Han Solo and Bespin

Let me throw this idea out there-

Training for various disciplines takes different amounts of time, obviously.
For a Catholic priest, it's 8 years.
For American Doctors, 8-9 years of higher education.
A black belt in Judo can be obtained in as little as 2 years.
Some certifications of EMTs can be trained in under 6 months.

What's clear is that Luke is not done with his training by the time he leaves for Bespin. What's not clear is how far away he is from completing it. Just watching the original films, one might think he could've been on Dagobah for a few weeks or months, and be relatively close to earning his rank in the lower echelons of the jedi. Maybe it takes 6 months to a year to train a Jedi, and that training continued once they had entered the order to advance to higher ranks.

Theravada Buddhists, for instance, can train postulates in as little as a year. In an additional year, these postulates can become novice monks, who then can train for more time to further advance themselves.

NOW- that being said, it only works with the original trilogy in mind. With the prequels, we see an incredibly complex Jedi training that requires as long as 13 years- and that's before the trainee even becomes a padawan! That sounds crazy, but it's not that far off from the 12-13 years of education students receive in the US before entering higher education. The difference is, padawans are still receiving very specialized Jedi training, and Luke would've had to speed through that, if he even got it at all.

Padawans retain that rank for roughly a decade, as well. That's a little harder to reconcile. Not only is Luke not getting the training he would've received to lay the base as a youngling, but there's no way he got close to a decade's worth of training on Dagobah.

So- whether or not you like the prequels (I think they have some redeeming qualities, but I don't love them), I think it's pretty clear that they cause some significant issues with how Luke's training is perceived.

 

and its not like irl when you can spot the headlights in the rear view mirror.

 

I don’t know. If you argue that Luke, who has an uncommonly high communion with the Force, is being privately tutored by a master with a millennia’s worth of experience under his belt, it isn’t that difficult to believe he could make some impressive leaps in development. If a child prodigy were to be solely instructed by a world renowned educator, odds are that kid would advance a hell of a lot quicker than the average student.

The two methodologies are just so wildly different though. It’s really hard for me to compare them. One was a formalized curriculum centered around teaching students what they’d need to know to be effective Republic peace keepers - probably involved a good deal more than just spoon bending. The other was a one-on-one live-in crash course that dealt with nothing but. There’s plenty of wiggle room there for me to rationalize a believable consistency.

 

Oh there's wiggle room, to be sure. But let's say that we go to the far extreme end of the spectrum, and say that Luke was on Dagobah for an entire year (must've had some pretty significant food stores in the Falcon, and it doesn't look like they got Cabin Fever too bad). Even then, even with that huge stretch of time and logic, Luke is only training for about 5% of the time a prospective Jedi would've had before the Empire.

It's conceivable that Luke's raw talent and Yoda's wisdom really streamlined this process. All I'm saying is that it was far more believable and required less suspension of disbelief when Jedi training wasn't specifically spelled out to take 2 full decades. But hey, I'm probably over-analyzing things.

 

I was never in love with the idea that being a Jedi required you start training as an infant. Past the obvious ethical implications of that, it just didn’t seem necessary – unless you’re trying to validate why a nine year old would be 'too old' that is Also, that there was a genetic requisite introduced really rubbed me the wrong way too. That’s a complaint for another time though.

Regardless, I think all the bases are adequately covered: Luke already knew surface level concepts before getting to Dagobah; Is naturally gifted; Was being directly guided by the most knowledgeable source we know of; Got an abridged version of Jedi 101; Ended his training before completion.

I don’t disagree with your point at all. I choose to see that aspect as making Luke all that more exceptional in retrospect though. He didn't learn everything there was to know about being a Jedi of the Old Republic tradition. But he got enough to get the job done in his own way.

Well, yeah, I thought that’s what we do here

 

WHY DOES CLOUD CITY EVEN HAVE A TORTURE CHAMBER???

 

Not from personal experience - promise - but any room can be a torture chamber . . . if you try hard enough.

 

It didn't, it had a room with a scan grid in it. But just like Vader improvised the carbon freezing chamber for freezing a human, he improvised the scan grid as a torture device. He's kind of a d-bag that way.

As for the stuff about it being unforgivable for Han to allow himself to be followed, relax. I forget what the canon explanation even is, if Boba Fett actually followed him, "plotted his trajectory" and went ahead or what. Even if he were followed it's not like he was driving in a car and didn't notice the headlights behind him. They didn't give us an explanation but it's Star Wars, and if they wanted to they could feed us a line about sensor shadows, jamming devices or any of the other ways people have managed to follow ships in the canon.

 

For Han, it was one visit too many.