**Spoilers for the book STAR WARS: AFTERMATH: EMPIRE'S END**
Take a look at any lists of the most despised fictional characters in all of creation and Jar Jar Binks is somewhere on that list. It’s been almost twenty years since he made his debut in THE PHANTOM MENACE, but fans are still throwing knives at pictures of him taped to their door. But aside from a few appearances we haven’t seen much of him since, and his whereabouts have remained unknown…until now!!
In the new STAR WARS book, STAR WARS AFTERMATH: EMPIRE’S END (which is a series set primarily between RETURN OF THE JEDI and FORCE AWAKENS), we get an official, canonized answer that the unwatchable Gungan ended up not too far from where we first met him – in Naboo. There he has been forced to become a street clown in order to get by in life, and it’s in this somewhat sad state that we get an explanation as to what happened to him.
While exploring the streets of Naboo, a young refugee named Mapo comes across a Gungan clown performing for children. Kids are finding him funny, but adults are avoiding him like the plague. The Gungan then cheers young Mapo up with some antics, and introduces himself as Jar Jar. Then Jar Jar tries to relate to the boy, and how no one wants him anywhere either saying, "Jar Jar makin some uh-oh mistakens."
As some of you may remember, and had added to your “Jar Jar assassination” dossier, the character was made an interim Galactic Senator in ATTACK OF THE CLONES, and was one of those who proposed and supported a war powers act that eventually led to the rise of the Empire. "Desa hisen Naboo tink I help the uh-oh Empire,” he says, revealing that people think he’s someone responsible for letting the Empire grow, and has therefore been shunned into a life of street clowning.
This interaction is also being seen as a commentary on the relationship Jar Jar has with the audience, in that children love his incoherent ramblings and mind-numbing antics, but adults stay as far from him as possible, banishing him to the lowest receptacles of life as we know it.
Frankly this is more than I would’ve allowed for the character. I personally would’ve tortured him like Mel Gibson in BRAVEHEART, all before chopping off his head…but that’s just me. But once the feelings of utter outrage subside, I guess this is a fitting place for the character. Paying for his ineptitude he lives a life of regret and sadness, which in a way is worse than beheading. Still, that would quite the sight.
STAR WARS: THE LAST JEDI arrives December 15.