What Was The Devastating Ability That Only Starkiller Could Use?

The lightning bomb. Starkiller could blast an opponent with Force lightning and then use the Force to keep amplifying that lightning until it reached a critical point and exploded out of them. The detonation did not stop at the target either. It shocked and killed anyone standing near the victim when it went off.

The power problem with Starkiller#

Starkiller, properly Galen Marek, is one of the strongest characters anyone has put in a Star Wars story. Darth Vader killed his father on Kashyyyk, took the boy as a secret apprentice, and trained him by teaching him to draw on hate and then throwing him into tests that were meant to kill him.

The results speak for themselves. He pulled a Star Destroyer out of the sky using nothing but his mind. He fought the Gorog, one of the most dangerous creatures in the galaxy, and left it in a state so wrecked that Boba Fett later took one look and reconsidered the contract. He killed Shaak Ti on Felucia.

But it is what he did with Force lightning that separates him, because that is where he stopped being a very strong dark sider and started being a genuine innovator.

Force lightning was already the high bar#

Force lightning channels Force energy down the user's limbs and hurls arcing bolts of electricity at a target. It is almost purely offensive, it causes unbearable agony as well as physical damage, and that combination made it a favourite instrument of torture among the Sith. It was never a common power. It belonged to the strongest dark side users in any given era.

The technique scales in interesting ways. Powerful discharges branch out into dozens of smaller forks, which means a skilled practitioner can hit several opponents at once rather than one. At the very top end, Palpatine could produce lightning intense enough to literally vaporise what it hit.

Marek belongs in that top bracket. He could kill with a single blast, strike many adversaries simultaneously, and deflect incoming lightning with his lightsaber or, during the fighting aboard the Death Star, with his bare hands.

What he built on top of it#

Where Marek pulled ahead was in treating lightning as a toolkit rather than a single attack.

He could charge objects and people with lightning and then throw them as improvised grenades. He could wrap a shield of lightning around his own body, a technique whose effects reached beyond the space immediately around him and shocked enemies at a distance, and which could redirect another user's lightning straight back at them. He could feed it into his weapon to raise the blade's intensity.

Then there are the variants with almost nobody else's name attached.

Lightning Grenade works by gripping an opponent with the Force, lifting them off the ground, hitting them with a short burst of lightning, and then either dropping them or slamming them into something so that the charge inside them explodes. The Legends record lists exactly two practitioners: Galen Marek and Darth Sidious.

Sith Seeker is stranger. It starts as a very uncontrollable Force push that flings the target through the air. The user then generates a large ball of Force lightning and deliberately lets it expand until it is no longer under their control, before launching it after the target to detonate on impact. The only known practitioner is Galen Marek. Nobody else, in either continuity, is recorded doing it.

The lightning bomb#

Which brings us to the one at the top.

The lightning bomb starts the same way as a normal attack. The user blasts an opponent with lightning. What happens next is the part nobody else managed. Instead of letting the energy dissipate, the user keeps working it with the Force, amplifying the lightning already inside the victim's body until it reaches a critical point and bursts out of them.

The video frames it as Starkiller holding the charge back and building it until it goes off, which is the same idea from the other end: energy that should have discharged is instead trapped and compounded until something has to give. Either way the outcome is identical. The victim is destroyed, and the explosion shocks and kills anyone standing close enough when it happens.

It is a horrible piece of work, and it is entirely in keeping with how Vader trained him. This is not a duelling technique. It is an area weapon built out of a person.

Where this sits in continuity#

All of it is Legends. Starkiller comes from The Force Unleashed and its sequel, and Disney moved that whole strand into the Legends banner in 2014, so none of these variants exist in current canon.

Force lightning itself carried over, and canon has its own long list of users from Count Dooku to Palpatine. What did not carry over is the specific catalogue of things Marek could do with it, which is a shame, because that catalogue is the strongest argument anyone has ever made for him being the most dangerous Force user of his generation.