Are Star Wars lightsabers on TV deadly enough? Here’s what doctors say

[Ed. note: This post contains spoilers for the end of season 1 of Ahsoka.]

If you’re up to date on Ahsoka, you’ll know that the Disney Plus show’s season 1 finale boasts a lot of lightsaber action. Sabine (Natasha Liu Bordizzo), Ahsoka, (Rosario Dawson) and Ezra battle a bunch of zombified night troopers and Morgan Elsbeth with a magic-sword wielding Morgan Elsbeth. Somewhat predictably, the former prove impressively resilient to being sliced and diced — zombies are tricky, after all — however, the slash to the chest sustained by the latter during her climactic duel with Ahsoka ultimately proves fatal. It’s a relief to not have any more laser-sword controversy in the Star Wars universe.

See, there’s been quite a bit of harumphing among fans of Lucasfilm’s galaxy far, far away that the saga’s most iconic weapon has lost its edge (literally). Star Wars has been around for 46 years. The media have taken pains to make it clear that facing an opponent with a light saber can be a serious matter. The right cleave can cost you limbs, if not even your head. A thrust in the torso is game-over. This logic held across the franchise’s pre- and post-Disney eras — until the House of Mouse started making live-action Star Wars It’s TV.

2022 miniseries Obi Wan Kenobi The trend for non-lethal lightsabers on small screens was started by not having just one, but Two-thirds of the population are able to vote. The characters in the book survive what appears to be fatal stabbing wounds. AhsokaContinued this trend with Sabine Wren, (Natasha Liu Bordizzo), already standing up in episode 2, after having been run over by Shin Hati(Ivanna Sahno)in episode 1. Predictably, the internet immediately declared that Sabine’s survival and recovery were dubious — by the standards of both real-world and Star Wars medical science. Are the critics right? Polygon consulted a real trauma expert in order to answer this question.

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Owen McCabe is our expert. He’s a board-certified MD in both general surgery and surgical intensive care. He’s a fellow of the American College of Surgeons and is currently a trauma and acute care surgeon. District Medical Group, Phoenix Arizona. He is a staff member at Valleywise Health Medical Center. Aside from that, he’s a professor of surgery at Creighton University and the associate program director for the Surgical Critical Care Fellowship. McCabe is also a Star Wars fan. fan (although he admits to dropping off a bit after the prequels), and he dialed into our call having done “prep work,” which we took to mean “spent several hours on Wookieepedia.”

We got straight to the point (pun fully intended) in our conversation with McCabe, opening with the most obvious question: What damage does Sabine sustain when she’s stabbed in Ahsoka What is the first episode? “So, the immediate effects obviously would be primarily pain and the physical and psychological responses to the shocking experience of sustaining this wound,” he says. “Beyond that, it very much depends on the exact location of the injury and what organs or systems are impacted.”

What about the cauterization effect of Shin’s lightsaber — would that make Sabine’s injuries less severe or buy her more time? McCabe dismisses the idea, correctly noting (according to our own stack of Star Wars guidebooks) that the Jedi and Sith’s signature swords radiate surprisingly little heat. Accordingly, McCabe theorizes the cause of a light-saber’s burning is thermal spread. Thermal spread is a term used in medicine to describe the process by which the heat generated from a blade transfers into tissues adjacent to the cut. Given that a lightsaber theoretically has a similar edge to the plasma blades favored by plastic surgeons — which don’t cause significant thermal spread — McCabe argues their cauterization capabilities are somewhat overstated.

“I think, based on my understanding of lightsabers, my thoughts about tissue transfer, and a little bit [of] extrapolating from our plasma blade, that the primary thing that’s gonna happen to tissue that comes into contact with the lightsaber is it’s gonna be vaporized,” McCabe says, noting that in terms of cauterization, “there’s sort of conflicting thoughts.”

“If you look at Star Wars media, you see examples where both bleeding wounds and cauterized wounds are generated […]It is likely that the cauterization will be superficial. I don’t think you’d see a lot of depth of tissue penetration largely because the duration of contact is going to be low, and […] I don’t think that’s going to meaningfully impact the amount of, for example, blood loss that you have.”

So, according to McCabe’s assessment, when the credits roll on Ahsoka episode 1, some of Sabine’s insides are “completely gone” and she’s at serious risk of bleeding out. This sure sounds like the “Sabine should be dead” camp was on the money, right? He says that it’s not necessary.

While McCabe acknowledges that someone in Sabine’s condition would need treatment “as quickly as possible,” he qualifies that statement by citing the “golden hour” — the concept that the “first hour of resuscitation is really critical to [a patient’s] overall outcome.” Given Ahsoka arrives more or less as Sabine is being stabbed, it’s a reasonable assumption she received medical attention within the golden hour.

The outlook for our would be Jedis gets a whole lot brighter from this point on. “A lightsaber wound maybe is more comparable to a gunshot wound in that it’s going to impact a large number of structures potentially and in a devastating way,” McCabe says. “So, it would depend on the mechanics of the stab wound, the stab wound from the front to the back, [but] as long as it’s not in the center of the abdomen, I think you’ve got a reasonable chance of survival.”

Not even the whole “organ vaporization” thing — which sounds like an instant death sentence — should meaningfully impact Sabine’s prognosis. McCabe believes that these injuries could be treated by a real-world trauma unit, without Star Wars. universe’s tissue-regenerating bacta tank technology.

“Injuries to the spleen, to a kidney — we can simply remove those injured structures,” he explains. “Injuries to the bowel, the injured segment can be removed and then new connection or diversion of the contents of the digestive tract can be done. If you know that the liver is a good example, then it’s possible to remove large amounts of liver without affecting the patient in the future. And so, even with tissue destruction, there’s a reasonable chance that a patient who has not exsanguinated [died of blood loss] prior to arriving at the hospital would have injuries that we could potentially repair.”

That’s more good news for Sabine, as shots of her being impaled in Ahsoka episode 1 and the scar she sports in episode 2 indicate that Shin’s lightsaber did indeed skewer her liver. So yes, a promptly administered bacta bath probably would have been enough to save Sabine’s life, incredible as it may seem to some. It’s her quick recovery that is the real story. When asked how long it would take someone in Sabine’s position to be fighting fit again, McCabe was emphatic: months.

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“It would be rare for a patient who’s going to have a good long-term outcome to be in the hospital for more than a few weeks, but often patients who sustained significant injury aren’t immediately ready to go home,” he says, noting that even once they’re released they’re often not fully recovered. “I mean, when we do open abdominal surgery, even under the best of circumstances […]The majority of surgeons will recommend a period of about a week before you can resume vigorous activity. And that’s just to start returning to vigorous physical activity. That’s not to be back at 100%.”

Of course, Star Wars’ mystical component could explain away Sabine’s short convalescence. Force users have shown to be more resilient than normal people in the films. We’ve seen Jedi shrug off multi-story falls and even briefly withstand the rigors of space You can also read about the advantages of using A spacesuit. However, the eight entries in Ahsoka make a point of how relatively weak Sabine’s connection to the Force is, so this line of logic seems like a reach. Score one point for the show’s detractors.

Overall, it seems that Sabine will survive her duel with Shin. Star Wars fans might not be happy about that. fans, for the understandable reason that when there’s a lightsaber fight, the consequences should You can also find out more about life-or-death. But that’s not what we’re talking about here; what we’re talking about is whether, by the laws of our universe and her own, Sabine could’ve survived being stabbed with a lightsaber, and the truth is she could have. She may not have been discharged as quickly from a hospital on Earth as on Lothal, but that’s the benefit of living in a fictional world. It’s important to note that the verdict is not yet in on whether or not those theories are true. Obi Wan Kenobi stabbings.