My airtight theory that Qui-Gon Jinn was evil
In 2008 I wrote a long, very serious forum post proving Qui-Gon Jinn was secretly a bad guy. It involves faked midi-chlorian counts, Yoda's crashing copy of Windows 3.1, and a body double retiring to Hawaii.
I love Star Wars. I want that on the record before I show you what I did to it in 2008.
One day I posted a theory to my forum, completely straight-faced, arguing that Qui-Gon Jinn, the wise old mentor from The Phantom Menace, was actually evil. Not misguided. Evil. A secret darksider running a long con. And then I built the most elaborate case a nineteen-year-old web developer could possibly build, which is to say I explained the entire Force using IT support metaphors.
The core of it: Qui-Gon faked Anakin’s famous midi-chlorian count.
He sends the test results via an un-encrypted signal from his PDA to the ship where then-Noob Obi-Wan sees the rating and trusts his master and prints the compiled source code but didn’t save the source, so there is no way for Yoda later on to check the code to make sure it wasn’t falsified.
When Yoda does go to verify it, the problem is, naturally, his computer:
His WIN 3.1 client that he has kept forever crashed because the compiled code was not valid… he deduces that he corrupted the data and didn’t want to be made fun of or docked pay for insubordination, so he decides to pass the data off, trusting Qui-Gon Jinn.
Yoda. A 900-year-old Jedi Master. Running an unpatched copy of Windows 3.1 and worried about getting docked pay. I had a whole worldview.
The finale is my favorite, because it solves a plot hole nobody asked about. If Qui-Gon was really a good guy, why doesn’t his Force ghost show up at the end of the saga? Easy. He never died:
While Obi-Wan is in the hole and Darth Maul is up there laughing, QG’s body was clearly replaced by a double. From here he vanishes on a habitual hiatus and moves to Earth or something and spends the rest of his days in Hawaii.
So according to nineteen-year-old me, the reason you never see Qui-Gon’s ghost is that he faked his own lightsaber death, swapped in a body double, and retired to Hawaii to watch the plan unfold. I signed the post off: “I love star wars to death, but I have always pondered this, how wrong am i, GO!”
Very wrong. Gloriously, confidently wrong. And I would defend the Windows 3.1 bit to this day.
(I never did shake the Star Wars thing. Years later I’d end up writing about an actual Star Wars pinball machine instead of a Star Wars conspiracy, which is probably growth.)