This illumination of Jedi fascism really speaks to my Lucas hatred, which cranked up a Grand Canyon-sized notch after the completion of the Star Wars sextology.

The Jedi are, of course, a conflicted and ham-handed crockpot recipe of reverse metaphors (what other kind from Lucas?). The Jedi are simultaneously the upper class (the rich, academia, the intelligentsia, the aristocracy, take your pick), guns, nuclear weapons, Christianity (at any point in history)–or, what we’re supposed to infer, the reverse: all these things are manifestations of the Jedi. It’s the ultimate socio-politico-conspiracy theory mash-up: if you outlaw the Jedi the only way to win is not to play the Jedi card behind the curtain.

It’s no coincidence that all these things happened “a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away” and not in the traditional sci-fi milieu of a distant future. We’re supposed to accept this as a kind of vignette of an alternate origin story. The history of the Jedi is the history we are continuously reliving here on planet Earth. Except it’s not. It’s cheesy sci-fi that pretends to sagacity and leaves itself so open to interpretation (Nostradamus anyone? The Bible?!) that it can be squished into any historical or current events mold. Or maybe it’s all just the story of a wandering Jew (R2D2?), who knows.

This also explains why the mysterious missing three episodes were never made or even outlined–it’s hard to imagine a more satisfying (or pat) ending than the effective extinction of the Jedi. Creating an Episode VII would ruin the happy ending; it would mean admitting that peace cannot be maintained indefinitely, that evil cannot be extinguished from the soul of humanity, that there is no post-power utopia.