During the many times when I watched Star Wars as a child, I always took it at face value. Princess Leia has somehow managed to steal the plans for the death star and Luke Skywalker bravely manages to pull of a one-in-a-million shot that destroys the thing with a little assistance from Han Solo. Last weekend I watched the movie again, for the first time in my adult life, and now I’m questioning the traditional interpretation. It seems that everything which took place actually happened because Darth Vader wanted it to happen, especially the destruction of the Death Star.
Firstly, Darth Vader has the motive. At the beginning of the movie he seems to be having a power struggle with Grand Moff Tarkin. The exact nature of the struggle is never explained, but there’s definitely tension there, and Vader’s power is clearly less than absolute. By letting the Death Star be destroyed, Vader not only kills Tarkin but wipes out the entire military hierarchy. By the start of the next movie he’s in absolute command of the military. (Why the Emperor promoted him after his first failure is not explained, but then again corporate America works the same way.)
Second, Darth Vader had the means. He knows that Obi Wan Kenobi disabled the tractor beam earlier in the movie. He could easily have restored the tractor beam to operational status and then used it to pull in and destroy the X-wings. Instead he allows the X-wings to reach the surface of the Death Star and make an attack run. After that, he decides to engage them ship-to-ship. He also decides to fly one of the fighters himself, which is surely an unusual decision for someone at the top. And he orders his other fighters to cover him while he makes the destroying shots himself. In that way Vader, conveniently manages to destroy every X-wing except the one piloted by Luke, and Luke manages to fire a killing shot. Then everyone on the Death Star dies, and the only survivor is … Darth Vader.
Furthermore, have you ever asked yourself, “How exactly did Leia get those plans?” Surely a reasonably competent person could have hidden the plans in a place where they couldn’t be stolen. I suspect that Darth Vader hid them under deliberately loose security and tipped off the rebels to where they were. The rest of the movie is basically an elaborate farce wherein Vader makes it appear as if he’s fighting the rebels, when in reality he’s aiding them. This explains why he sent such an incompetent force of Storm Troopers to capture the droids on Tatooine, why he allowed the Millenium Falcon to escape the Death Star, and why the Death Star emerged from light speed in the wrong position and had to wait half an hour before it could get a shot at the rebel base.
I took it to be a situation like ones that existed earlier in totalitarian societies. For example, Adolf Hitler played his generals against each other.
The Death Star was as big as a small moon, but it didn’t comprise the entire military hierarchy. The Star Destroyers were formidable in themselves, and there had to be a command structure over them.
The tractor beam might have been used against a flight (leader and wingman, an echelon, or a small formation) of fighters, but unless the Death Star had multiple tractor beams (it was implied it didn’t), then it could not have taken on several fighters attacking from different directions.
IIRC Bismarck could not successfully engage the British Swordfish aircraf because the aircraft were too slow for the guns. The AA turrets were designed to defend against more modern fighters. Death Star had the same problem, so they had to resort to a fighter-to-fighter battle. Vader had good reason to believe he was invulnerable. By getting into the fray himself he gets to claim the glory of victory (had they won) at little risk to himself. But Luke’s skills were a match for his, and he was too focused on his quarry to defend himself from the classic diving attack from behind.
It doesn’t matter how she got the plans. She got them. John Walker operated a spy ring, and he was in a trusted position. Same with Christopher Boyce.
It was brought up that the escape from Death Star was ‘too easy’. The plan was to allow Millennium Falcon to escape so that it could be followed to the Rebel base. As for where Death Star emerged from hyperspace, I suspect that relativistic astrogation requires some leeway. Also, the Empire didn’t know where the Rebel base was. They’d need at least a little lead-time to find their targets.
I always thought that the Emperor deliberately allowed the Rebellion to get the plans to the Death Star because he underestimated them and figured 1> They were no real threat, and 2> They would be destroyed before they could do anything, and 3> There was no weakness in the Death Star that they could reasonably exploit.
Darth Anakin is a glory hogging narcissist who is exactly the type of person to say “Dammitall, I’ll just jump in a fighter and take out these clowns myself. They’re no match for me!”
kaylasdad99 pretty much sinks this in one: Lucas isn’t that subtle. He also isn’t that smart.
Vader’s position at the commencement of “Star Wars” is a bit inconsistent with the way “Revenge of the Sith” ends. It’s never explained why Vader is the Emperor’s no-questions-asked right hand man and then, suddenly, Tarkin appears to be the military generalissimo; even if Vader has a direct line to the Emperor it’s pretty clear that Tarkin wears the big boy pants with respect to the uniformed military.
Vader betraying the Empire to kill off opposition is a neat idea but it’s inconsistent with “Episode III” and, in any event, it’s hopelessly inconsistent with the way George Lucas tells stories. If that had been Vader’s intent, it would have been about as subtle as a Roman triumph.
On the final run in the trench, I can’t imagine Vader is saying, “Now, all I need is for some ship – perhaps piloted by a lovable rogue – to dive in from above and attack my formation in just such a way that my fighter is thrown clear of the Death Star so I don’t get any boo-boos when it gets blown up.”
I always thought (before the prequels were released) that Tarkin was instrumental to the Emperors rise to power. In that scene where Vader is chocking the officer who demeaned the force, Tarkin orders Vader to stop and he sheepishly complies. It was clear to me that the officers are loyal to Tarkin first, and Vader could not defy Tarkin in front of his officers. Palpatine probably could not get rid of Tarkin without angering the military and I bet he shed no tears when he heard of Tarkin’s demise. Vader probably dreamed of killing Tarking, and after he recovered from the shock of the destruction of the death star, he gleefully sang “ding-dong the bitch is dead” all the way back to Coruscant. It’s a shame the Grand Moff didn’t have a bigger role in the prequels. Instead we got the lame ass General Grievous.
One of the things I liked about the prequels was that Palpatine was scared of Vader. Promoting someone over Vader would probably meant for Palpatine a long fall down one of the many pointless shafts the empire was known for.
But they weren’t pointless. That is what they were there for.
"PALPY: Watch your step, ambassador. This part of the base is still under construction and we haven’t put up the guard rails yet. The shop stewards keep complaining but…<uses Force Push. Ambassador falls down shaft> Oopsy daisy! Just like that, actually.
There was this one very funny Star Wars comic story that both explained the above AND gave a reason why Vader might want the Death Star destroyed. Hell, it even gave him a direct role in it!
Also, you don’t drag a fully armed, hostile attack craft into your fortress. What are you going to do with it once you’ve got it in there? Most fortresses, the Death Star included, don’t have cannons positioned to deliberately fire on its own interior, and I doubt that personal weapons are going to be especially effective against the shields and armor of a ship designed to withstand ship-mounted cannon fire. And even if you did all that, when the hostile ship blows up it’s going to take a big chunk of your fortress with it.
I would say the opposite. The Death Star’s designers assumed that any attack against the DS would come from slow-moving capital ships attacking from range. The idea that somebody would attack with small, one-man fighters at close range was so ludicrous that they didn’t even consider it, and thus didn’t include appropriate countermeasures. This is the same reason the exhaust port was unshielded - no capital ship attacking from range (which is space can mean hundreds of kilometers) was going to be able to detect such a small target, much less hit it.
We don’t know how R2-D2 got the plans. They could have been downloaded at Genosis during Attack of the Clones and later discovered by Capt Antilles, blowing not only cover on the project, but detailed plans that explained to the rebel Senate members just why so much capital expenditure was being made secretly.
I think that it is entirely plausible that Vader was playing all sides against each other. The prequels are all about Palpatine/Darth Sideous doing exactly that.
Ep IV has the reclusive Emperor presented to the public as not fully in charge and finally dissolving the Senate in a power play. Tarkin may also be about to engage in his own power play.
Darth Vader IIRC in the expanded universe has little time for the Death Star, and he was even less happy about the destruction of Alderaan, something which backfired on the empire.
Grand Moff Tarkin, was the designer and the commander of the Death Star, and as it was the ultimate weapon of the Empire, i would imagine he would have quite a bit more say than Vader until he killed the emperor in ROTJ, Vader was a sith lord, and the Empire and the dark side are not the same thing. One assumes, they also practice the seperation between church and state.
The Death Star plans were stolen by Bothan spies and given to Antilles who passed them to Leia as she was a diplomat and the Empire should not have attacked or stopped the ship.
