Maythe Force Be With You
Stylised original portrait plate for Depa Billaba

DossierChalactanThe Clone Wars

Depa Billaba

A silent Council seat in 1999; two decades later, the master who dies so Kanan Jarrus can live.

Species
Chalactan
Homeworld
Not established
Affiliation
Jedi Order
Rank
Jedi Master, High Council member
First appearance
Star Wars: Episode I The Phantom Menace (1999)
Portrayed by
Dipika O’Neill Joti
Padawan (canon)
Caleb Dume / Kanan Jarrus

Depa Billaba is a Chalactan Jedi Master and High Council member, first seen in The Phantom Menace (1999), where she is played by Dipika O'Neill Joti and says nothing at all. She is one of the great examples of how Star Wars characters get made: a costume in a chair, retrieved decades later by writers who needed somebody to occupy a particular hole in the story.

In Legends she was Mace Windu's padawan, and Matthew Stover's Shatterpoint (Del Rey, 2003) is built around her breakdown on Haruun Kal — a Jedi who went native in a guerrilla war and had to be found by her own master. It is the darkest thing the Expanded Universe did with the Council.

Current canon took her somewhere else entirely. Greg Weisman and Pepe Larraz's Kanan — The Last Padawan (Marvel, 2015) makes her the master of the young Caleb Dume, and gives the series the scene it exists for: Order 66 arrives, her own troops turn, and she buys her fourteen-year-old padawan the seconds he needs to run. Every subsequent appearance of Kanan Jarrus is a consequence of that moment.

The two versions cannot be reconciled and do not need to be. Legends gives her a fall; canon gives her a death that makes another character possible. Both are more than a silent extra in a 1999 crowd shot had any right to expect.

On the record

Appearances

Where this figure actually appears, with the medium and the year. Nothing inferred.

Appearances of Depa Billaba
WorkYearMediumNote
Star Wars: Episode I The Phantom Menace1999FilmFirst appearance, non-speaking.
Shatterpoint2003NovelMatthew Stover, Del Rey. Legends.
Kanan — The Last Padawan2015ComicGreg Weisman and Pepe Larraz, Marvel. Canon.

From the library

Appears in

Books in this log where the character is central rather than incidental.