Obi-Wan Kenobi’s Clone Veteran Cameo hides a secret tragedy
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Obi-Wan Kenobi’s clone trooper cameo had a lot more meaning than most viewers realized, hiding a hidden tragedy affecting the clones.
The Obi-Wan Kenobi The clone’s cameo on the Disney+ TV show hid a deeper tragedy. Set a decade after the events of Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Siththe Obi-Wan Kenobi The Disney+ TV series forced the Jedi Master to leave his self-imposed exile on Tatooine when the Inquisitors kidnapped the young Princess Leia. Episode 2 saw Kenobi head to the planet Daiyu, where he was immediately confronted with a reminder of his past: a veteran clone trooper of the 501st Legion, now reduced to begging on the streets.
The clone cameo had a deeper meaning than many viewers realized. Since Kenobi had been holed up on a remote outer rim planet, this was probably the first time he had encountered a clone trooper since Order 66. He would have recognized the distinctive armor at a glance and he knew the odds were high this particular clone. The soldier had served under Anakin Skywalker when his former apprentice led the attack on the Jedi Temple. Obi-Wan never knew about the inhibitor chips, meaning he had no way of knowing that the soldier had no choice. And yet, for whatever the case, he chose to cash in on his fellow Clone Wars veteran. He felt sympathy, recognizing that they had both been brought down by the Empire.
Even beyond Obi-Wan’s pathos in the face of trauma, however, the clone trooper’s cameo also hid a deeper tragedy. As Lucasfilm notes in an official trivia gallery: “Temeura Morrison’s cameo as a veteran of the 501st Clone Battalion shows not only a decade of abandonment and despair, but also a continuous acceleration of growth encoded in the clone’s biology. This genetic manipulation makes him seem distant [older] than its 20 chronological years suggest.“Clone aging underscores the tragedy of the Clone Wars. Technically, the clones won the war; the Separatist army was defeated, and Order 66 meant that they were the ones who overthrew the Jedi. And yet, for all that. it’s the case, they were just pawns of the new emperor.
The aging of the Clone Troopers is a secret Star Wars tragedy
After the Clone Wars, the Empire quickly stopped using clones, instead turning to a massive galaxy-wide recruiting initiative, and it is likely that artificially enhanced aging was one of the reasons for the decision. Clones were expensive to produce and would not remain viable for long. Even worse (from Palpatine’s point of view), some clones rebelled against Order 66; Star Wars: The Bad Batch Season 1 further suggested that the inhibitor chips’ influence degraded over time, potentially making them even more unreliable.
It always seemed odd that so few clone troopers were active in the Rebel Alliance. Obi-Wan Kenobi episode 2 serves to remind viewers why this is so; because the clones aged incredibly quickly and few would have survived to the time of the Galactic Civil War. Tragically, this accelerated aging could explain why the Empire felt so comfortable leaving them out; they knew the clones would soon disappear, eliminating a potential source of well-trained rebels. And so the largest army in the history of War of the galaxies it disappeared in just decades, with only a few tragic signs of the kind to be seen Obi-Wan Kenobi.
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