When Jedi Were Totally Okay With Using Force Lightning

Becoming a Jedi is one of the most potent fantasies Star Wars games can offer—the power of a lightsaber, the greater power of the Force itself. It is, indeed, a fantasy that we’ve gotten to turn to more than any other in Star Wars‘ long gaming history. But with that fantasy has come a view of the Force that, over the years, has just as often bled into the narrative of Star Wars itself: a view of the energy field as disparate powers, fenced off in light and dark, tiered and codified because, well, that works in a video game. It works less well in a spiritual and narrative sense, which is why sometimes you get the wild instance of a Jedi that’s totally fine with zapping lightning out their fingers and frazzling people… as long as it has a different name.

I’ve been thinking about this recently thanks to the fact that, last week, it was announced that the classic hack-and-slash Phantom Menace game Jedi Power Battles was getting an updated re-release early next year, 25 years after it became the first Expanded Universe material to introduce us to a “Light Side version” of Force Lightning. In Power Battles—created with a view of the Jedi Order in the prequel era that had yet to be completely defined by the arrival of Phantom Menace on the big screen—”Electric Judgment” was an ability exclusively used by Jedi Master Plo Koon. For all intents and purposes, it was simply Force Lightning But Good: Plo shot jolts of golden electric energy from his hands, using it to disable the majority-droid foes you faced down across the game’s various levels.

It marked the first time we had explicitly observed a Jedi use a power that, up to this point, we had only seen Emperor Palpatine use to horrifically torture Luke during Return of the Jedi. But ever since, the Expanded Universe kept finding ways to use it, and justify such a harmful use of the Force as something that aligned with what would become more codified over the years as the Jedi Order’s moral viewpoint. In some interpretations, the ability was treated as a forbidden technique among several generations of Jedi, fearing that its root in a desire to injure, fatally or otherwise, was inherently of the dark side. Electric Judgment would be more specifically refined as an ability pioneered by Plo Koon himself: the reference book Jedi vs. Sith: The Essential Guide to the Force features a description of a mission where the Jedi Master inadvertently shot lightning from his hands to incapacitate a criminal during a hostage situation. After reporting the outburst to the Jedi Council and meditating on his feelings, telling them that he had felt no negative emotions when the ability occurred, nor did he express a desire to kill the criminal in the process, Plo was given permission to develop and utilize the ability and record his experience with it for the Order.

In later EU stories, Electric Judgment would give way to Emerald Lightning, a more generalized version of the ability that, despite the name, could manifest into multiple different colors (save for the white-blue of Force Lightning, of course). With it and its increasing use in the New Jedi Order era of EU material came multiple applications, typically offensive ones like those associated with Electric Judgment, but also defensive applications, like storm shields, or a mass-stunning tool. But for the most part, it remained the same: a power that was eerily similar to one used by the Jedi’s dark foils, but only came from use with noble intentions of justice, rather than anger and hatred.

Was that enough to justify a classically “Sith” power being wielded in the name of good? Well, it depends. The gamification of the Force as a toolkit that got us to Electric Judgement in the first place is also the one that gives us this codified view of Force “abilities” that could be delineated as light and dark, as well. What is inherently light-natured about dominating another sentient being’s mind, even if just for a moment with a Jedi mind trick? What is more explicitly aggressive and violent about using lightning to incapacitate a foe over pushing them with enough kinetic force to send them flying to the ground? Is telekinesis “dark” because it has an offensive application, even though we see Jedi use it all the time?

The Force as we really see it in the movies, especially in the original trilogy, is—and more often should be seen as—an energy that manifests in intent and the nuance of context. There is no explicit idea of any one action with the Force being dark-or-light-side coded, and that you can cross over like selecting a different skill tree in a video game. It’s about the emotions the user is feeling when they’re tapping into the Force, how they wield and apply it—being either of the light or the dark is about how the user wields this general power, rather than aspects of the power itself being inherently either or. This broader understanding of the Force, beyond the dichotomy of what we would come to understand as Jedi and Sith across the standardization of those factions in the EU and the prequels era, has become somewhat resurgent again in contemporary Star Wars, which a franchise more willing to question what it means to wield the Force, and to wield the names “Jedi” and “Sith” in the first place, as well as broadly question the motivations of these factions in material like Ahsoka or The Acolyte.

Perhaps with that perspective’s resurgence, with it we can see less of a gamified view of Star Wars‘ spiritual core. The Force is bigger and broader than it could ever be truly encapsulated by two schools of ideological thought—it binds all living things, regardless of their sensitivity to it. As the franchise ponders its future—uncertain or otherwise as it is at the moment, one that at least currently intends to consider what it will mean for a hero to try and rebuild the Jedi Order for a third time on-screen—maybe we do need a reminder of Electric Judgment’s peculiar place in the stars, and have it change our view of the Force as it did that first time, nearly 25 years ago.

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