Ahsoka Tano’s Jedi rival in Star Wars: The Clone Wars, Barriss Offee, fulfilled a long-term plan that was at one point considered for the loathsome villain, General Pong Krell. Barriss Offee was significantly reimagined from her Legends continuity counterpart in The Clone Wars, with the canon series establishing her as being Ahsoka’s age (rather than Anakin’s age) and lacking her specialty in Force healing. Canon’s version of Offee also fell to the dark side and betrays the Republic, similar to Pong Krell, though the impact of the latter’s treachery would have been far more shocking if The Clone Wars stuck to its original plan.
Pong Krell was introduced in The Clone Wars season 4 as a Jedi General who showed contempt for Clone Troopers dismissing and dehumanizing them as he callously sent his soldiers on suicidal maneuvers that get numerous Clones killed. For most of the four-episode Umbara arc, Krell appeared to simply be a Jedi who failed to recognize the humanity of the Clone Troopers, but by the final episode, his malice was made clear. In addition to harboring a hatred of Clones, Krell had fallen to the dark side and was intentionally sabotaging the Republic war effort on Umbara as part of a plan to join the Separatist Alliance.
According to Dave Filoni, Krell was initially going to be a heroic Jedi General who appeared throughout The Clone Wars season 4. Krell’s fall from grace would be shown slowly and gradually, culminating in the Umbara arc. Filoni decided against this, however, stating that he wished to avoid creating a character that audiences would grow fond of only to turn them evil later. By making Barriss Offee a villain in The Clone Wars season 5, Filoni took a character who Star Wars fans had appreciated since before the 2008 series and turned her evil, making her fall to the dark side far worse for some fans than Krell’s would have been.
Barriss Offee had a storied history in the Legends timeline before The Clone Wars reimagined her. The Mirialan Jedi was featured prominently in Alan Dean Foster’s The Approaching Storm as a co-protagonist alongside Anakin Skywalker, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and Luminara Unduli. Offee also starred in the MedStar duology of novels and several Legends-era webcomics, which revealed that by the end of the war, Offee had become a Jedi Knight and was training a padawan learner, Zonder. Offee ultimately died during Order 66 on Felucia.
Barriss Offee’s many Legends-era stories made her a fan-favorite Jedi among Star Wars fans, so rewriting her to be a traitor who murders Clone Troopers and civilians was a disappointing twist for some Star Wars fans. Dave Filoni, unfortunately, passed on making Krell a more nuanced character by introducing him as already having fallen to the dark side. The Barriss Offee shown in The Clone Wars was a significantly different character from the Legends-era Offee, contributing to some The Clone Wars fans hand-waving the 2008 series as being an exclusively canon-timeline property.
Ideally, a different Jedi, perhaps one who’d been created for the 2008 Clone Wars series, would have fallen to the dark side and perpetrated the Jedi Temple bombing in season 5. Furthermore, introducing Krell earlier in the show and having him slowly fall to the dark side would have added to the already-complex villain. However, characterizing a fan-favorite Jedi like Barriss Offee so differently from her previous appearances was one of the few mistakes that Star Wars: The Clone Wars made.
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