What Happened to Reva in Her Childhood to Make Her Join the Dark Side?

The Obi-Wan Kenobi miniseries has only recently premiered, and while we have already seen both Obi-Wan Kenobi and Darth Vader make proper appearances, we also had the opportunity to analyze and explore other characters, like Reva, the Third Sister. Now, we have already seen that Reva is a very ambitious character and that she is ready to betray her superiors to fulfill her ambition of becoming the Grand Inquisitor, but what about her past? In this article, we are going to tell you what happened to Reva during her childhood to make her join the Dark Side of the Force.

At this moment, we know very little about Reva’s childhood. She was a very young Jedi when she was taken in by the Sith and was probably subjected to conditioning like the other Inquisitors in order to join them. Whether she holds some personal grudge against the Jedi is, as of this moment, unknown. We only know the general idea behind her story.

This article is going to be dedicated to Inquisitor Reva in the Star Wars universe. At this moment, we have to say that we know very little about her history, as she is an original character whose story is going to evolve over the remaining episodes, but we are going to give you as much as we can under the current circumstances, i.e., with the information we have.

What happened to Reva in her childhood to make her join the Inquisitors?

The female human Reva, who later became the Third Sister, was a member of the Jedi Order, being Force-sensitive. In the Order, she was trained in the basics of lightsaber combat and Force control. However, by the time of Order 66 at the end of the Clone Wars, she had already fallen to the dark side of the Force and became part of the Inquisitory project created by the new Emperor Palpatine.

Like the other Inquisitors, the Third Sister was tasked with hunting down surviving Jedi who might pose a threat to the rule of the Empire. At an unknown point in time, she became obsessed with capturing Jedi Master Obi-Wan Kenobi, though her wish was not approved by the Inquisitor. Along with the Third Brother, little was known about her activities in the Inquisitory.

The two paragraphs we have written out for you are everything we know about Reva’s history. The fourth episode of Obi-Wan Kenobi has hinted that there is some story that explains her hatred towards the Jedi, but we don’t know anything at this moment. Namely, there are two possible explanations. The first one suggests that Reva, somehow, feels betrayed by the Jedi because of an unknown event and that would explain her hatred. Now, since she is an original character, we still don’t know whether this is true or not so we’ll just have to wait it out.

The other theory, which is the more likely one based on what we know at this moment, is that she was simply recruited by the Empire, brainwashed and then made an Inquisitor. The brainwashing that future Inquisitors go through is severe and it would break a lot of experienced Jedi, let alone a Youngling. The Inquisitors are fiercely loyal to the Empire and they hate the Jedi because they have been taught to perceive things like that.

In the next section, we are going to explain how the Inquisitors work as an organization.

How does the Empire recruit Inquisitors?

Knowing that there would be Jedi who could survive the planned start of a great Jedi purge by Order 66, the Dark Lord of the Sith, Darth Sidious, began sowing the seeds of the Inquisitorial program years before becoming Galactic Emperor. During the Clone Wars, he hired bounty hunter Cad Bane to kidnap several Force-sensitive children who would become young Jedi in the near future.

At his private establishment in Mustafar, the Dark Lord intended to subject the children to a process of conditioning enslaved people, having foreseen that he would have “an army” of Force-sensitive spies at his disposal. Despite this, Darth Sidious’ operation was stopped by the interference of Jedi Knight Anakin Skywalker and his Padawan Ahsoka Tano.

They managed to rescue the children and escape the destroyed base with them. Despite this setback, the Dark Lord simply set up more facilities and modified more nanny droids to ensure the continuation of his plan to use Mustafar to recruit infants to his cause. As the war raged on, Darth Sidious also kept tabs on knights who had grievances with the Jedi High Council or the Jedi Order’s role in the conflict.

Exploiting their weaknesses, the Sith Lord secretly offered these chosen few the things their brethren had denied them, plus a chance to survive Order 66 as long as they gave him their unwavering allegiance and the dark side of strength. At the end of the war, Supreme Chancellor Sheev Palpatine, public figure Darth Sidious, took the carefully orchestrated opportunity to found the Galactic Empire and declare the Jedi Order its enemy.

With the apparent assassination of Jedi Master Mace Windu as retribution, the new Emperor activated Order 66, a protocol hardwired into nearly all clone troopers of the Galactic Republic by the Sith before the war and ordered them to kill their Jedi commanders. Nevertheless, as the Dark Lord predicted, some Jedi survived mass murder, so he planned his hunters to pursue those who survived until the light of the Jedi Order was extinguished once and for all.

Darth Sidious also took Anakin Skywalker to the dark side to become his apprentice and gave him the name “Darth Vader.” While Skywalker had the potential to be a Sith in his eyes, Sidious specifically chose those who would become Inquisitors as he felt they had no chance of becoming powerful enough to challenge him.

Most of the Jedi were killed by the clones, but a few managed to escape, especially after Jedi Master Obi-Wan Kenobi sent a distress signal from the temple to warn the survivors. Thus, some of them survived the initial purge and went into hiding. Fearing that the surviving Jedi would threaten his rule, the newly installed Emperor Darth Sidious founded the Imperial Inquisition to hunt down and defile or wipe out the last Jedi order.

Much like Skywalker had fallen, the Inquisitors were all former Jedi who had fallen to the dark side and dedicated themselves to Sidious. A lot of Imperial Inquisitors had joined the Dark Side of the Force because of the intense torture or corruption they had been subjected to. When they joined the ranks of the Inquisition, the Force Sensitives effectively lost their identity.

They were given numerical designations to represent their entry into an organization that perverted everything the Jedi Order had stood for. A guardian of the Jedi Temple of Pau’an turned “the Grand Inquisitor” had joined Emperor Sidious when the Dark Lord promised him access to the Jedi archives. The Ninth Sister was former Jedi Masana Tide.

The Tenth Brother was former Jedi Master Prosset Dibs, who had been assigned to the Sith at the end of the Clone Wars. The second sister was former Jedi Padawan Trilla Suduri, who was captured shortly after Order 66 and tortured into giving in to the dark side. Darth Vader quickly discovered the program and was tasked with it by Darth Sidious.

The Supreme Commander trained the Inquisitors in the ways of the dark side of the Force. As part of their guidance, some Inquisitors had parts of their bodies severed with their master’s lightsaber so they would not forget the lesson of loss. After Lord Vader cut off the Sixth Brother’s left forearm, the Grand Inquisitor began to question his new master’s training techniques. The cyborg claimed that he intended to get adepts of the dark side to abandon their tendency to fight defensively as ancient Jedi and embrace more offensive moves.