3. We Knew Yoda Had It In Him... Bring On The Jedi!
As talked about in the previous article, one of the biggest factors the prequel trilogy gave us was the Jedi in their prime. Attack of the Clones gave us a much better glimpse of the sort of thing we all dreamed of as children and even though there was still a fair bit of bad decision making by the order, all was forgiven when they rocked up for the Battle of Geonosis. Of course we finally got to see Yoda doing the things we all secretly knew he could. For one, seeing him with a lightsaber was awesome but more so his ability to withstand whatever a Sith threw at him was good to see. Yoda always told Luke about how power The Force was and in Episode II we truly got to see what he meant. In addition to being a visual spectacle, Episode II also let us know that the Jedi were not superheroes and given an overwhelming number of enemies they can be defeated. We begin to see how the Jedi ranks were reduced in the run up to the Emperor taking over the galaxy and Geonosis became the blueprint of what would follow in the Clone Wars (an event that would remain unseen until the animated series rolled around after Revenge of the the Sith).. Additionally because the Jedi now have an army of clones behind them, an army no one knew about until their reveal that sparked the Clone Wars, the people of the galaxys view of the Jedi probably shifted. No longer were they the spiritual negotiators that would fix the unfixable problems in the galaxy but instead they were soldiers, fighting a war that the entire galaxy had to decide what side they wanted to fall on. I wont go too far into the ins and outs of this and those who want more need look no further than the ever awesome Clone Wars animated TV series but make no mistake the Clone Wars forever changed how the Jedi were seen by the people of the Galaxy and kept the internal struggles of the Jedi way under pressure as well. Of course, well go into the fallout of all that in the next article on Episode III.