A while back I blogged about my quest with the Ethereal Spirit on Mustafar (in "Galaxies"). The spirit, of course, is Obi-Wan Kenobi, and he haunts Mustafar, giving the miners a sense of peace and tranquility.*

The other night I decided to visit him, just to see how he's doing, so I went to the burning plains of Mustafar, meditated like a good Jedi, and then clicked on the mysterious holocron that summons the ethereal spirit.

Then I received this message: You have already completed the quest that the spirit set before you. What has been done cannot be undone, and you must live with the decisions you made during that journey.

Wow! I was floored. What a profound statement to find in a video game!

And how true is that? How true is that in our real lives? Life is a journey after all, and the decisions we make follow us throughout our days. Words cannot be taken back, actions cannot be undone. Decisions cannot be unmade.

In the Star Wars universe, our heroes and villains made decisions throughout the course of the Saga that set in motion amazing heroics, unthinkable calamities, seemingly miraculous rescues, and of course, redemptions.


But here is where I lose it. Here is where I discover my own inner, dark side. If it had been me on the second Death Star, with Vader down on the floor and the Emperor cackling in my ear, with all that power at my disposal...

I would have offed the both of them and been done with it. (No, I wouldn't haver taken over the Empire as my own, I'm too lazy for that sort of responsibility.) I probably would have twirled my lightsaber and did a little dance around their corpses, too.

So you're thinking, "We wouldn't have had a happy ending!" Well, why the heck not? Those two would still have been dead, Ewoks could still have played the rumba on the stormtrooper helmets, and the ethereal spirits could have partied at Qui-Gon's place.

But would Obi-Wan have been disappointed in me?



* That's an in-game painting, a rare item, called, appropriately enough, "Redemption"