Dooku Was Right (Mostly)

When compared to its contemporary counterpart, Tales of the Jedi isn't needed to watch Star Wars. The Jedi are bad and Count Dooku was right to leave the Order.

Dooku should have become a Darth Vader. Tales of the Jedi doesn't do a good job of explaining how he went from ex-Jedi to a man who would kill Yaddle. Many flaws of the Jedi system have been shown by the Star Wars franchise, and why characters like Dooku, Ahsoka, and several of the Jedi who became Sith Inquisitors would find it irretrievably broken.

The first two episodes of Dooku's Tales, "Justice" and "Choices" are set before he left the Jedi and became the new Count of Seranno. Both episodes feature corrupt senators who exploit and abuse their people, but Dooku wasn't sent to help them. He was sent to rescue the Senator's son who was kidnapped to protest their abuse, but against the instructions of the Jedi High Council, he was sent to retrieve the body of a murdered Jedi.

Dooku tells one of the senators that they serve the people of the republic, but that is clearly not the case. Mace Windu makes it clear in "Choices" that they shouldn't investigate their fellow Jedi's murder because they're ignoring problems that are getting their members killed.

It is just one of many times the Jedi ignore problems under their noses. The Jedi were able to transform the Republic into a totalitarian Empire because of their inability to detect the rise of the Sith. In the third Dooku episode of Tales, "The Sith Lord," Qui-Gon Jinn tells his former Master that he encountered a Sith Lord. The Jedi High Council doesn't want to raise an alarm that the most evil force in the universe has returned. It costs many people throughout the universe their lives because of willfulIgnorance.

This happens many times in the novel Dooku: Lost Jedi. The council was warned of the sudden influx of Sith artifacts that seemed to be returning to the galaxy. When Dooku's friend and fellow Jedi Sifo-Dyas has a premonition of the destruction of the agricultural world of Protobranch, Yoda and Council forbid them from heading there to mitigate the destruction.

The problem with the Jedi was summed up by Dooku in the novelization of The Clone Wars.

There is a problem with the Jedi Order. It's not possible for a person to wield that kind of power for a long time without becoming corrupt. He doesn't know that it's overtaken him and he doesn't know why we're not acting to stop this. You don't notice the smell anymore when you live alongside corruption.

The problem with Star Wars is that it knows the Jedi are bad, but doesn't have the courage to admit it. In The Last Jedi, we see how the Jedi have failed, but only two people seem to realize that the Jedi are a broken institution.

It's time for the Jedi Order to stop.

It's time for you to pass on what you've learned. There's strength. There is a certain level of mastery. Weakness, folly, and failure are also included. Failure most of the time. Failure is the greatest teacher of all time. We are what they grow past. It's the true burden of all masters.

The Jedi order has failed harder than any other, from The Phantom Menace to the moment of fear and weakness that sent him to the Dark Side. The Jedi were never wrong to serve politicians over people, to ignore injustice like slavery, or to deny its followers the freedom to form attachment. If Anakin did not have to hide his marriage to Padmé, how much of the Empire would have been spared? If his attachment to his father didn't bring him back to the Light, how long would the Empire last?

Dooku became disillusioned with the Jedi and left the order. It's a bad habit for Star Wars to fall to the Dark Side if they find fault with the Jedi. Despite the constrictions placed upon him in Tales of the Jedi and Jedi Lost, Dooku still wants to do right. The Grand Inquisitor, the Fifth Brother, the Sixth Brother, the Seventh Sister, and the Tenth Brother are all former Jedi who doubted their order. That is a large group of people.

Ahsoka was wrongly accused of bombing the Jedi Temple and was the only main character who knew the Jedi were terrible.

Count Dooku knew before anyone else that the Jedi Order was broken and that he couldn't change it. Is it possible that he over-corrected and ended up killing a lot of people? Definitely. That doesn't mean he was right about Jedi.

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