The Monstrefact: The Miraluka of "Star Wars"

This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed human. Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeart Radio. Hi, my name is Robert Lamb, and this is The Monster Fact, a short form series from Stuff to Blow Your Mind, focusing on mythical creatures, ideas, and monsters in time. I've covered a number of Star Wars species and creatures in the past on The Monster Fact, and since we're celebrating Star Wars Week here, I have one more for you, a Force-sensitive humanoid species known as the Miraluka. The Miraluka have existed in Star Wars comics and novels for decades at this point, with specific examples falling into canon or extended universe status. But we're not going to get too wrapped up in this division. The Miraluka look like typical humans, except they have no eyes, and generally keep their vestigial eye sockets covered with a blindfold. While other species in the Star Wars galaxy possess only varied levels of connection to the Force, the Miraluka all possess enough force to manifest a kind of Force sight, an ability to sense their surroundings via Force sensitivity in a way that makes up for their lack of visual sense organs. This of course plays in a long-standing Star Wars trope in which a Force-sensitive individual trains with a blindfold, or some sort of blindfold-like device on, so that they can better trust their innate Force sense of their surroundings. We see Luke do this in the original 1977 film. In Star Wars Rebels, the Jedi canon Jarrus sustains a blinding injury and is forced to depend on his Force senses in this way. And if you, like me, played the video game Star Wars Jedi Knight Dark Forces 2 back in 1997, you'll remember the game's chief antagonist, the Dark Jedi Jarrick, played by Christopher Neame, was also blind. Subsequent Star Wars media retcon Jarrick to be both an Imperial Inquisitor and a member of the Miraluka species. Christopher Neame, by the way, has come up on Weird House Cinema before as he played Johnny Alucard in the Hammer horror film Dracula AD 1972 opposite Christopher Lee, who of course has his own Star Wars heritage. But I found this idea quite fascinating. The humanoids of the Miraluka homeworld benefiting from species-wide Force sensitivity might have evolved to depend on the Force as their primary sense, to the degree that their eyes atrophy away, like some manner of organisms adapted for life in, say, deep caves or the deep ocean or something. Exposed to the presumably much stronger sensory input of Force sight, their brains came to depend on it as the primary sense to form a mental model of the surrounding world. Now, we don't quite have a parallel for this in the natural world, but I was reminded of the common rat. A rat's eyesight is quite poor, but makes up for it with superb hearing, scent, and touch via their whisker sense, which I am tempted to compare to Force sight in this scenario. Rats excel at life in artificial human constructions, such as the interiors of walls or, say, in the sewer, as well as all sorts of naturally occurring spaces like this. To navigate these environments, these little mazes, they depend in large part on high resolution sensory maps, which they generate in their heads via constant sweeps of their delicate whiskers. They can also detect slight changes in air currents with their whiskers. Our perception of reality is based on the mental models we form based on input from our senses. Animals with different levels of sensory details, such as stronger hearing or weaker sight or differing cognitive abilities, they essentially occupy a different sensory world. So it's a fascinating exercise to imagine what our own lives would be like with any of these sensory knobs adjusted even a little bit, or indeed an entirely new sensory input, perhaps based on the mysterious Force added to the equation. Tune in for additional episodes of The Monster Fact, The Artifact, or Animalius to Pindium each week. As always, you can email us at contact at stufftoblowyourmind.com. Guaranteed human.