Full Series In Which Kablob Goes On About Barriss Offee

This is the first part of my promised "Barriss Offee Rant".​

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The Right Jedi: How the Jedi Order’s Poster Girl Fell to the Dark Side.​

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Foreword​

I stopped watching The Clone Wars as it was airing somewhere around the beginning of the third season, (the part where it got boring for a while) which I very much regret. I was mostly out of Star Wars for a while until I stumbled across a review of The Lawless and realized I was missing out on something seriously awesome.

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Resurrecting Darth Maul could have gone two ways. It went the awesome one.​

I watched the “Mauldalore” arc and then the latest episode at the time, Sabotage, which featured Anakin Skywalker and Ahsoka Tano starring in CSI: Coruscant. I was very excited for the rest of it, and started looking up Clone Wars-related stuff on the Internet to pass the time. So I stumbled across the group of people who made fanart about Barriss Offee and Ahsoka Tano. (Some of which was, admittedly, not exactly platonic.)

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I don’t know where they got that from. I don’t see any subtext here.​

I remembered how much I liked the Geonosis 2: Electric Boogaloo arc from Season Two that had Barriss and Ahsoka meet each other back when it aired in 2009. So for two weeks, as Ahsoka got increasingly screwed over by (her own lack of thinking things through and) some unknown person framing her for murder and terrorism, I was very invested in the idea of Offee and Tano being great friends. And then, like everyone else who put thirty seconds of thought into what happened in To Catch a Jedi, I realized something depressing. There was a ninety percent chance that Barriss was, as Adrian Monk put it, “The Guy”. So I had a week to come to terms with that and then The Wrong Jedi aired and proved me right while simultaneously breaking my heart.

The funny thing is that I wasn’t very interested in Barriss Offee apart from her friendship with Ahsoka until that happened. I’d always thought of her as being “Background Jedi Number 4”, no more interesting than any other B-List Jedi. But then I started thinking about how “Jedi Number 4” could lost her mind the way that obviously happened. I put way, way too much thought into it. Eventually it even got me into writing fan fiction continuing their story after Revenge of the Sith, and now I’m even thinking about writing an actual book of my own some day.

But that isn’t here or there. This piece is focused on one thing: analyzing Barriss’ actions and presenting a possible series of events that could have caused her to do them. So here we go.

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There were a lot of arguments on the Internet after the Season 5 finale of the Clone Wars. Whether or not Ahsoka Tano was justified in leaving the Jedi Order, whether or not the Jedi Council handled the situation well, whether Tim Curry’s Palpatine impression was passable or just god-awful. But the one people were upset about the most was the revelation in the last episode, The Wrong Jedi (even though it was incredibly obvious by the one before it) that the antagonist of the arc was none other than Jedi Knight Barriss Offee. To say this was a departure from her previous characterization would be a massive understatement. If someone in the Star Wars galaxy had looked up “Average Jedi” in an encyclopedia before this arc aired, they would have found her picture.

So why did she do it? The out of universe reason is simple. They came up with the plot and then looked for the antagonist. For that they needed somebody who:

• Was a Jedi
• Had been on the show before
• Had interacted positively with Ahsoka Tano before
• And was NOT in Revenge of the Sith

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The comic doesn’t count, obviously.​

Now the in-universe reasons could be much more interesting.than that. We know the facts of what Barriss did. What we don’t know are:

• What drove her to it?
• Just how much did she fall?
• Why did she decide to frame Ahsoka?
• How much about what was going on did Palpatine or Tarkin know?
• What happened to her afterwards?

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Part One: Barriss Offee, Before She Lost Her ****​

Barriss had two significant appearances in The Clone Wars before Season Five. In the episode Weapons Factory, she and Ahsoka blew up a...weapons factory, and almost die in the process. In Brain Invaders, she and Ahsoka are on a medical frigate whose crew has been infected by Geonosian parasites. Barriss gets infected herself and is forced to fight Ahsoka, which just feels really uncomfortable in hindsight.

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“Can we get a rematch in a few years? This worm up my nose is screwing up my form.”​

So what character traits do we see in Barriss from these two episodes?


She’s pretty smart.

For her mission in Weapons Factory, Luminara Unduli tells Barriss to memorize every single junction of a literal bug hive. From the way Barriss talks about it, that’s not too hard of a task.

Barriss, an 18 year old Padawan, didn’t think it was hard to memorize this thing:

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If they really wanted to make it hard, they would have made it non-Euclidian.​

That is impressive. (Most impressive.) Further showing how much of a nerd Barriss is, we have the way she opens doors:

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Clearly, angles are the path to the dark side.​

Literally everybody else with a lightsaber cuts circular holes in things. Barriss cuts a rectangle. Which makes a lot more sense, cutting a circle is harder and makes a lot of space you don’t actually need. Good on her for thinking that one up. Maybe the Jedi would have adopted that method eventually, who knows? From her later actions you get the sense her Intelligence score would be a lot higher than her Wisdom score.

She is very big on the whole “Greater Good” thing.

In Weapons Factory, Barriss and Ahsoka are forced to destroy the factory’s reactor with a tank parked right next to it. Barriss barely hesitates to agree, knowing that they would most likely be killed instantly. When they are buried beneath the rubble instead, she says:

“What happens to us now doesn’t matter. By destroying this factory we’ve saved countless lives elsewhere.”

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Most of the time these things are just glorified flashlights.​

Obviously she doesn’t object to not dying when Anakin and Luminara dig them out, but it comes up again in Brain Invaders. Barriss and Ahsoka, the only uninfected people on their ship, split up on separate missions to stop it. Barriss tells her:

“One of us must succeed Ahsoka. If you need to, you’ll do what must be done. I know it.”

Honestly, that quote is a bit creepy in hindsight.
Once Barriss is infected, she doesn’t hesitate to ask Ahsoka to kill her when she briefly gets control of herself.

Clearly, Barriss doesn’t place much value on her own life.

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This is a kid’s show, right?​

Also worthy of mention: when Barriss gets jumped by an infected clone she panics and kills him. Which isn’t necessarily indicative of dark-sidery. It’s pretty understandable under the circumstances. For the greater good, right?

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The first time a Jedi kills someone on this show, and it’s a teenager gut-stabbing one of her buddies. Kid’s show, everyone.​

So if their situations had been reversed in Brain Invaders and Ahsoka was infected instead of Barriss, then it’s likely Barriss would have killed her. She would have felt pretty terrible about it, yes. It probably would have haunted her for the rest of her life. (Which probably wouldn’t have been very long, what with an enraged Anakin and everything.)But if she thought the greater good called for it, she would have done to Ahsoka what she did to the clone.


Stick up the ass, much?

Barriss and Luminara have pretty much the textbook example of a Jedi Master/Apprentice relationship. Meaning, Luminara is a hardass and Barriss listens to whatever she says

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I might as well converse entirely by repeating the Jedi Code.​

Barriss’ method of following the Jedi code is a lot stricter than Anakin’s or Ahsoka’s - that’s why they decided to pair her with Ahsoka in Weapons Factory in the first place. She is, as presented here, an extremely orthodox Jedi.

So how does all this result in bombing your way to the Dark Side?

Coming soon: Part 2, in which we add two years of war, a non-Jedi friend with absolutely no ulterior motive, someone else’s betrayal of the Jedi, and stir vigorously.

 

I think your degree in Barrissology payed off.

 

Told you I spent way too much time thinking about it.

 

You are a strange, strange person, and it is my privilege to know you interact with you on a website.

 

Thank you.

 

I find the reason I enjoy visiting this place is the strange people. It's wonderful!

 

Aw, thanks.

 

You hit the nail on the head, Barriss Offee is my most favourite minor character in Star Wars.

Barriss_Coffee do you agree?

 

I hope to see Inquisitor Offee at some point over the course of the Rebels / Spinoffs continuum.

 

In regards to cutting the door with the lightsaber in a rectangle....Ventress did that during the Nightsisters arc when her and 2 sisters went after Dooku....we should have realized that is the way evil force users cut doors as opposed to the circles used by good force users.

 

Ehehehe, I'd never noticed her cutting the door with the lightsaber in a rectangle!

Seriously, though, this is some interesting meta. I'm glad to know other people like Barriss/think about what could have caused her to fall as much as I do.

 

Woah.

 

They truly choose "the quick and easy path".

 

Straight lines and right angles are the mark of the artificial. The synthetic. The man-made. Nature abhors a right angle. A circle on the other hand is the "perfect" natural form. Circles occur everywhere in nature. Water droplets are naturally pulled into a sphere by surface tension. Planets, moons and stars are pulled into spheres by their own gravity. It fits with the ethos of darksiders, who wish to control and impose their own order on everything, vs Jedi, who are in harmony and symbiosis with the natural order of things.

 

Interesting stance I like it. Too bad, I never actually see it in practice by the Jedi. Re: natural order and such.

 

Well like they say, "that's the theory".

As with all generalizations about the behavior of group x or organization y, "they do this" "they don't do that" etc. the theory in practice is never hard and fast. Often it's very loose, sometimes barely discernible.

 

Part 2: How To Break A Jedi​

So we’ve established that Barriss is pretty much the most Jedi of the Jedi. And the Jedi are, as Mace Windu gets quoted on saying a lot, keepers of the peace. They’re supposed to prevent wars from breaking out, and if that fails then they’re supposed to end them as quickly as possible. Set up a peace treaty or something. Barriss and Ahsoka talk about this briefly before everything hits the fan in Brain Invaders. You get the impression that Barriss and Ahsoka are both a little uneasy about the whole “Jedi as Generals” thing, but at this point Barriss hasn’t really started asking questions yet.

“Once the war is over it will be our job to maintain the peace.”

She’s only thinking about what will happen when the war is over at this point. Ahsoka wonders what the difference between a peacekeeper and a warrior is, and Barriss doesn’t know either yet.

“I don’t have all the answers, Ahsoka. Like you, I’m a learner.”

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But enough retroactive foreshadowing of me, let’s foreshadow your Master Anakin some.​

This episode still takes place in 22 BBY. The Clone Wars have been raging for about six months or so. Sure, some really messed up stuff has happened. The flamethrowers on Geonosis, anyone? That must have disturbed the heck out of her if she saw it, or even if she just heard about it. Fine, she thinks. Greater good. Don’t think about it to hard. Not to mention the entire brain worm experience, which has to be traumatizing for everyone involved.

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Which one of them do you think had worse nightmares that night?​

So, the Jedi might have started the war when Luminara grabbed Barriss and told her Mace Windu was taking them and a bunch of extra Jedi to Geonosis Round One to rescue two idiot Jedi and a Senator who were about to be executed. Okay, Barriss says. That makes sense, we can’t just let them get killed. Then once all of the Jedi without names on Geonosis get killed and Yoda shows up with a literal army, she had to realize that this was going to set off something crazy. But then it turns out Dooku is the Sith Lord, so they have a duty to stop him. They just need to capture Dooku, and then the Republic and the CIS can negotiate their differences out. The war part is just a necessary evil to stop the greater evil.

. Yes, at this point in time Barriss’ idealism is almost completely intact. Fast forward a year or two. After a seemingly endless number of battles just like Geonosis, Barriss’ idealism has to be on a dangerously shaky pedestal. Just when the hell is this war going to end, anyway?

Take someone who was trained her whole life to respect all living things and to never unsheathe her lightsaber unless it was absolutely necessary. Make her a fervent believer in those teachings. Now, make her responsible for leading thousands of men in battle, and don’t give her enough experience in life to temper her intelligence with wisdom. To top all of that off, give her access to a power that, if you use it with negative emotions, can do a real number on your ability to reason. What you’ve got there is a potential time bomb.

But most of the time, Barriss only had to fight droids, right? Yes, but she still has to deal with the clones. We don’t know if Barriss is a healer in the new canon since she never did it on screen, but if she is then how do you think it must have felt for her to heal these men of all sorts of horrific injuries, only for a lot of them to just get killed right after? It’s discouraging, to say the least.

And the CIS didn’t only use droids. Geonosis had the Geonosians, but the best example to use here would be Umbara. We didn’t see a single droid on that planet, it was all Umbaran militia. You get the impression that, even without Krell mucking everything up, that battle was one of the worst in the Clone Wars. Slogging through some alien jungle for weeks on end, getting ambushed by the enemy - and the animals, and the plants - at all hours of the perpetual night. Though all of this about Umbara isn’t that relevant, it’s not like Barriss was anywhere near -

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Oh. Well then. Thank you, two second cameo.​

So Barriss was at Umbara. In space, at least. But who’s to say that she didn’t wind up planetside? She could have been in all of that Shatterpoint Heart of Darkness stuff down there. But more important than that, Barriss was in close proximity to this guy:

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Yes, yellow is my natural eye color. Why do you ask?​

Pong Krell is the Jedi who turned so villainous that even Karen Traviss probably thought he was a bit over the top. He was a wannabee Sith Lord who planned to defect, he got as many clones killed as possible, and he staged a friendly fire incident before going on a rampage. What do you think Barriss’ reaction was when she heard that the reason Umbara dragged on for so long was because of a Jedi? She’d be horrified. Now what do you think her reaction would be when she heard what the Jedi Council did about it? Actually, what did the Jedi Council do about Krell?

Er, nothing. Sure, they had to have been appalled at what he did. A Jedi Master went absolutely, completely to the Dark Side in the most calculated, cold-blooded way possible. But he was killed by the 501st, case closed. They kept doing everything that they were doing before Umbara. And that’s the point when Barriss’ idealism about the Jedi’s role in the war completely snapped.

This is how she saw it: The Jedi had completely failed at keeping the peace. Once the war started they were so focused on stopping the Sith that they weren’t trying to stop the war, they were trying to win it. There’s a big difference between those two things for Barriss “Model Jedi” Offee. Now she thinks: This isn’t for the greater good. This is just terrible.

So then she’s got that mental dissonance to deal with between what they taught her and what she’s actually doing. She keeps in the war though, because what else can she do? She’s just one Jedi, she can’t make a difference. This is where the strict following of the Jedi code comes to bite her. She really needs to talk to someone about her problems, but her instinct is to try and remain detached. So she just keeps it bottled up. She lets it stew. She probably starts to have bouts of depression, plus a dose of PTSD on top. Meditating with the Force can only relieve so much of that.

But who can she talk to? Luminara? Let’s say that Barriss is knighted around this time, so they don’t see each other that much anymore. Let’s say that when Barriss does see her she tries to bring up a few doubts to her. But Luminara’s responses could all be summarized as “The Council knows what it’s doing, don’t question them.” It’s the same with any other Jedi in an authority position she could talk to. Not to mention that Barriss is getting seriously disillusioned with Jedi in positions of authority. She doesn’t want to talk to Yoda or Windu or any of them more than she has to, because she’s starting to blame them a bit for what’s going on. Maybe she tries to talk about it to Ahsoka once or twice, but it goes right over Ahsoka’s head. Nobody really wants to think about it, because they can all feel that the entire situation is a bit wrong, somehow. But Barriss just can’t let it go.

So let’s say that one day when she’s back at the Temple, Barriss takes a walk on the streets of Coruscant to try and clear her head. If she doesn’t get out of there for a while she’s probably going to scream at some poor youngling who’s being annoying. (*cough*Petro*cough*) So she’s walking along in Craptown, Coruscant, trying to pretend she’s just a normal person for a while. She’s incognito. Even left her lightsaber back in the Temple. She turns down a street and look, there’s an anti-war protest going on. Barriss gets intrigued and joins the crowd to listen to whoever’s going on a rant. After a while the woman standing next to her starts up a conversation about it with her, asking what she thinks about the whole thing.

Barriss Offee, meet Letta Turmond.

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Who wouldn’t trust someone with this tattoo?​

So they hit it off pretty well, bonding over their mutual anger at the system. Barriss needs to get back the the Temple, so they decide to meet up again for, I don’t know, coffee or something. Eventually, Barriss reveals that she’s a Jedi.

Now let’s look at Letta. Shes an extremist anti-war activist whose husband works in the Jedi Temple. Now here’s a Jedi opening up to her about some of the exact things Letta herself gets angry over. You can bet she’s going to cultivate the hell out of this relationship. Their meetings become regular things, whenever Barriss is on Coruscant. Barriss vents about her frustrations with the Jedi to Letta, then Letta subtly works to introduce her to the anti-war rhetoric. About how the Jedi do whatever the Senate tells them to, and the Senate does whatever Palpatine tells them to.

Now in between these meetings, Barriss is in the field getting fresh reminders of it all.

At first Barriss tries defending the Jedi. They aren’t all bad, right? I’m not the only one who feels this way, she tells Letta. Okay, Letta says, give me some examples. Barriss thinks about it for a minute and comes up with a name.

Ahsoka Tano.

She expressed her own doubts to Barriss back in Brain Invaders, right? She didn’t take the easy way out and kill Barriss, she found a way to save everyone on the ship. (Other than the one Barriss killed, that is. But she’d rather not think about that.) You could trust Ahsoka, Barriss tells Letta. She’s different from the others. Sadly for Barriss, she’s completely wrong about Ahsoka. She might have felt unsure about it then, but she hasn’t been affected nearly as badly by the war. She’s completely convinced that the Jedi are doing the right thing, and the Separatists are bad even if they have a few good people on their side. Not to mention that if Ahsoka does start having issues, she can actually talk about them to her Master, who assures her it’s all fine.

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Snips, our purpose as Jedi is to kick ass.​

So, Barriss has Ahsoka’s views completely wrong. Letta asks her if maybe they could get Ahsoka into their meetings, but Barriss thinks it’s a bad idea. Ahsoka might be sympathetic, she thinks, but she’s also very close to her Master, Anakin “Woo Lets Kill Some Seppies” Skywalker. If Anakin asked her what she was doing sneaking off from the Temple so much, Barriss thinks that she would tell him. Anakin would freak out and think Barriss and Letta were a pair of traitors, then he would report her to the Council.

Okay, Letta says. She’ll forget about it. But later she’s going to remember what Barriss said about Ahsoka. For now she’s just going to keep feeding Barriss’ distrust of the Jedi and the Republic. Eventually Barriss won’t be able to handle it anymore.

Coming soon in part 3: How two chicks with tattoos brought down the Jedi Temple

 

This is why I never really felt that Barriss' fall was in need of an explanation as badly as others felt. It's all in there implicitly, and one only needs to think a bit about it to piece things together.

 

Well, the problem is that while it's there if you really, really look for it, I'm pretty sure I put more thought into Barriss than the writers did.

 

Part two didn't disapoint. This is so good to read.

 

So...Bariss for inquisitor??

she is already bent...maybe Palpy had her tortured and brainwashed...along with using some wicked, evil Sith mojo to twist her into a loyal darksider.

 

Do Not Want.

(Will explain why later)

 

It's a possibility. It'd take quite a bit of brainwashing and such though since the very thing she was fighting against was what would become the Empire. Assuming she never escaped prison or was terminated at the end of the War, though, that's over a decade of time for them to brainwash her into a loyal Dark Side user for the Empire.

Doesn't mean I want it, though. In some ways I'd rather see Barriss stranded and alone on some planet, a bit insane from both the Dark Side and everything she said turning out to be true.