Anakin was... intense.

If you are the last person in the western world who does not know who Anakin Skywalker is, yet plans to watch all of Star Wars, be warned that there are spoilers.

“Anakin was… intense,” said Huyang, the droid who taught Jedi how to build light sabers for about a thousand years, to Sabine when she asked what Anakin was like.

Ahsoka at one point stopped training Sabine because she was afraid that if Sabine learned to use her full powers, she would become dangerous. We learn this piece of history from Huyang as well, when Ezra asks (after having been in exile for a very long time), “What happened between those two?”

Join me in a thought experiment (all ten of you who have watched enough Star Wars to get this. The others, please stay with me, I’ll analyze some Billy Joel at the end.)

What if Sabine had been Anakin’s padawan?

Sabine is intense. Sabine is angry. Her family was killed on the Night of a Thousand Tears. She is a Mandalorian. They are a military people who bring up their children to be warriors.

We don’t really know who Anakin was. I am learning more as I work my way through Clone Wars. If you haven’t watched the animated series, don’t be put off by the fact that they are animated. You forget within five minutes that you’re not watching “real” actors on the screen.

We get to know young Ahsoka and grown-up Anakin in Clone Wars. We see Anakin’s incredible effectiveness as a general, along with some of his mistakes.

Ahsoka is always getting upset because people die in wars, and Anakin tries to explain to her that, well, people die in wars.

I think Anakin would have had a hard time ever adapting to a “normal” life, even though on some level that’s what he wanted with Padme. Can you imagine Anakin Skywalker taking out the trash? I can imagine Anakin parallel parking, but that’s just because I find parallel parking extremely hot. Weird. I know. I am attracted to people who can do things I can’t, and parallel park is one of them. I like statisticians too, though sometimes it is best if we remain just friends.

Anakin was intense, like pure fire. Anakin could have been a Targaryen, one of the early ones. Can’t you imagine Anakin as a dragon rider? He reminds me of the Targaryen who lost an eye but gained a dragon, learning to ride Vhagar, the only living dragon who flew to Weteros with Aegon. Vhagar was the sister of Visenya, Ageon’s warrior sister-wife whom my 2004 Subaru is named after.

Are you with me here? If so or if not, take a moment to share this with another Star Wars nerd.

If you watch the prequels, you see exactly how Anakin turned to the Dark Side. People he loved were brutally murdered. Anakin wanted to see order in the galaxy. He became a law and order conservative. Maybe you would be too if your mother was kidnapped and gradually tortured until she died.

Over time, we watch the New Republic try to go from being a rebellion to being a functional society. This is not easy. The lack of ability to enforce the laws gives rise to piracy and drug gang warfare. “Spice” they call it. Those who control the spice trade make a lot of money and kill a lot of people.

Now from a harm reduction perspective they should have just legalized spice, but I can only mix so many worlds and metaphors at once. Even I have a limit.

I think Anakin was right about a great many things. He knew how to fight and win. Where Anakin got lost was, if you ask me, when he put his faith in the wrong person: the Chancellor. Anakin never had a father, he left his mother young and returned to watch his mother die, and while he loved Padme, because they could not be public about their marriage, he could not have the kind of emotionally settled life that might have protected him from turning to the Dark Side.

It is not hard to see in his relationship with Padme how he is looking for the nuturing he once got from his mother. It is not hard to see how he is looking for a father figure, and Obi-Wan just isn’t it. Anakin had this overwhelming need for connection that both motivated him and proved to be his doom.

I wonder, if he had been able to marry Padme openly and raise their children, if he might never have turned to the Dark Side. Of course then we’d have a boring movie or no movie at all (though I’d watch Anakin and Padme love scenes all day and all night). While I will be the first to admit that married people confuse the hell out of me, there is a certain stability that comes from a very long term committed relationship, and Anakin and Padme were that once in a generation kind of love affair that I think could have stood the test of time.

Also, and I’ve given this a lot of thought: Padme was older than Anakin. Not by a lot, but seven years (I think) is a long time when you meet very young. Anakin needed a woman he looked up to, respected, was a bit afraid of and definitely worshipped.

It’s sad that the Chancellor used Anakin’s love for Padme as the final way to turn him.

This is where the Jedi pseudo-Buddhist code fails, I think. Trying not to be attached does not work. The Mandalorian code of solidarity and strong bonds “This is the Way” makes attachment to family, community and partners a functional way to build a society. It is a lot of what I admire about Jewish culture. I am not the first person to have noticed that Mandalorians are a lot like Israelis. (I wonder how much hate mail I’m going to get from that comment!)

I love Zen as a practice, and I took my jukai vows, but I do not consider myself a Buddhist. As I’ve thought of it, I am religiously more Jewish than anything else. When I go to Torah study at the synagogue or listen to the sermon, I find myself identifying much more than I do these days with the Christian stories. Maybe it’s the context, sure - at a time when I have felt rejected by and frightened by people who used to be friends and community, I find community in abundance in my synagogue and my worldwide family. I have no interest in detachment.

Anakin would have been a great general, and not Darth Vader, if he’d been able to see his mother live to a happy old age and settle down with his wife to raise the Jedi twins. But he had no way of knowing how his love for his mother and his wife could be turned against him, and through him, turned against all of humanity.

The Force is not a personal god. There is no Jesus figure with whom one may feel cosy. There is no father-figure god, no person to draw a picture of in Sunday school. There is power, but it is not a power that belongs to anyone. It’s not about moving rocks, though sometimes you need to move a few rocks.

A horrible aching lonely streak runs though Anakin’s entire life. Rey is the same. Ezra too, though Ezra finds community with the Ghost crew. Ezra may be the sanest of them all. What will happen to Ezra now that he’s back? Ezra is strong in the Force but he’s just not crazy like the rest of us. He had good parents who he knew loved him. He was great with cats. I imagine that he would make a great husband and father. But again, great husbands and fathers make for boring movies.

Someone who did not make a great husband, if you were to ask Christie Brinkley, was Billy Joel. But “Uptown Girl” has got to be the most classic of classic love stories where you just have to take a moment to rejoice in the moment when the unlikely pair gets together, even though you know it will end in disaster.

A lot of life is about enjoying the moment. And who knows, maybe it won’t end in disaster?

I’m open to possibilities.