Ok. Gonna follow a theme here.

Quote Originally Posted by Palanan View Post
So yet another round of supposedly wise and precognitive Jedi being caught flatfooted by the mysterious Sith just holds no appeal.
To be fair, stories about how the Jedi used their wisdom and foresight to consistently thwart evil plots against galactic peace before they got very far, would be mindnumbingly boring.

For any story involving the Jedi Order to be at all interesting, the threat has to be significant enough to matter for the story (threat to the Order and/or Republic as a whole) *and* is has to be perpetrated by people who can avoid/bypass/confuse the Jedi so they can do it in the first place.

So yeah. That pretty much means "sith or sith-like force users doing <evil things>". Or, you know, set it in a time when the Jedi Order isn't in power.

Quote Originally Posted by Errorname View Post
Do we need a story about a functional Jedi Order? The Order as fundamentally broken gets played a lot because it makes sense, both as a logical worldbuilding consequence of the Jedi's tenets and because it creates a lot more narrative friction
Excactly. We can asume that all the times when the Order worked perfectly, and maintained peace perfectly, and stopped threats perfectly, all happened, and happened most of the time, but we're just going to write stories about the relatively few times when they weren't able to do so.

These are stories about when the Jedi were *not* able to precognitively detect and prevent something major going on. Right? Otherwise, there is no story.

Quote Originally Posted by Peelee View Post
An organization that has never been functional and is fundamentally broken, yet somehow lasts thousands and thousands of years, does not seem to make any logical sense to me.
Because the only stories worth telling (in the time frame/setting in question) are the ones where the Jedi order failed in some way. We can either assume that they did fail constantly, but somehow managed to maintain their position, power, and the Republic for thousands of years anyway *or* we can assume that they were quite functional, and that their philosophies and approach generally worked well (it's not about perfection, it's being less imperfect than the alternative), and that we have a skewed view of things becuse we're only shown the very very very rare cases when their approach failed.


BTW. None of this is intended to be interpreted as an endorsement of the specific show we're talking about, or many other SW shows in the past, for that matter. You can still write total garbage even if I don't have an issue with the core assumptions of the setting itself. And there's certainly been plenty of that, and I have a bad feeling this might be in that category as well (for... reasons).

I guess the lesson from Die Hard is that big wealthy businesses should never lock their valuables in a vault anywhere, cause bad guys will just get to them anyway...

"Perfect" and "better than the alternative" are two very very different things. Most story/adventure plots are about when the latter runs into the cases where their lack of perfection causes problems. Complaining because the very thing that makes the story possible in the first place actually exists is kinda silly.

And, as a tie in to your comments about Andor and the ISB, that's a great example of this. Those guys are scary efficient at their jobs, and willing/empowered to go to lengths to maintain security, but a huge plot point is that they are not perfect. There are gaps. And there is a bureaucracy in place that makes even those who spot those gaps have to work around the system to do something about it. I actually found those scenes the smartest in the series, precisely because it shows this sort of process going on. And that's saying something, since the series itself was pretty darn high on the "smart-o-meter" IMO.