The Stupidest Thing in the Star Wars EU

[4thofeleven]

Yes, I know, there's a lot of contenders for that title. But in re-reading the craptacular Jedi Academy* trilogy, I think I've found the crown jewel: The Force Detector found on Coruscant in the first book.

What is it? Well, it's a pair of paddles that you put on either side of a person, and then it displays a hologram of them. If they're force-sensitive, there's a blue glow around them.

Stupid things:

• Paddles. That just sounds silly on its own.
• It's a machine that detects the Force, that pre-dates the Phantom Menace's midichlorians by five years.
• It was apparently used by the Empire in the Jedi purges. That's right, the Empire detected Jedi by grabbing people off the street, putting them between a pair of paddles, and scanning them to see if they could use the Force.
• It displays a hologram of the person you're scanning, despite the fact that the only data it's actually analysing is "Force Sensitive/Not-Force Sensitive". Can't it just beep or something?
• Finally, what makes it really stupid: Anderson devotes an entire chapter to finding the detector, retrieving it from the ruins of a secret imperial lab, having Luke work out what it does... and then it never actually gets used. Well - no, Lando uses it once to check if a con-artist is a force-sensitive or not. Of course, it's pretty much a formality at that point, since Lando already knows how the con-artist is working his scam and that he's not using the force to do it - also, the con-artist is never mentioned again.
  So you could cut the Enchanted Paddles of Detect Force from the book entirely without affecting the story whatsoever, but Kevin Anderson apparently felt they were such a brilliant idea that they had to go in anyway!

And that's why the Force Detector is the stupidest thing in the Star Wars EU. Say what you will about the other stupid concepts and ideas of the EU, at least they existed to move the story forward...

* Couldn't find anything good to read; hadn't read them in years, alright?