Full Series Why didn't anyone else try to change Ahsoka's mind? (S 5 finale)

I understand "no attachments", but her training represented years of investment on the part of the Jedi Order and she was both valued in the skills sense and badly needed in terms of their diminishing manpower.

So why was Anakin the only one to try to talk her out of it? I'm not saying that they should have tried to hold her by force or anything like that, but shouldn't an effort at least been made?

 

You are asking the Jedi Council to be reasonable in an episode where they convicted an innocent without any concrete proof, and their investigative teams were so incompetent that they couldn't find signs of a lightsaber conflict at the scene where Ahsoka was found half beaten.

You're expecting far too much from the show.

 

The Jedi Council tried to knight Ahsoka almost as an apology for throwing her to the wolves on circumstantial evidence. That was their attempt to make her stay. When she walks off they probably would give an, 'Its the will of the force' explanation. Plo stopped Obi-wan from going after Ahsoka. Its only Anakin who gets the chance to go after her and say goodbye.

 

I was particularly dissapointed with Plo in the scene, given that he was pretty much Ahsoka's father figure (with Anakin more like a "big brother")...

 

I was disappointed with Plo the entire arc. Plo was underutilized but so was Obi-wan. IMO Plo should have done alot more in the third part of the arc since at the start he sounded to be in such disbelief of Ahsoka murdering somebody.

 

^Fair points.

 

Maybe because the Dark Side clouds everything? It sure seemed to affect their judgement about a bunch of things.

Actually, I wonder if there wasn't an ulterior motive for the whole setup of Ahsoka. If the entire thing was a machination of Palpatine... and if Barriss was somehow in league with him. Acting as a tool to procure the setup.

Interesting here is the involvement of Tarkin, which brings me to the possible true motive behind the whole thing. The Nexus hyperlane co-ordinates. Tarkin has half of them. Ahsoka and the Jedi Council, has the other. But Palpatine wants the entire set to use in setting up Grievous' lightning raid on Coruscant - the one seen during the opening battle of RoTS. If the council won't tell him, better to go after the weakest link in that chain - the Padawan Jedi, Ahsoka Tano, who is more likely to be more easily broken than the masters on the council.

So he constructs this setup, and uses the recently darksided Barriss Offee to set it in motion. First of all Ahsoka will be mentally assaulted, by having her whole life turned on its head, the floor ripped from under her, in the space of a couple of days. The Jedi who have been her surrogate family from the age of 3 believe she's turned to the Dark Side and they disown her and abandon her... then comes a kangaroo-court military drumhead... the phony evidence piles up before her face, and poor little Snips stands there starting to realize she's screwed, all while inwardly knowing herself to be innocent of course, but unable to prove it... and finally the guilty verdict is delivered and the death sentence is pronounced. Or at least, that's the plan.

Having been thoroughly mentally softened up, the next phase can begin. With Ahsoka now disappeared from the public gaze, ostensibly onto death row, they can do whatever they want to her. Shades of the CIA secret prisons and waterboarding and who knows what else here... but 100 times worse, I guess. It probably doesn't bear thinking about what a Sith emperor and all his apparatus, inquisitors et al can bring to bear on an individual to break their will. For maximum despair-infliction value, stick a bunch of Ysalamiri around her while the interrogations / torture proceeds... that way she can't even try to draw on the Force to bolster her mind against them.

Of couse this plan went to hell because Anakin. But... they still need those co-ordinates... I wouldn't be surprised if they sent some bounty hunters after her, after she left the Jedi order, to try to bring her in so they could go to work on her as above.

 

Yes, the Jedi Council certainly didn't appear to be the brightest bulbs in this arc, or most of RotS for that matter. Hence, "the Dark Side clouds everything" excuse. The Jedi seem utterly incapable of thinking outside the box.

I've speculated in the Barriss character thread and redemption thread that she was most likely simply an unwitting pawn of Palpatine. I just don't see her being in league with him, as I take her ideological rant before the courts to be her true beliefs, which indicates that she is still very much opposed to the Sith; she calls the Jedi an "army fighting for the Dark Side". I tend to believe that Palpatine had a hand, however surreptitiously, in spawning the anti-Jedi movement we see in Sabotage, and therefore contributing, however indirectly, to Barriss' decision to perform terrorist acts with the help of Letta Turmond.

I tend to believe that the Nexus Hyperlane routes were already given to the Chancellor and the Jedi Council in its complete form after the end of the Citadel arc. It only makes sense considering they are both the heads of the GAR. I think you give Tarkin, as sleazy as he can be, too much credit if you think he setup the terrorist attack himself with Barriss as his pawn. I really don't think he had any advance knowledge of the plot, outside of potential "suggestions" planted by Palpatine to make security more lax during the highly suspicious circumstances in The Jedi Who Knew Too Much. Considering all that happened afterward involving Ahsoka being framed for Letta's demise, Tarkin would readily play along. I think Palpatine's powers of precognition would allow him to anticipate the attack and even the framing of Ahsoka, and he merely ensured that Barriss could succeed in this endeavor by setting up the situation appropriately beforehand...which also plays into Palpatine's own grand plan of turning Anakin to the Dark Side by permanently separating him form his Padawan.

In short, Palpatine, and not Tarkin, is the real mastermind behind the plot, albeit very indirectly.

So, since the Nexus routes are already known to Palpatine, allowing Grievous to execute the attack on Coruscant in Labyrinth of Evil, I see no need for wanting to track down and torturing Ahsoka for the information; it's all really a diabolical ploy to tear her away from Anakin and send him spiraling ever closer to Sidious' dark embrace.

 

Interesting...and quite plausible the both of you.

Valkyrus' set up is almost identical to what I've read about how the CIA will recruit people of interest to them who otherwise are not inclined towards that kind of occupation, particularly for "interrogators".

In short: Find a promising upper-classman (nearing his degree) medical student with the right psyche profile. Suddenly, he's expelled for "cheating". His student loans are immediately called in. He can't work in the medical field because 1) he hasn't a degree and 2) his reputation has been ruined. He can't work outside the field because people for some reason just won't hire him. Right as he's on the edge of being hungry and homeless, a guy comes to him with a tempting "job offer"...

 

I like how in that arc Plo Koon looked like he wanted to say something reasonable about the clear insanity but Anakin already took matters into his own hands and the 501st like the psycho stalker he is.

 

Meh, why bother. Quitters gonna quit.

 

PK EDIT: Not Cool Dude.

 

First, I get the distinct impression that padawans quit or wash out fairly frequently, even talented ones (see: Komari Vosa). To us, who saw the entire Clone Wars through Ahsoka's eyes, her leaving is a very big deal. To the Council, who see padawans quit or wash out all the time, it probably isn't. The only reason she even got the send-off by the whole Council is that the Council was embarrassed by the specific circumstances involved in her departure - the bombing, manhunt, false accusation, and trial.The truth is, Ahsoka is important to us because she's a main character from our perspective, but she really isn't that important objectively in the big scheme of things.

Second, what was left to say? The Council was wrong, and knows it - none of them can blame her for what she does. She has every justification for leaving. In fact, she was way more gracious about it than they deserved. Everything had already been said that needed to be, or that could be.

 

Because if EU supplementary material, the show, and other stories are an indication...

The Council as a whole are elitist pricks. The Jedi are in serious need of PR people.

 

The Jedi had been put between a rock and a hard place where Ahsoka was involved.

Ahsoka's actions are not that of an innocent teenage girl. And her unwillingness to tell the whole story stacked up against her.

The Council was going on what they had to go with. One of those facts was that Ahsoka had been seen with Ventress; a known enemy of the Jedi even if she helped Obi-Wan.

Palpatine was demanding that they do something, the Jedi looked bad in the eyes of the citizens of the Republic, ect, ect, ect. They KNEW that their vision was clouded by the Dark Side and they were afraid that if they didn't act quickly that they would be the bad guys.

They hint in that Arc that the Jedi are immune to the Courts. This is why they expelled Ahsoka; so she could stand trial.

The Jedi Council isn't about to admit to ANYBODY that they allowed fear to control their actions. So they tried to blame the Force if you will for THEIR actions and choices. No wonder the Force had them wiped out; I wouldn't want to be blamed for others choices.

What is sad is that Ahsoka tells Anakin that she belonged at the Temple or she was meant to be a Jedi early in season one. She seemed to truly believe it.

Didn't the Council say that the Dark Side was clouding their vision during Ahsoka's trial before them?

But you can see that the Jedi Council is afraid. They didn't see the Darkness in Krell until after he was killed and reports were made. They nearly lost the campaign and who knows how many clones because of Krell.


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Because that's way too convenient.

 

Just my opinion, but I would have resigned after getting Knighted. Former Jedi Knight looks better on a resume than former padawan.

 

If Barriss figured out that the Republic was hopelessly corrupt, the war was one big set-up, and the Jedi were being used as tools, Yoda could have. The Council could have. They could have looked into it more deeply than they did. They could have asked more questions than they did. They could have stood their ground and told Tarkin no - she's a Jedi padawan and she gets a trial before the Council, which is the Jedi way.

Frankly, I don't even think the Jedi used this as cause to reflect at all about what happened. Yes, they were sorry about the personal pain Ahsoka went through being wrongly accused, but it never caused them to ask any bigger questions about what happened and why. They just had their Scooby Doo ending ("And I would have gotten away with it too, if not for you meddling kids...") threw Barriss in jail, and kept on keepin' on. And this isn't even the first example of that. I remember after the Krell arc, Jimmy Mac over at the Forcecast saying that he would be baffled if we never saw any fallout from what happened. Well we didn't, and now it's clear why. Barriss, like Krell, was another warning sign that the Jedi Council simply chose to ignore - they swept both incidents under the rug as best they could, learned nothing from them, and went back to business as usual. That, more than anything, is probably why Ahsoka left. It wasn't enough to apologize.

To give a real-world example*, as a Roman Catholic, this hits close to home, vis a vis the recent pedophilia scandals. Like the Jedi Order, the Catholic Church is a basically decent organization full of basically good people who try to do basically the right thing. But like the Jedi Order, they too often ignored clear warning signs, too often swept nasty incidents under the rug, and too often let battles with external forces distract them to the point where they were ignoring bad things happening inside their own organization. Like the Jedi Order, the Church is full of wise men who should have known better - who fooled themselves into believing that things weren't as bad as they really were, and into believing that their critics were all just haters, whereas many of them were people who were simply trying to make them understand that drastic action needed to be taken. Like the Jedi Order, the Church made the wrong call, when it really, really couldn't afford to. Like the Jedi Order, the results were, in the end, disastrous.

Over the last few years, I've encountered many Catholics who still believe in God, in the essential goodness of Jesus's message, and in the need to act in its spirit, but who just couldn't keep coming in to a Church that screwed up this badly and that seemed for a very long time to have learned nothing from what happened, not come to terms with what happened, and not taken responsibility for what happened in any meaningful way (it didn't for a long time, but has substantially cleaned itself up recently, something that the Jedi Order didn't get the chance to do before Order 66 hit). Ahsoka seems to me to be essentially the Jedi version of that. She still believes in the light side of the Force and the essential goodness of the Jedi Order's stated goals and mission, but she just can't remain a part of the Order as it is right now. I probably wouldn't have done what she did in that situation**, just as I have not left the Church in our world, but I can't say that I don't understand. And that, basically, is what Anakin did say to Ahsoka as she left.

(*I mean this example as an illustration, not to start a religious flame war. If you don't like the Catholic Church very much and you'd like to tell me all about that, and about how your religious views or lack thereof are much better, you can save your breath - I'm not interested.)

(**Yes, our 20/20 hindsight tells us that Ahsoka did make the right call on a personal level, because we all know that Order 66 is coming and that she probably wouldn't have made it past that if she stayed. And we also know that Anakin made the wrong call by staying, because we know how things turned out for him. But again, that's 20/20 hindsight - in considering whether they made the right call, we should only consider what they could have known at the time that they made it.)

 

Ahsoka painted a target on herself after she left. Sidious probably had been looking for ways to off Ahsoka and now that she's left the Order and the relative safety of her Master's side she's free game.

If you want some thing lame I was reading a fan fic where before her trial she has a vision and sees that Palpatine is the bad guy. She says NOTHING to the Jedi Council. It sounded EXTREMELY petty to me for her to keep silent.


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I didn't bring up your name at all. You know what the great philosopher Felix Unger said happens when you assume...

Why not? Thousands of college kids managed to figure out that Vietnam was a really bad idea, even when LBJ and the "Brain Trust" full of "the best and the brightest" that he inherited from Kennedy couldn't. Bradley Manning managed to figure out that the Iraq War was an immoral quagmire on his own, when all manner of Generals and politicians above him seemed unable to do so. There isn't all that much space between what Manning did and what Barriss did. Many call Manning a traitor and say he (at very least) put lives at risk. Others say he had a valid point and had to do something drastic to wake people up.

I doubt it. Again, she's important to us because we see the war through her eyes. But in the big scheme of things, she really isn't. She was a minor annoyance to his goal of his stripping Anakin of the things that kept him grounded. Once she walked away on her own, she wasn't worth bothering with.