Luke Skywalker’s Jedi training was one of the highlights of both The Empire Strikes Back and the Star Wars trilogy as a whole, but why was Yoda so reluctant to train Luke at first? Yoda states several reasons, including Luke’s age and apparently incompatible personality traits as key reasons, but he quickly changes his mind after repeated insistence from Luke that he is ready for the grueling tutelage. Because of this, Yoda may have been testing Luke yet again. When examining everything we know about the Jedi Order, Yoda’s reasoning becomes more meaningful.
Yoda’s first scenes in The Empire Strikes Back gave Luke (and the audience) the impression that he was an eccentric and playfully goofy creature living on Dagobah, rather than a wizened Jedi Master and a great warrior. This was the first of many tests for Luke, in this case, testing his patience. Luke failed, acting dismissive of Yoda until learning his real identity. When he eventually begins training Luke, the aspiring Jedi fails to learn many more of Yoda’s lessons. These notably included facing his inner demons in the dark side cave, his faith in the Force when failing to lift his X-Wing from a swamp, and difficulty controlling his emotions when seeing visions of his friends being tortured. Luke made things worse in Yoda’s eyes by pausing his training prematurely to save them, despite knowing that it’s a trap laid by the Sith.
Yoda lists several specific reasons why he’s reluctant to train Luke. He’s impatient, angry, reckless, and constantly looking to the future at the expense of the present. In short: He felt Luke wasn’t ready. Yoda was the grandmaster of the fallen prequel-era Jedi Order and trained Jedi for centuries, with students typically beginning as young children. He saw too much of Anakin in the young adult, and he didn’t want to end up training the successor to Vader. With that in mind, why did Yoda change his mind so quickly? In all likelihood, this was yet another test of his, probing how seriously Luke would take the path ahead, and informing Luke how much he’d need to grow and change to become a true Jedi. Training one or both of Anakin’s children to defeat Vader was part of Obi-Wan and Yoda’s long-term plan to defeat the Sith and bring about the return of the Jedi.
By the time Luke returns to Dagobah to complete his training in Return of the Jedi, a sick and dying Yoda tells Luke that he doesn’t require any more training. In the time between his devastating defeat in Cloud City, Luke learned from his failures, becoming more patient, honing his fighting skills, and constructing his own lightsaber (a vital rite of passage for a Jedi). All that’s left for him to become a Jedi is to kill Vader. Luke refuses, using his attachment to his father to help redeem him, proving that he can both resist the temptation of the dark side and rise above the flawed teachings of the old Jedi Order.
Luke’s choices in Return of the Jedi prove that Yoda and Obi-Wan were wise to train him as a Jedi. In Legends, he goes even further, continuing to grow (albeit with plenty more failures and lessons learned) and establishing the New Jedi Order with far more emotionally healthy philosophies than what’s seen in the Star Wars films. Luke, unfortunately, doesn’t learn from all his failures at first, though, reestablishing the Jedi Order with its flaws intact, leading to its near-destruction and necessitating one last lesson from Yoda at the end of his life.
- Rogue Squadron (2023)Release date: Dec 22, 2023
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