I should probably bring up the Iron Knights. Though, technically, they’re not droids, they’re an exotic form of cyborg…part machine, part silicon based crystaline lifeform. (I don’t even know if there’s a proper term for that. Cycrys? Cybicon?)
If they can be force sensitive, it doesn’t seem entirely impossible that a droid couldn’t be, depending on what SW droids’ brains are composed of. It might have to do with relative complexity—like if, by analogy, a vat-grown organic brain was capable of accessing the force, but a collection of vat-grown ganglion couldn’t.
Or, like others have said, if even an organic brain was damaged, brainwashed, or raised in severe isolation, maybe it couldn’t access the force—not unlike a typical droid who might be built with a low IQ, used as a slave, and/or had it’s brain reset on a regular basis. So maybe if most droids couldn’t use the force, it just means Kasper Hauser, a fresh Nexus 6, or Randal McMurphy couldn’t do it, either.
R2 is, however, a badass. He is the only character who knows exactly what’s going on at all times. He knows who Luke is. He knows where Luke is. He’s the one who talked Skippy into blowing his top. He kicks seven kinds of ass and doesn’t bother to take names.
R2 is everything Han wishes he could be. And nobody notices, cause all he does is go boop.
How do you explain General Grievous then? Or Darth Vader?
Grievous was not a Sith but according to this he has a high midichlorian count. While not trained specifically in the use of the force I think he still benefited from an affinity for it and of course he was about as mechanical as they come while still having an organic brain.
Vader of course was still mostly human but with significant mechanical support yet it seemed to hinder him not at all.
To back this up and flesh it out, this was mentioned in the novelization of The Empire Strikes Back. If I remember right, the writer explicitly said that he didn’t use his mechanical arm to just take the damage, but that he actually absorbed the energy through the Force. Foreshadowing the encounter between Luke and the Emperor in Jedi when Luke tries to deal with the Force lightning.
There’s also stuff from a comic book series that a friend of mine has. It’s set after the Battle of Endor, and Luke has started sliding toward the Dark Side. His powers are shown as being demi-godish. At one point, he blocks a blast from an AT-AT cannon with the Force.
I think that R2-D2 is just really good at analysis, is more creative than a 'droid has any right to be, and he’s got more experience than every single character in the story — with the exception of Yoda — since he’s never been wiped during the course of something like 70–80 years, and has been involved in crisis after crisis. He’s mastered being in the right place at the right time and has always been good at figuring out what to do to get things working again.
well, the first mistake is believing that the force is a purely biological force. It is a reactive force and permeates as a field. It is residual, and there is no beginning or ending point. I prefer to think of R2 as Luke, Obi, and Lea’s familiar.
Ah, I saw him as akin to one of the intelligent Mind machines in Ian Banks’ “Culture” universe that had organic components to back up their pico-circuitry.
Ha! Shows what you know. The events of Star Wars are in our future, but the opening title crawl is even further in the future. Luke blows up the Death Star 20,000 years from now. 25,000 years from now, the movie starts, and talks about things that happened 5,000 years previous.
+50 geek points to me for a ridiculously convoluted fanwank!
Hmm. If episdoes 7-9 were made, I wonder if the opening statement would get more and more recent. Episode 7 would be “a somewhat long time ago”, 8 would be “a short time ago” and 9 would be “a few minutes ago”. Or better yet, “Right now”.
The way I see it, R2-D2 was actually a disguise for the nimble, Sith-fighting badass Yoda we saw at the end of Episode III. When he went into exile he set up a dummy Muppet-like puppet as a decoy, which he could control remotely, and spent much of the rest of his life encased in a droid’s casing. It completely fooled the Emperor and Vader and even Luke, who he could not risk showing his true self to just in case he went over to the Dark Side.
Come on, doesn’t this explain a LOT? Even the ghostly image of Obi-Wan, Yoda and an Anakin-in-Jedi-robes at the end of RotJ was a holo projected by Droid-Yoda.
It’s also the surprise ending to Episode 9, when R2 cracks like an eggshell to reveal Yoda inside.
