KOTOR 2 and The Last Jedi: Unlearning What You Have Learned

Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords

Developer: Obsidian Entertainment

Medium: Video game

Release date: December 2004

Timeline placement: 3,951 BBY

"Perhaps you were expecting some surprise, for me to reveal a secret that had eluded you, something that would change your perspective of events, shatter you to your core. There is no great revelation, no great secret. There is only you."

 

It is 2003. Filmmaker Rian Johnson, having recently shot his first movie, Brick, gives an interview where he reveals his ambition to make a movie so divisive that half the audience loves it and the other half thinks it is the worst movie they've ever seen.

 

It is 2017. Filmmaker Rian Johnson, having recently shot his fourth movie, Star Wars: Episode VIII – The Last Jedi, goes to a Halloween party dressed as Dougie Jones, the bastardized subversion of beloved Twin Peaks hero Dale Cooper who appeared in Twin Peaks: The Return, David Lynch's "fuck you" to nostalgia.

 

It is December 17, 2017. I walk out of the theater after watching The Last Jedi and text my friend Bryant, who asks me how the movie was. "Oh fuck," I text back, realization dawning, "I don't think I liked it."

 

It is in our house now.

It's always been difficult for me to choose a preference between Knights of the Old Republic and its sequel. As a story, I greatly prefer The Sith Lords, along with most of its characters. The original KotOR is more or less a perfect Star Wars experience, but the price of being prototypically Star Wars is not being able to be anything else. By contrast, KotOR II just isn't as much fun to play. The tone and atmosphere are much darker, and you're always ill at ease. There's precious little lighthearted adventuring between the desperate battles; you're on the run from beginning to end, without the comfortable reliability of the Jedi or the Republic to fall back on.

 

It's also less fun for less deliberate reasons. The length of the opening sequence on Peragus II is a common complaint, comparable to a more survival horror-ish version of the first game's Taris. But where KotOR let you begin the game's main quest in its second major area, Dantooine, in KotOR II you first have to explore the Republic ghost ship Harbinger and complete Citadel Station, a huge area full of backtracking, before crashing on the planet Telos and fighting dozens of enemies as you travel across its surface to reach the polar region, where you can finally start the main story.

 

The game's extensive first act alone was one of the major deterrents that kept me from playing it as many times as its predecessor. The other, of course, was the infamously incomplete ending and abundance of obvious cut content in the original Xbox version. 

Less fun to play, but better written.

 

If the original Knights of the Old Republic was somewhat comparable to The Force Awakens in how it drew on the tone and structure of classic Star Wars to tell a modern Star Wars story, The Sith Lords and The Last Jedi can be compared for how they subvert and deconstruct both their immediate predecessor and Star Wars as a whole, and how The Sith Lords does it correctly and The Last Jedi sucks. 

In KotOR, the player character goes through the whole Star Wars hero's journey, including Jedi training, a romantic arc, redemption for sins past, and saving the galaxy from certain doom, before finally arriving at happily ever after. The game acknowledges how awesome you are and everyone gets a medal. In the sequel, set a brief five years later, everything has gone to shit. The Jedi are all but extinct, the Republic is on the verge of collapse, the Sith are back and more dangerous than ever, and your character from the first game has vanished and all his friends are sad. As Avril Lavigne once said, so much for my happy ending.

 

Of course, The Force Awakens infamously did the same thing to Return of the Jedi, and didn't have much of an ending itself. Instead it left things on a cliffhanger for the subsequent film to pick up. J. J. Abrams showed the audience a box and asked "What's inside it?" then handed it over to Rian Johnson, who gleefully ripped it open and declared "Nothing! It's empty!"

 

Snoke in TFA: "I want the girl alive!"  

Snoke in TLJ: "Kill the girl!"  

Snoke in TFA: "Bring Kylo Ren to me so I can complete his training!"  

Snoke in TLJ: "Kylo your mask is dumb, now gtfo lol."  

Han in TFA: "Luke went looking for the first Jedi temple."  

Luke in TLJ: "I don't care about the first Jedi temple."  

Rey in TFA: "The one thing I want in all the universe is for my family to come back, but by the end of the movie I've accepted that they never  will."  

Rey in TLJ: "The one thing I want in all the universe is to know who my parents were."  

Rey's parents in TFA: *drop her off and leave the planet in a working spaceship*  

Rey's parents in TLJ: *so poor they have to sell their daughter for drinking money then die on the same planet*

Finn in TFA: "I've suffered a massive spinal injury and I'm in a coma!"  

Finn in TLJ: "nvm lol"  

Maz Kanata in TFA: "Nothing matters more than the fight against the dark side."  

Maz Kanata in TLJ: "I'm too busy with a union dispute to help the fight against the dark side, even though my whole business operation got blown up in the last movie."  

Kylo Ren in TFA: "I love Darth Vader!"  

Kylo Ren in TLJ: "Snoke made fun of me so I hate the past now!"  

Hux in TFA: "I'm a frothing-at-the-mouth true-believer Hitler Youth fascist!"  

Hux in TLJ: "I'm slapstick comic relief!"  

The First Order in TFA: "Oh no, like six X-wings showed up! We must retreat! Also our whole planet exploded!"  

The First Order in TLJ: "We rule the entire galaxy, somehow!"  

Kylo Ren in TFA: "My unique custom-built lightsaber got destroyed and my helmet got blown up!"  

Kylo Ren in TLJ: "Never mind I have a whole wardrobe full of them apparently. Also my scar is in a different place now."  

 

Snoke in TFA: "We must stop Luke Skywalker from returning at any cost! He is the only one who can stop us!"  

Luke in TLJ: *does nothing*  

Finn in TFA: "I started off trying to run away from my problems, but I've grown to care about something larger than myself!"  

Finn in TFA: "I started off trying to run away from my problems, but I've grown to care about something larger than myself, again!"  

Maz Kanata in TFA: "I'll tell you how I got Luke's lightsaber in another movie!"  

Maz Kanata in TLJ: "But not this one!"  

Finn in TFA: "I don't know how to pilot a vehicle!"  

Finn in TLJ: *pilots a vehicle*  

Snoke in TFA: 

Snoke in TLJ: 

 

The Sith Lords also tackles an entirely different set of themes. While the first game was a love letter to Star Wars, a "greatest hits" remix of the classic trilogy's most iconic moments and concepts, the second takes a much more critical, introspective view of the franchise. Written by Chris Avellone, whose résumé doubles as a list of some of the greatest RPGs of all time, KotOR II has a lot to say about the Jedi and the Force, little of it complimentary. His criticisms don't feel entirely dissimilar from those made by Rian Johnson in The Last Jedi, but the difference is that, coming from The Sith Lords, they feel more genuine and earned. Chris Avellone spent ten months reading the entire Expanded Universe as research for the game, whereas I'm still not completely convinced that Rian Johnson has ever actually seen a Star Wars movie.

 

I'm being facetious, of course; it's clear that Johnson has at least seen the prequels, that he didn't like them, and also that he missed the point of them completely.

The core theme of the prequels wasn't that the Jedi are fundamentally flawed as a concept, it was that the Jedi of that particular era had lost their way and become so fearful of the dark side that they exchanged their humanity for religious ideology, and were destroyed because of it. The titular "Return of the Jedi" was the next generation rejecting the mistakes of the old and starting a new path forward.

For Luke to suddenly be an ascetic prequel-esque Jedi in The Last Jedi and The Book of Boba Fett reveals a lack of imagination by the people writing these stories. Instead of logically following from the end of Return of the Jedi, they can only ape what they saw in the prequels, while completely missing the point of it.

 

In the original trilogy, Luke became a full Jedi by rejecting his teachers and choosing love over the strict dogma of the prequel-era Jedi. He didn't undergo the life-long training and brainwashing of the old Jedi Order. When he starts rebuilding the Jedi, you would expect his philosophy to reflect his experiences.

 

But The Last Jedi is like nah, Luke's just as bad as the prequel Jedi after all, it's actually Rey who has to do everything Luke was supposed to do because the actor who plays Luke got old in real life so there's no way he can be the hero anymore.

 

Now compare all of this to the way KotOR II followed the first game. Yes, things have gone to shit, and there's never any clear-cut resolution to it all (why would there be, when Obsidian thought they were making only the second game of what would be a trilogy? There's another point of comparison for you: The Sith Lords said its say with consideration for both its predecessor and its assumed follow-up; The Last Jedi burned its forerunner's blueprints and pulled the ladder up behind it). But it built more than it tore down. 

 

More importantly, Chris Avellone's interrogation of the Jedi Order was clearly framed as one writer's voice asking questions while the established setting endured around it. Despite the widespread consequences The Sith Lords brought to its isolated era of Star Wars history (consequences that ultimately didn't amount to much thanks to BioWare's subsequent storytelling in The Old Republic), it never truly upset the apple cart; KotOR II never had the equivalent of Luke Skywalker sucking down green walrus milk and then dying like an idiot.

 

Your original character could always return (in fact, the ending of the game depends on that premise). Five of your party members from the first game could potentially appear in the second, if you didn't kill them, and nothing prevented the other four from returning in the future. The only significant returning KotOR character to be killed in The Sith Lords was Ed Asner's Master Vrook, and who wasn't thrilled to see that?

The Jedi Order was destroyed, but by the end of the game it had been rebuilt, free from the influence of the obdurate Jedi Council. Compare this to The Last Jedi's resolution, where the man who rejected the obstinacy of the surviving Jedi Council members of his own day is killed with no legacy to leave behind, whatever lessons he had to teach replaced by the stolen Sacred Jedi Texts. "Page-turners, they were not." Wow, I bet Rey's Jedi Order is going to be super-cool and exciting when everything they know is based on the Dead Sea Scrolls and none of the lessons Luke Skywalker learned fighting the Empire and saving his father. Sign me up for Episodes X, XI, and XII!

 

Oh . . .

 

It is December 19, 2017. For two days I have grappled with my feelings about Star Wars: Episode VIII – The Last Jedi. "The A-plot was a really good anti-nostalgia 'Star Wars is dead and you are a fool for liking it' deconstruction of what people want and expect from these movies," I tell Bryant, "but for some reason they decided to weigh it down with terrible B- and C-plots that take forever and go nowhere."

 

Looking back, I'm not sure I still agree with all of that assessment. Like Twin Peaks: The Return before it, The Last Jedi seemed to be saying to its audience, "Did you really expect this to be the same as the thing you loved a quarter century ago? It's not; it can't be; it never could have been." But when Twin Peaks was disproving its own pop-cultural simulacrum in 2017, that question came from the lips of the same men who had first built that shadow's caster. 

 

Who the hell is Rian Johnson to decide what Star Wars is or needs to be? No George Lucas. No David Lynch. Not even a Chris Avellone.

 

With Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords, Avellone addressed everything he found objectionable about the hypocrisy of the Jedi as he saw it in the prequels and the EU, but he respected the setting enough to understand that he was just a visitor passing through, saying his piece without forcing the audience to agree with him. By contrast, The Last Jedi burned the setting down around it to make its statement about failure and letting go of the past (and animal rights and war profiteering and divine birthright and), while actually saying nothing. The Jedi returned, just not the Jedi we wanted to see. A Nobody from Nowhere finally became the hero, as had been happening in Star Wars since 1977. Good was tempted by evil, and easily overcame that temptation with no effort whatsoever. What a subversion of expectations! The best Star Wars film since Empire! Bring on the Johnson trilogy!

 

Oh . . .

Disney should just give up on trying to get any new Star Wars films off the ground and instead put all the money they would have wasted on that into having Chris Avellone write Knights of the Old Republic III. It would be better written, and more fun to play.

 

 

Epilogue: I realize that I've spent significantly more of this post whining about The Last Jedi than celebrating The Sith Lords, and I regret that; I have spent too much time complaining about The Last Jedi already. But it's easy to go on and on about poor, misguided things. The special things, the things that matter, the things you remember—those are the things it's hard to talk about, because what they mean is only what they mean to you.

 

When I was in high school, our future class salutatorian was running for student council president and asked me for a quote to use in her campaign. Without hesitating, I said nonsequitously, "ONE BROKEN JEDI CANNOT STOP THE DARKNESS THAT IS TO COME," Darth Sion's portentous line to Kreia when he arrives on Peragus II. 

 

She used it in her speech and had it printed out on posters. One hung on the wall in the cafeteria well into the next academic year, long after the election was over. I can't remember who won, but I still remember that poster.