The Death That Didn’t Save Anyone

Jar Jar Binks is one of the most straightforwardly terrible ideas in franchise history. Not flawed-but-interesting bad, the way some prequel choices are—just wrong, in every direction, at every level. Wrong as a character concept, wrong as comic relief, wrong in delivery, wrong in proportion to everything around him. The hatred he generated wasn’t hyperbole.

So when footage emerged showing that Star Wars: Episode I—The Phantom Menace had originally included a scene in which Jar Jar dies, the reaction was brief relief followed by the bitter realization that the scene had been cut. But the story gets better, or worse: the death scene was cut from inside a survival scene. Jar Jar was going to live through something, and then die during that living, and then both scenes were removed from the film entirely. The version of Jar Jar that finally died in Episode I exists only as footage that never made it to any audience—excised from a life that didn’t make it either.

The meta-absurdity feels right, somehow. Even in the editing room, the universe couldn’t commit to putting him out of his misery.