Wow he did say that didn't he.
Also in thinking of all the Jedi channeling their power through Rey that means that each Jedi that we watched die on screen from Qui Gon to Mace to Ben got to have a direct hand in putting him down. A true comeuppance. You know Mace in particular must have enjoyed that, lol.
I also watched ESB again this week with the full events of the ST in mind and even though it pertains only to TLJ and not TROS it's now very easy to recontextualize the "future" that Yoda saw in ESB.
"If you end your training now, if you choose the quick and easy path as Vader did, you will become an agent of evil." Well we never saw Luke become an agent of evil so it turned out that Yoda was wrong. Or was he? Perhaps he saw a butterfly effect of Luke prematurely running off to Cloud City that ended with this:
And even though that moment lasted only a split second it was long enough for him to be a true instrument of Palpatine in giving Ben that final push that he needed. Yoda saw that, didn't really understand the context at the time, and tried to warn Luke away from it.
Palpatine's ultimate revenge. He knew that Luke defeated him with the help of his family so in order to properly return he'd need to separate Luke from his family while simultaneously creating his own, flipping the script (no pun intended) to ensure victory.
And a-dev if you're reading I did think of something else pretty major while watching ESB that relates directly to your feeling that the ST doesn't justify its own existence. And to that I'll offer this: In the 90's Star Wars Insider interviewed Irvin Kershner who stated that he thought that one SW film was enough for him to direct and that he'd set the characters up enough to continue on in the Saga without him which is why he declined George's offer to direct ROTJ. A decision he later regretted when he saw how "easy" their challenges in ROTJ were and how the heroes seemingly "coasted through every encounter."
You see ESB was supposed to be the beginning of a long, hard road to victory. A victory that wouldn't truly come until *four films* later. And I get having grown up with ROTJ being the feel good light hearted victory movie and liking that everything wrapped up super clean with a nice little ribbon on top. But that wasn't the planned path when ESB was made. I mean nothing about ESB (if you can try to ignore knowledge of ROTJ) suggests that the Rebels are just one quick battle away from winning the entire war.
But a tri-level battle at Endor, then years of clean up (as chronicled now in Mando) before one last resurgence of true evil that forces almost every main hero to face their greatest fears, make the ultimate sacrifices, while still in the end achieving ultimate sustainable victory does for me finally feel like a journey worthy of the one that began in ESB. Yes ANH was the true beginning of course but ESB was when **** got real.
In a way I'm glad that there was such a long gap between the OT and the ST now because if they stuck with the three years between films and Episode VII came out in 1986 and then you had Han or other main characters dying then it'd just feel like none of them ever got a break from all the grueling battles. So I like that as Luke says in TLJ "for years there was balance" where we can assume that all the warm fuzzies of that Endor celebration did continue for years on end before things got tough again with Ben Solo's turning.
