Star Wars' Barriss Offee: The Child Soldier to Domestic Terrorist Pipeline - Part 2
On the bright side of death.
For a more general critical look at Star Wars’ current era:
In Part 1, I outlined the biography of Barriss Offee, a Glup Shitto of some note, and broke down her two most important storylines from The Clone Wars.
The gist:
Barriss grew up idolising her master, Luminara, who was a role model and surrogate mother in her eyes.
There was a distinct lack of reciprocal care from Luminara, whose attitude to Barriss was far from affectionate.
Barriss’ came to question fundamental Jedi values, specifically the rejection of emotion, and ultimately committed a terrorist attack against the Jedi Order, who she blamed for the war.
Luminara’s absence during these events hints at a rift between them, connected to Barriss’ off-screen crisis of faith.
Here, I will be looking into a likely reference to Luminara, with implications for Barriss’ character, and Barriss’ (final) role in Tales of the Empire.
Spoilers for The Clone Wars and Tales of the Empire.
Following the thread
Some time after the dust from The Wrong Jedi had settled, a much later arc offers what is almost certainly a reference to Luminara, which is full of implications for Barriss’ character. In this storyline, the down-on-her-luck ex-Padawan Ahsoka joins the Martez sisters, two impoverished orphans from Coruscant’s underworld, in their attempts to make their fortune.
Rafa, the cynical older sister, explains her resentment of the Jedi in a memorable outburst. She tells Ahsoka how her parents were killed during a high-speed chase involving the criminal Cad Bane and several Jedi. It’s not framed as if the deaths were 100% the Jedi’s fault, but they were pressing a hot pursuit through a heavily populated area, and were never held to account for it, so Rafa is entitled to draw her own conclusions.
There is, incidentally, a definite class connotation here, the Martez sisters arc being one of the show’s more class conscious stories1. The Clone Wars highlights more than once that the masses of Coruscant live in squalor, which the Jedi are either ignorant of or indifferent to2. With that context, it’s really not surprising to learn that they endangered poor people while chasing a criminal who had threatened the wealthy, well-connected Senators they rub shoulders with every episode.3 The Jedi Temple doesn’t resemble a literal ivory tower for nothing, and in general Coruscant is a very straightforward metaphor for power in terms of verticality, with the Senate and the Jedi on top4, and everyone else below them, many beneath the surface of the planet itself in the so-called Underworld. Likewise, the Jedi Council’s tower stands above the rest of their Order, signalling that the Yodas and Luminaras are high above the Ahsokas and Barrisses.
"Not everyone on Coruscant lives in a luxurious temple on the surface." - Ventress, during The Wrong Jedi arc.
Rafa also tells of how a female Jedi, who she describes as having dark robes and light-green skin, spoke to them in the aftermath. This Jedi proceeded to deliver a chilly non-apology to the orphans, concluding that the Force would be with them, before promptly leaving them to their fate.
This is not explicitly stated to be Luminara, but it certainly fits her description and matches her coldly pious character as shown on Geonosis. The only other Jedi it could have been is Barriss herself, whose idealism and compassion elsewhere make her a far less likely match. The Jedi is also not mentioned as being young, whereas Barriss is about the same age as Rafa, if not younger.
There is still some intentional ambiguity here, particularly as this arc was Ahsoka’s first appearance since The Wrong Jedi, so the memory of Barriss’ betrayal would still be fresh in the minds of viewers. However, if we suppose that Rafa is talking about Luminara, then our sympathy for Barriss can only increase: with such a guardian, what chance did she ever really have?
The alternative explanation, that Barriss was always heartless, and it was she who offered such cold comfort to the Martez sisters, is a) less interesting, and b) is contradicted by Tales, in which Barriss is shown to care for the common people, and is prepared to fight another Inquisitor when a child is threatened in her presence.
Tales of the Empire: The final word on Barriss?
This indirect anecdote from Rafa would be the last we would hear of Barriss for many real-life years, until her return in Tales of the Empire last year. This reprise was not so much long-awaited, as totally unexpected, given that she had seemingly been forgotten in the lengthy interim, and was never a particularly marketable heroine in the first place5.
Tales certainly does some good things with Barriss, though also some less good things. The episodes are beautiful pieces of animation, but extremely brief and thus, as usual, there is not enough space to realise the potential of the character.
To give a quick summary of what actually happens:
The first episode shows Barriss inducted into the Inquisitorius6. She is encouraged to use her anger to access the Dark Side, and eventually pitted against another ex-Jedi apprentice, who she kills in self-defence.
The second episode shows Barriss working with another Inquisitor to hunt down a surviving Jedi in a refugee settlement. Barriss’ approach is gentle and tactful, and she convinces a child to give her the information. Her fellow Inquisitor, Lyn, proceeds to go on a killing spree, because the other civilians had lied to protect the Jedi. Later, Barriss talks the Jedi into surrendering, only for Lyn to kill him anyway. She proceeds to throw Lyn off a cliff, and abandons the Inquisitorius (Barriss is great at quitting dramatically).
An older Barriss7 helps a Force-sensitive child to escape from the Empire. She encounters Lyn again and leads her into an icy cave. There, Lyn kills Barriss, and is redeemed by remorse.
I enjoyed Barriss’ characterisation in the first two episodes, because it was very consistent with the more layered and interesting interpretation of the character. While no longer a Jedi, Barriss clearly continues to embody the better Jedi virtues, and is true to the previously stated ideals which had led her to reject the Order (and, implicitly, Luminara).
In the first episode, she is reluctant to attack an unarmed opponent, and only kills her fellow apprentice in self-defence. In the second, she justifies her work for the Empire as a necessary evil, causes no unnecessary bloodshed, and clearly has sympathy for the people in the refugee settlement. This is valuable context for understanding the character, confirming that Barriss truly cared about the people of the Republic (/Empire), and was a genuine if ruthless idealist, as opposed to the moustache-twirling dark-sider suggested by some of The Wrong Jedi’s weaker scenes. She also shows intelligence and humanity in her interaction with the refugee child, as well as the young Jedi, making her basically the only Imperial other than Thrawn to employ such dastardly devices as tact, subtlety and common sense.
Where it starts to go wrong is Barriss’ redemption, because it is not framed simply as ‘she’s good now,’ but as ‘she’s good AND a Jedi again now.’ She says it herself when she turns on Lyn:
Then you have one Jedi left to deal with.
In the final episode, she speaks about her time with Luminara and the Jedi in a cloyingly nostalgic and idealising way, effectively retconning all of the off-screen conflict and angst that was so heavily implied by the Geonosis Arc and The Wrong Jedi. Barriss trivialises her own character development, simply saying that:
A darkness took me.
I find this to be a very reductive and unsatisfying read of what happened to Barriss, and how and why her beliefs changed during the Clone Wars. Sadly, Star Wars (particularly in the Disney era) is averse to nuance: everything must be a simplistic good and evil story, in which the Jedi and Republic are good by definition,8 and the only deeper message is that you should buy more Star Wars toys.9
This over-simplification is not even consistent with what Tales shows us: elsewhere, it was made clear that Barriss continued to hold anti-Jedi views even as a reluctant follower of the Empire, telling the young Jedi that:
[The Jedi] paid for their hubris, but you don’t have to.
This actually sounds like something The Wrong Jedi-era Barriss would have thought and said, but in the very same scene she declares herself to be a Jedi again. It’s disappointing, and a definite downgrade even from the slightly-incoherent version of the character we saw previously.
Barriss’ death also leaves something to be desired. Of course, Star Wars loves a redemptive death, and there’s nothing inherently wrong with such, but this one felt anticlimactic, and only served to bring about the redemption of Lyn, a character none of us know or care about.10 Lyn’s redemption comes out of nowhere, does not feel deserved or even explicable, and I doubt it meant anything to anybody. Not a soul was watching those episodes for Lyn, and she’s frankly an embarrassing character to die to.
On the other hand, at least now that Barriss is dead, Disney is unlikely to mishandle her any further: after all, she’s not popular, well-known, or marketable enough to be resurrected. So, perhaps we should be grateful that she will almost certainly be allowed to rest in peace, her aura almost intact. That’s more than can be said for anyone named Skywalker, or anyone related to Jango Fett.
Closing thoughts
Barriss’ send-off wasn’t ideal, and even her dramatic peak was less than it could have been, yet she still outperforms many a Glup Shitto in terms of her pivotal role in The Clone Wars, the wealth of subtext and symbolism in her character, and the sheer potential that she had.
In a way, it is good that she was used so sparingly, and that any questions and conjectures will be left unresolved. If there’s one thing that Star Wars has taught us, it’s that the impact of a character is often inversely proportionate to their screentime, and Barriss was handled skillfully enough to make a strong impression in very few episodes.
Like the best antivillains, she is a creature of contradictions: pious and iconoclastic, gentle and ruthless, remorseful and unapologetic. She is gone, but she is worth remembering, and remembering fondly.
A lot of people disliked it, or at least felt it overstayed its welcome. It does a little, but it’s far from the worst Clone Wars story.
In The Wrong Jedi, Barriss’ key story, Anakin and Ahsoka are surprised to see the poverty one of their Temple’s workers lived in - they had simply assumed that their workers were fairly paid.
This is reinforced by Dooku’s Tales of the Jedi episodes, which explicitly framed the Jedi as stooges of a corrupt Senate and enforcers of an unjust oligarchy. So, per those episodes, Barriss had a point.
And of course, Palpatine’s office as Chancellor has a separate building, a very tall and spindly tower rising far above the Senate.
Slightly-autistic hijabi Kaczynski with religious trauma is a fairly niche archetype.
Ex-Jedi who are trained to hunt down the remaining Jedi. They’re not very good at it.
Now living alone in a hut in the wilderness; she’s not beating the Unabomber allegations.
You just have to ignore the slave army and the numerous feudal planets that make up this ‘democratic’ union, and ignore that it’s a hellish hyper-capitalist oligarchy, except in the episodes where they specifically highlight those points. It’s a mess.
Discussed previously here, where I broke down the long tradition of anti-Jedi narratives prior to the Disney era, and the conflict between these more complex narratives and Star Wars as a commercial entity.
Lyn was in Obi-Wan Kenobi, which makes The Clone Wars look like The Brothers Karamazov. She wasn’t even an important character, just an irate background alien with bad prosthetics.
Excellent write up as usual. I feel that Star Wars is constantly approaching the sublime, but never quite able to get out of its own way to deliver on its own potential.
I’d love to get your take on Andor, which I think was a wonderful breath of fresh air for the franchise.