Saw Gerrera lived most of his life as a revolutionary, fighting to bring about positive long term
change in the best ways he knew how, no matter the personal cost to himself or others.
He was born on Onderon, under the rule of King Dendup.
When the Clone Wars came to his homeworld, Saw watched as the king he respected
was replaced with a Separatist puppet.
Saw and his sister Steela banded together with
others who shared their opposition to the planet's
change in leadership, including the son of Onderon's former senator, Lux Bonteri.
The insurgents began to strike against the droid
army from the shadows, and captured the attention of the Jedi Council.
The Jedi wanted to help the people of Onderon resist their oppressors, but the planet's
legitimate alignment with the Separatists prevented the council from sending legitimate
aid.
Instead, a small force of three Jedi and a clone captain were sent to Onderon to equip
the insurgents with the training and equipment
they would need to successfully fight on their own.
Saw's rivalry with Bonteri made their instruction under General Anakin Skywalker
difficult but Saw did gradually become a better soldier
as a result.
With help from the Jedi, Saw and Steela's forces infiltrated the planet's capital
city and took their war to the heart of the Separatist's occupation.
Their tactics of openly fighting the droids in the
city caused civilians to become fearful of the rebels, something Saw struggled to understand.
Steela knew the key to victory would be to win over the people by inspiring hope in them
once more.
Working with Skywalker's Padawan, Ahsoka Tano, they planned to free King Dendup.
Saw infiltrated the palace only to be captured before he could escape with the king, and
subjected to brutal torture and interrogation, not dissimilar from what Saw himself would
eventually do to his prisoners.
The rebels managed to rescue Saw and the king before their execution, and the group escaped
back into Onderon's wilds.
There, they engaged in a battle with Separatist forces.
Using armaments provided by Hondo Ohnaka, they defeated
the droid army and forced Dooku to withdraw from the planet, but at a heavy cost:
Steela fell to her death after a gunship Saw personally shot down crashed into the cliff
she was cornered on.
Saw would forever be plagued by guilt and anger over his sister's death,
and it put him on his first steps towards the man he
would become.
Saw continued to work with the Republic and Jedi throughout the rest of the war.
He originated the codename "Fulcrum" for his clandestine
communications with Skywalker; this moniker would
later be adopted by rebel spies like Ahsoka and Cassian Andor.
Despite his alliance with them, Saw and his forces on Onderon were declared
insurgents immediately after the war ended and
the Republic became the Empire.
It became clear quickly that the fiercely protective and
independent insurgent groups the Republic had trained to defend their homeworlds from
the Separatists would ironically become the Empire's
greatest opposition.
In the days after the rise of the Empire, Governor Tarkin sent Clone Force 99, otherwise
known as the Bad Batch, to Onderon to eliminate
Gerrera and his people in a test of their skill and
loyalty.
Saw's men captured the clones and he came out to speak with them personally.
Saw
opened their eyes to the injustice of Palpatine's ascension to emperor before packing up his
camp and leaving Onderon behind to fight for the galaxy on a larger scale.
Though the Empire would later wipe out some of the people Saw
had left behind on the planet, Gerrera himself was
already gone.
In the following two years, Saw came to meet a smuggler named Has Obitt while aiding a
resistance against Tarkin in the Salient system.
Though the battle there was lost, Obitt connected Gerrera with an Imperial scientist
named Galen Erso who wanted to escape Coruscant with his family.
Saw personally smuggled Galen, his wife Lyra, and their daughter
Jyn to a new life at a homestead on Lah'mu.
Galen's work for the Empire involved powering a
superweapon that Saw would spend decades trying to chase down.
Five years into the reign of the Empire, Saw and his forces launched an assault on a key
Imperial refinery on Kashyyyk.
There, Saw met the surviving Jedi Padawan Cal Kestis, and the
two worked together to successfully take over the refinery.
Saw delivered an inspiring speech about how hope for the Wookiees was not yet
lost, but he soon made the pragmatic decision to
abandon Kashyyyk and the plight of the Wookiees after the Empire struck back in greater
numbers.
It wasn't long after this that the Empire found the hiding place Saw had set up for
the Ersos, killing Lyra and forcing Galen back into servitude.
Saw was able to rescue and adopt the child, Jyn, taking her to his base on Wrea, where
he trained her to become his best fighter.
The two quickly developed a bond, and Saw slowly included
her in his efforts to fight back against the Empire.
Several years later, Saw took Jyn with him to meet one of his rebel contacts, a resistance
fighter named Enfys Nest, who led a group of Cloud-Riders.
Nest gave Saw enough coaxium to power a fleet, having acquired it from the crime
syndicate Crimson Dawn with the help of Han Solo.
Despite their less brutal methods, Saw's relationship with Enfys' Cloud-Riders
was close enough that one of her best fighters, Benthic
Two-Tubes, would end up becoming a leading member of Saw's Partisans.
One of the most brutal messages that Saw ever sent to the Empire came a few years later,
after Jyn had grown into a teenager.
Saw and his team visited the planet Inusagi, where they used
flechettes to violently massacre Imperials and civilians alike at a celebratory festival,
including the planet's governor.
As Jyn matured, Saw became paranoid that his aggressive fighters would realize Jyn's
relationship to a key Imperial collaborator and exploit her as a hostage.
After being betrayed on a mission to Tamsye Prime, Saw left Jyn behind
in a bunker with a knife and a loaded blaster before abandoning her for what he believed
to be her protection.
In the following years, an increasingly angered Saw ordered the assassination of Naboo Moff
Quarsh Panaka.
Though Panaka was one of the Emperor's closest allies, this move upset the
other rebel cells, who had hoped to eventually make the relatively level-headed Panaka
sympathetic to their cause.
Not long after, Saw led a mission to investigate the disappearance of the Geonosian race,
losing his team when they were ambushed by a scared surviving Geonosian.
The crew of the Ghost were sent to rescue Saw by Bail Organa,
and Saw found himself once again working with Jedi.
The Spectres were put off by Saw's aggressive methods when it came to interrogating the
Geonosian, though Saw was eventually persuaded to release the survivor and allow him the
chance to preserve his civilization.
Saw was left with nothing but questions regarding what the
Empire had been up to on Geonosis, ignorant that it was actually the same superweapon
project Galen Erso had been working on.
Tensions between Saw and the rebels led by Organa and Mon Mothma continued to build as
each side became more frustrated with the other's methods.
When the Alliance became formalized into a cohesive movement, Mothma
issued an official censure condemning Saw's actions.
Saw, in turn, considering Mothma and her rebels to be cowards too afraid to do what
needed to be done.
After destroying an Imperial relay, Saw found himself once again working with the Spectres
to investigate whatever the Empire was building.
Stowing away on a freighter, they discovered a
massive kyber crystal which Saw ensured was destroyed.
His only remaining lead was that the stormtroopers on board had mentioned the Jedha
system, an ancient site known to have been a
resource for kyber crystals used by the Jedi.
Pursuing this, Saw relocated his people to Jedha and began to engage the Imperials
aggressively there.
He recruited two local Guardians of the Whills, Baze Malbus and Îmwe, to
help him by providing aid to a local orphanage.
Though the Guardians helped his people for some time, their ties were broken after Saw
double-crossed them during a mission to steal a
shuttle for the orphans to flee with, intending to instead use the shuttle to destroy a Star
Destroyer.
As the Imperials continued to bleed Jedha dry of kyber and Saw continued to engage them
in the streets, a defecting Imperial cargo pilot
named Bodhi Rook came to Jedha looking for Saw
with a message from Galen Erso.
Rook was apprehended by Two-Tubes and brutally interrogated by Saw in person, who had become
too jaded to trust the pilot on word alone.
Before he was able to act on any of this, Saw's men brought him another capture:
Jyn, who was working with the rebels to learn the information
Rook had been sent to give Saw about the Empire's secret weapon.
Saw was dismayed to learn Jyn was still angry with him for his abandonment of her, and that
his cause meant nothing to her.
He showed her Galen's message, detailing a weakness in the
superweapon's reactor.
As Jyn was overcome by emotion, the Empire activated that very same
superweapon to annihilate much of Jedha.
Saw used his last moments to push Jyn into surviving and carrying this message onward,
deciding that he would run no longer.
As the blast overtook his hideout, Saw removed his breathing
mask and uttered his final word: "Steela."
Jyn was successful in delivering Galen's message, and the weakness was soon used to
destroy the station by Luke Skywalker.
It was only a few more years until the Empire fell, and
Saw's dream for a free galaxy came true.