When I was a kid, lightsabers weren't just the coolest fictional weapon in the galaxy, they were also the most feared. Among all the good ideas George Lucas dreamed up when he created the original Star Wars, a sword with a blade made out of pure energy that could cut through anything (and that also comes in a variety of cool colors) was the most brilliant. Lightsabers were awesome — a sci-fi update of the samurai swords Lucas was probably obsessed with when he was a kid. And just like those razor-sharp samurai swords, a lightsaber wasn't something you wanted to mess around with or find yourself on the receiving end of. You talk smack to a dude packing a lightsaber at your local watering hole, and you're going to lose, at minimum, one of your arms. Simple as that. Like Ben Kenobi said, lightsabers were an elegant weapon for a more civilized age ... but they would also strike your ass down in a hurry.
Cut to four-plus decades later, and lightsabers have been neutered as the genre's weapon of choice when you've got to settle matters with some sense of finality. It probably started with Darth Maul. Actually, it probably started with Marvel's Star Wars comic books or some other extended universe nonsense, but I'm not about to count that or bother to do any research into it. What I can tell you is that, in The Phantom Menace, Obi-Wan Kenobi (Ewan McGregor) uses a lightsaber to slice Palpatine's heavily tattooed apprentice clean in half. Yet, somehow Maul survived, got himself some robot legs, and lived to fight another day, eventually returning in both The Clone Wars and Rebels animated series and later, Solo. At the time, we all just let it go because Maul was the one cool thing to come out of The Phantom Menace, and we knew that Lucas never should have killed him off in the first place. So we gave it a pass. It was good to have Maul back. Never mind that we saw that guy's torso get separated from his lower extremities.
Getting Stabbed With a Lightsaber? Not a Big Deal These Days!
Today, though, things are completely out of control on this front. Last year, in Disney+'s Obi-Wan Kenobi, the Grand Inquisitor (Rupert Friend) gets double-crossed by Reva, the Third Sister (Moses Ingram), and stabbed through the abdomen by her neato double-bladed red saber. It's basically the same killing blow Maul himself dealt to Qui-Gon Jinn (Liam Neeson) in The Phantom Menace. But while Qui-Gon has been relegated to Force ghost status, the Grand Inquisitor survived to continue hunting Jedi throughout the galaxy. Just a few episodes later, Darth Vader himself — the bloke who will use his mind to Force-strangle Imperial officers who make the terrible mistake of mildly annoying him — also uses his lightsaber to stab Reva through her abdomen. And you're never going to believe this, but she survives as well. Really, Lucasfilm? Stabs in the gut by a blade made out of lethal plasma, and they both get to just walk away?
We got a break from the continued devaluation of lightsabers with the refreshingly lightsaber-free Andor, but Lucasfilm was back at it earlier this week with the two-episode premiere of Ahsoka. Near the end of the first episode, Star Wars Rebels holdover Sabine Wren (Natasha Liu Bordizzo) gets stabbed in the gut by Shin Hati (Ivanna Sakhno), one of the show's mysterious orange-lightsaber-wielding Dark Jedi. It will come as no surprise to anyone who watched Obi-Wan Kenobi that Sabine spends about a half an episode in a Star Wars-style hospital bed before being fully healed up and on her way for more space adventuring. How exactly does one call shenanigans in a galaxy far, far away? Because something here stinks worse than the inside of a Tauntaun.
Lightsabers Have Been Losing Their Luster in Star Wars for a While Now
Honestly, things have been trending in the wrong direction as far as respecting lightsabers goes for a while now. Do you remember how lightsaber training was conducted in the original trilogy? I'll tell you how — by yourself with a harmless training droid. In The Empire Strikes Back, you don't see Yoda whipping out his little green lightsaber to challenge Luke to a practice round. And the reason you don't is because (a) Yoda knows that being a Jedi is about deeper shit than just wielding a laser sword and (b) he also understands that practicing lightsaber techniques against a living opponent is probably going to result in somebody accidentally losing a hand or, even worse, a head.
Yet, 39 years later, in The Rise of Skywalker, we have a flashback to a period shortly after Return of the Jedi where Luke and Leia are out the woods just whaling on each other with their sabers during training. Seems pretty ill-advised and dangerous to me, but I just wrote it off as another example of J.J. Abrams playing fast and loose with the mythology. (Don't even get me started on light-speed skipping.) But then we got Obi-Wan Kenobi offering a similar flashback, where a younger and less genocide-y Anakin Skywalker (Hayden Christensen) faces off against his master in a fairly aggressive-looking practice duel. Again, how is this safe? Do lightsabers have some kind of non-lethal practice mode? Actually, don't tell me. Some Star Wars book written in 2004 probably says that they do. But that doesn't count, and I don't want to hear about it.
Lightsabers need to go back to being used for what they do best — chopping off limbs and heads and permanently ending the lives of anyone who takes one across the waist, through the gut, or anywhere else that looks like it should be lethal. And don't try to win a Star Wars No-Prize by insisting that the blade cauterizes the wound, thus vastly increasing the chance of survival. Ask Qui-Gon's Force ghost if his wound got cauterized. When Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) shows up at old Ben's hovel in A New Hope, Ben gives him Anakin's lightsaber and tells him plainly, "Your father wanted you to have this when you were old enough, but your uncle wouldn't allow it." There's a good reason for that, and it's not just because Uncle Owen didn't want Luke getting caught up in a bunch of crazy Jedi adventures. He also knew lightsabers were not a child's toy. Those things are friggin' dangerous. They're designed to disintegrate battle droids, mow through Stormtroopers, and cut off the heads of despicable Sith Lords. They're not designed to gently wound an adversary or to spar with your Jedi buddy during some friendly training. It's time for Lucasfilm to turn lightsabers back into the precision instruments of death they were always designed to be.