You may not know this, but I love looking for plot holes in movies. Many of them are very benign and can easily be excused, since a screenwriter can’t think of every possible scenario. Some of them are glaring and obvious, but the whole movie is so terrible that you’ll do anything to make it stop, so deep thought about the movie is a waste of time. Then there are those wonderful treasures, the plot holes that hide in plain sight in what often is a high-quality movie.
For example, in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, the mysterious presence of equipment to “measure gaseous anomalies” on the U.S.S. Enterprise, despite the fact that it was aboard the U.S.S. Excelsior at the beginning of the movie, and the two vessels were never anywhere near each other until the penultimate scene, when Uhura reminds the captain about the aforementioned equipment. It enabled them to destroy the cloaked Klingon Bird of Prey with a specially modified torpedo, and the Enterprise emerged victorious. Despite that, it was still a great movie and one of the best Star Trek films.
I have been batting around a certain notion for a few years, and after some in depth analysis, I have come to a conclusion:
Yoda is the real villain of the Star Wars saga.
Yes, you read that right.
Yoda. Big Bad Guy.
The Capo, the Schemer, the Architect of everything wrong with the world. You’re probably saying: “This guy has flipped his lid.” And while the jury is still out on that, let me illustrate how, when viewed through the lens of Yoda Corleone, the Republic was his to toy with, and in the end, his big scheme to take control blew up in his face.
Now before you counter with other arguments, this argument is based solely on what is in the movies, not the animated series, not books, short stories, fan fiction, or other sources. That being said, consider the following points:
Point One—Yoda the Liar. Yoda misled Obi-Wan when it came to the existence of Kamino and the clone army. Obi-Wan learns that someone has doctored the Jedi archives, and when he says so to the archivist, she protests that it can’t be possible. If that’s the case, only someone of a high station, like someone on the Jedi Council, would have the kind of permissions needed to cull information from the archives.
Point Two—Yoda, the Richest Jedi in Babylon. How could a mysterious Jedi Master named Sifo-Dyas pay the trillions of credits necessary to create a clone army and no one in the Jedi Council notices? The answer is simple—Yoda covered it up. Either that or he is so inept that he couldn’t read an accounting report on Jedi holdings. Or perhaps there is a third possibility that the Jedi have so much money and property that the payment for a clone army was barely a drop in their financial bucket and could easily be chalked up to a clerical error. Whatever the reason, the Jedi paid a load of money to create an army of clones who would be loyal to them and the Republic.
Point Three—Yoda, George Patton. When the clone army is brought to the robot planet Geonosis, Yoda is not surprised at all at the appearance of a huge clone army, along with all their hardware, and then wastes no time in taking command of the army himself. Seriously. He doesn’t even blink, and the clones are all programmed to respond to his orders without question. How could he not be aware of that? Never mind the final scene in Episode II: Attack of the Clones, where he and some other bigwigs watch the clones loading up on to Star Destroyers and head out to war, and no one questions where the army or ships came from. He must have had them all under his little green thumb.
Point Four—Yoda the Blind Monk. He stood right next to a Dark Lord of the Sith and didn’t notice anything wrong. For a Jedi Master who said “My ally is the Force, and a powerful ally it is…” he seemed woefully out of touch with the force when at the end of Episode I: The Phantom Menace, he stands right next to Palpatine, the Sith boss himself, and doesn’t even get a tingle? We can therefore conclude that he knew who Palpatine really was and let him continue because he served a useful purpose.
Point Five—Kung Fu Yoda? For all his talk of peace and detachment from the physical and emotional, he threw it all to the wind when he went all Speedy Gonzales on Count Dookie. Yoda always preached against violence, but he dropped all semblance of dignity or decorum when he bounced around like a superball in a ridiculous and not-purposely-comical light saber duel.
Point Six—Runaway Yoda. Instead of facing the consequences of his failure, he goes into “exile.” Again, for all his talk of being righteous and responsible, when he sees the Republic going down, he runs away to Degobah. If that doesn’t sound like a South American dictator running off to another country with all the money, then I don’t know what would. He doesn’t do what a samurai would do—commit seppuku—and instead acts like a common criminal and high tails it as far as he can go and hides on a swamp planet with absolutely no one else living there.
Point Seven—Boss Yoda. The Jedi had the biggest, nicest, most expensive building on Coruscant. The Jedi are swimming in cash, as I said in point two. The Jedi had obviously given up the pretense of being ascetics and lived in luxury like the warlords the really were. Sure, they still preach to their trainees that the simple life is the way but practiced very little of that themselves. And it seemed that no one even questioned it.
Point Eight—Yoda the Shogun. The Jedi were the Republic’s equivalent of the Samurai, and Yoda would be the Shogun, the de facto leader of the Republic. No one questioned the actions of the Jedi, and they had the authority to arrest, disarm (literally), or kill anyone in their way. Sounds exactly like the Samurai in 17th century Feudal Japan; they answered only to their own social order and direct superiors, and the people of the Republic go along with it. When Anakin and Obi-Wan catch a would-be assassin, Anakin tells the curious onlookers: “Jedi business, move along.”
Point Nine—Yoda, Fingers in Every Pie. When the Trade Federation blockades Naboo, instead of sending in an actual negotiator or diplomat, he sends in the Jedi to resolve the issue. That would be the equivalent of the President of the United States sending in the Navy SEALS to deal with a trade dispute between two small islands in the South Pacific. This demonstrates that Yoda had no real interest in preserving the peace. In fact, very much the opposite; sending in the Jedi only served to stoke the fires of war. This simple act is one of the most obvious tells that Yoda is willing to have his followers do whatever it takes to retain power.
All of this does not excuse the entire Jedi order—they had been abducting children and raising them as warriors for “a thousand generations”, and kept the Republic in check, effectively ruling the Republic with their mystical ways. But the excoriation of the Jedi can wait for another day; the fish fry of the day is Yoda, the head of the Jedi Crime Syndicate.
A bastian of writing 