SPOILER THREAD - The Last Jedi

[SharkyMcShark]

Yoda’s fight with Palestine was very ordinary. I vaguely recall reading that the destruction of the Jedi order only hours before ruined him mentally and emotionally and he could not wield his Sabre to i his full potential.

That and i think they wanted to show Palestine as being a supremely powerful force user as well as master manipulator...

Or we are all over thinking this and Lucas and the other Star Wars writers have been given too much credit post film release!

I did do several laughs.

I guess the writers didn't have much room to move with things like that, since Palpatine had to survive to the Original Series, but fans (and the movie studio) would have wanted to see a Yoda V Palpatine battle at some point during the prequel trilogy.
The prequels had to flesh out or explain things only briefly mentioned or implied during the original trilogy, while making sure they don't end up contradicting or preventing anything that already happened in Ep 4-6.
I think it might have made more sense to have Yoda go straight into hiding when Order 66 was initiated, sacrificing the action scene of his confrontation with Palpatine, whom Yoda should have easily defeated.
Obi Wan could have gone to the Jedi Temple on his own, to find out about Anakin before going after him on Mustafa. After Order 66 occurred, Yoda's inclusion on-screen was pretty much unnecessary from that point on.

The way Yoda was handled in episodes 2 and 3 suggests to me that George Lucas on a really basic level fundamentally misunderstands the roles and purposes of characters in his films.

The brilliance of Yoda, as we were introduced to him in ESB and later saw in ROTJ, was that the audience was shown and literally directly told that to be a great Jedi you didn't have to be a devil-may-care muscly swashbuckling physical warrior type.

The greatest use of the Force seen in the released films to that point, being the X-Wing lifted out of the swamp, was accomplished by a strange two foot tall frog goblin thing who didn't have a lightsaber, walked with a pronounced limp, and had no desire to actively join the righteous fight against the Empire despite his power.

Then you had the Emperor set up as a fantastic counterpoint to that. The most powerful evil in the galaxy was a frail old man with a walking stick and no light saber - the very antithesis to the physically imposing machine-like Darth Vader.

The way that these beacons of the light and dark were set up communicated some very important things about what it meant to be an extremely powerful Jedi or Sith. Physical strength, lightsaber training, and combat mastery were at the end of the day negligible. It ties in incredibly well with the end of ROTJ, where Luke helps bring about the end of the Sith by laying down his saber and refusing to give in to the urge to fight.

But, hang on a minute, suddenly its the early 2000s and Early 2000s Quality CGI That Will Age Terribly (patent pending) is a thing! Everyone gets a saber! Let's have everyone doing backflips!

Lucas literally said in one of the commentaries for ESB that if they'd had the technology in the 1980s to make it work that he'd have had Yoda running alongside Luke doing backflips and leaping over rocks, instead of riding in his backpack. George Lucas doesn't understand his own characters.

PS: If Force Ghosts don't interact with their environment why does Obi-Wan sit down on the log in Jedi, do ghosts get tired?

There's an interesting fan theory floating around that I heard posited by Sam Witwer (has done extensive Star Wars voice work) that as Luke becomes more attuned to the Light side in the OT that he's better able to view and interact with Obi Wan's ghost - in ANH it's just a voice, in ESB it's transparent, and in ROTJ it's almost solid with an aura, and can physically interact with things like the log.