous Jedi in the galaxy was one who advocated for the dissolution of the Republic.“

“Intended for the Core Worlds, it shows a graphic sophistication that was in vogue at the time. Rather than detail the inevitable horrors of impending war, its singular lightsaber and well-chosen words instead demonstrate how undefended the Republic was. In crafting this message of vulnerability, the Commission for a Safe and Secure Republic (a nonprofit think tank based on Level 5121, Coruscant) also unwittingly seeded a secondary story that would grow during the Clone Wars—that no salvation lay in the direction of the Jedi Knights.”

“Absent from this hero-making were the Jedi Knights. Citizens who witnessed the Jedi in action were understandably in awe of their abilities, but it was the clone trooper who was the public face of the war effort. The mystic Jedi remained forever inscrutable to the Republic citizenry at large. To the Separatists, they were branded as hypocrites (thanks to firsthand criticism by Count Dooku). That they could so callously brandish a clone army—“slaves bred for war,” as Separatist propaganda proclaimed—did not speak well to their character, though few among the Separatists knew that the Jedi were given no choice in the matter.”



“Anti-Jedi sentiment was more a product of their cultural absence rather than a refutation of anything substantive. Separatist worlds that had experienced lawlessness attributed that to Jedi neglect, a failure of policing. Indeed, the war itself was a failure of the peacekeepers.”



The language of the book even specifically echoes these lines–how the Jedi were seen as policing everything (or not policing everything, they couldn’t win on that front), how they were failures as peacekeepers, and it’s very consistently shown to be not the truth, they were “painted as” this or “branded as” that or “claimed as” this or “imagined as” that.



That’s why what Trace is saying here is so important in context–she’s speaking to a former Jedi, who cannot speak back because she must protect herself, she can’t reveal that she’s a Jedi, so she’s visibly struggling to keep quiet. She says some of it–”The Jedi didn’t start this war, they’re trying to stop it.”, which shows us that Trace is not an accurate reliable narrator in this, no matter that she’s not doing it out of malice. Ahsoka also visibly starts to respond a second time when Trace is talking, but pulls herself back, showing us further that there is a response to this, Ahsoka just can’t say it.



I mean, she’s not entirely wrong, the Jedi are extremely busy with this war and don’t have time for other stuff, you know, because they’re dying in this war. So many Jedi have died, we’ve seen them die on the screen, as well as the war gets busier and busier. The Clone Wars itself makes this point in season five, when Maul is pulling together his crime syndicate and the narration specifically says, because the Jedi are being dragged into the war, they don’t have time to deal with criminals, so they’re flourishing.



But there’s really no solution to that, so long as the war is going–do they just let people on Separatist-oppressed worlds die because the spice running trade is gearing up? Do they let the people of Ryloth die in a Separatist attack because there was a mugging on level 1313 that they should be patrolling for? They don’t have the numbers to do both and they were already drafted into the war.



But even more importantly–Trace says she wants to go out into the stars, get away from Coruscant, get away from the Jedi and the war. Think about that, where does she think the war actually is? Where does she think the Jedi actually are? What does she think is waiting for her out there?



One of the big points of ROTS and the Battle Over Coruscant is that the planet has actually been relatively sheltered from the war, the people in the Core (even the ones in the lower levels of Coruscant) haven’t seen much at all of the war, it’s barely touched them. Out in the stars? Where Trace dreams of going? That’s where the real war is.



And it shows that she’s not accurate in her assessment of things. Again, she’s not doing this out of malice, she had expectations of the Jedi that they could not possibly realistically meet, given the political set-up, and that’s part of what Palpatine precisely did. He built them up to something they couldn’t–and shouldn’t and didn’t want to–live up, but they had no time and so few of them (ONE OUT OF SIX BILLION PEOPLE IS THE CONSERVATIVE ESTIMATE FOR HOW MANY JEDI THERE ARE IN THE GALAXY, that’s like ONE Jedi to deal with literally all of our problems in every single country here on Earth, and then blaming them for not stopping all the wars, while also not keeping the peace in all the countries and not stopping all the crime) and the galaxy had to buy it, including people who were sweethearts but had probably never actually met a Jedi before.



Because that’s what Palpatine’s propaganda did, that’s what his political maneuverings did, to get the Jedi so busy saving those people over there, that these people blamed them for not being here, too.



And that’s exactly how we get to, “The war is over. The Separatists have been defeated, and the Jedi rebellion has been foiled. We stand on the threshold of a new beginning.”

This is how we get to a galaxy willing to stand by while THEIR TEMPLE WAS ATTACKED AND THEIR CHILDREN LITERALLY GUNNED DOWN.



This is how you get a galaxy to accept the genocide of an entire culture, that even the good people who are just trying to make it through the day are maneuvered and manipulated into believing the Jedi started the war, that they weren’t trying to stop it but kept it going so they could gain power, that they wanted to take over for power’s sake, that they didn’t care about anyone else, to forget that the Jedi were fighting on their behalf (when they themselves wouldn’t even do as much) and dying for them.



By showing us people like Trace Martez.

