The Dark Lords of the Sith, Darth Vader and Emperor Palpatine, as well as their use of fear against opponents. While the Inquisitors’ spinning double-bladed lightsabers aren’t entirely practical, they do offer some benefits to their wielders.
While Darth Vader was more than powerful enough to hunt down the Jedi survivors of Order 66, he couldn’t do it alone. Shortly after the Jedi Purge began, Palpatine and Vader trained a small number of Jedi— who’d fallen to the dark side by choice or torture—as Inquisitors, dark-side agents who closely resembled Sith Lords. Although the Inquisitors were gone by the events of A New Hope, they’d faithfully served the Empire and the Sith in their galaxy-wide pogrom of the Jedi.
Since their introduction in specific type of lightsaber with two blades, capable of spinning in dazzling displays. The weapons proved to be versatile and provided useful defense for the wielders, as well as being extremely intimidating to opponents—yet their main purpose seems to be instilling fear. Against an opponent who isn’t afraid of an Inquisitor, the spinning lightsabers were impractical, as proven by Kanan Jarrus at the end of Rebels season 1.
Kanan’s season-long character arc was overcoming his traumatic survival of Order 66, and his fear was personified by the season’s main villain, The Grand Inquisitor. Throughout the season, he and aspiring Jedi Ezra Bridger fled the Grand Inquisitor in their various encounters with the dark side agent. In the season finale, Kanan, mistakenly believing Ezra to be dead and no longer afraid of his opponent, exploits a design flaw of the Grand Inquisitor’s weapon and cuts it to pieces. While the weapon was frightening before, the emboldened Kanan quickly disabled the weapon once he was no longer afraid of it or its wielder.
Inquisitors were not officially Sith, despite their loyalty to the Dark Lords and their training from them, and thus they had a unique weapon of their own. This is similar to how the Knights of Ren—a dark side group with an even looser connection to the Sith—had leaders with unique red-bladed lightsabers. Since Inquisitors had to re-learn their philosophies and use of the dark side instead of the Force, they had a uniformly aggressive fighting style. Inquisitors weren’t nearly as powerful as Sith, so they relied on intimidation to aid them in combat, with their spinning lightsabers assisting them with weaponizing fear.
While the spinning double-bladed lightsabers weren’t effective against emboldened enemies, they did provide some practical benefits. The spinning blades allowed Inquisitors to block blaster bolt barrages effortlessly, and they even imbued their wielders with flight, as shown in Rebels season 2. Imperial Inquisitors are a unique Sith splinter group who rely on fear, and thus they all wield spinning double-bladed lightsabers in Star Wars canon.
