Watching my new Star Wars trilogy on DVD got me to wondering why Vader never took on a pupil. He was plenty powerful enough, and I’m sure he could’ve found someone who wanted to be ultra-powerful like him.
My guess is that he was kind of stuck in student mode. He’d always been an apprentice. He just dropped Obi-Wan for the Emperor. While he may have been able to teach someone, it just never crossed his mind.
What say you, Star Wars geeks of the SDMB?
I always assumed he had a ton of students, he just ended up “accepting a lot of apologies”
There can be only two Sith Lords: the apprentice and the master. At some point one will kill the other in a power struggle and get a new apprentice.
He tried to convince Luke to join him, remember?
Interesting. That explains why the Emperor made Luke and Vader had to fight at the end of Episode VI, instead of just having them both serve him.
That raises another question: why that restriction? The Jedi don’t seem to have a problem having multiple students (see Episode II, where Yoda is seen training an entire classroom of padwans).
So was he just waiting for Luke the whole time? Why not train a few to help in the meantime?
If he trained one successfully, somebody would have to die: The trainee, making the effort a waste; Vader himself; which he certainly wouldn’t want to do; or Palpatine, who was so strong that perhaps only the hypermidichlorianated Vader or Luke *could * kill him, and perhaps only both of them together. If it’s the last, then for Vader to take over as Emperor, he needed Luke and only Luke to be his apprentice.
The Sith world is one of constant struggle to reach the top. No sensible person in that situation is going to lightly train yet another person gunning for his throat. In such a way it does make a certain amount of sense.
I would imagine that it’s at least in part because it’s awfully hard to be a very well-kept secret if there are hundreds of you. The Sith are a secret society, remember, and basically illegal (in the Old Republic, at least). Having hundreds or thousands of snot-nosed kids under your tutelage would make it difficult to keep things under wraps (hell, look at the trouble Obi-Wan has with one snot-nosed kid…)
Exactly. And thank you, Lord Ashtar, for bringing it up. Why are there only two? I know that this was said by Mace Windu (IIRC) in the first movie (TPM, not ANH), but is there other basis for it (I don’t read the books)? If you think about it, it really doesn’t make any sense. And how would two be able to wipe out a whole buncha Jedi (partially answered by the movies, I guess)? And does Sidious get rid of Dooku so’s he can take on Anakin?
I don’t think it makes much sense that there’s only two evil people. I would think that would be really easy to combat. Instead, I like to think that Windu’s line was a throwaway belief with not much basis behind it.
From what I gather from the Expanded Universe, the Sith have a tendency to turn on each other. Indeed it is apparently part of their teaching to do so. If the master is too weak to keep the apprentice from killing him, he dosen’t deserve to be the master anymore.
With that in mind, it is probably best to have only one flunky that you have to keep from turning your back on, than a whole school full of them.Because the Jedi, as a rule, aren’t evil backstabbing meglomaniacs who want to dominate the galaxy?
I’m pretty sure in the official Star Wars backstory, back when the Sith/Dark Jedi movement started, there were a lot of them, but they ended up fighting among themselves for power, which let the Jedi defeat and massacre them. So, the only survivor of the massacre of the Sith decided that, from then on, there would only be two, a master and a student. Then, when the student became more powerful than the master, he would kill his master and take a student of his own, and so on, and so on.
Because teachers don’t get paid squat. Even in a galaxy far, far away.
Because, really, who has time to sit through all those committee meetings?
I think it’s the Dark Horse comics that address a lot of issues with the history of the Sith. From The Force Academy (and reference The History of the Sith):
Time and time again, the Sith had grown and then crumbled because of its own internal power struggles. Darth Bane saw that there could only be one master… but in order for the Sith to continue, there must also be an apprentice. As long as there was something for the apprentice to learn, he/she wouldn’t betray the master (unless they got impatient, as some did).
There are a few reasons why Darth Vader hadn’t taken a pupil yet:
[ul]
[li]Sideous still dwarfed Vader as far as power went. In order to take on a student, Vader would need to kill his master, but was not yet ready to match him in a Force-to-Force combat. In other words, he still had learning to do.[/li][li]From what we’ve seen in AotC, Anakin saw Palpatine as a father figure and had reverence for him. That reverence continued after becoming Vader, since Palpatine had saved his life and set him “free”.[/li][li]With nearly all of the Jedi dead, there was probably slim pickings for a student. Plus, there’s all that keeping-a-stranglehold-grip on the galaxy to do.[/li][li]The only reason Vader sought to gain an apprentice was in order to save his son’s life.[/li][/ul]
When the Rebellion had been crushed, when he had become at least within the same range of Sideous (using the Dark Side to control an entire battle fleet while playing mind games with your apprentice’s hidden son and being able to shoot tendrils of pure evil out of your fingers at the same time is a far step above Vader’s parlor tricks), and when someone suitable had been found, I’m sure Vader would have gone looking.
Emperor Palpatine/Darth Sideous was the Master,
Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader was the Apprentice,
What was Mara Jade?
So, according to the new order of the Sith, there could only be two Sith in the entire universe at any one time? That seems kinda weak… What if a surviving Jedi or two manage to train a couple dozen disciples out on some bumpkin little planet? Couldn’t they just just overpower the pair through numbers?
When we say, “there are always two (Sith), the master and the apprentice,” I take that differently than most of you.
It means there are always a minimum of two, in order to carry on the Sith in the event of one being killed. But the Master is always on the lookout for more Sith. Because they are so dangerous and evil, I’m sure their numbers are by necessity extremely limited. They’re not looking for any old shlep with some ability with the Force, they want that one individual who is particularly strong, and there aren’t many. Among those few powerful enough to be attractive to the Sith, they need to find one who is emotionally & psychologically vulnerable to being turned to the Dark Side.
So while we refer to Darth Maul as the apprentice, it’s pretty clear to me he was pretty much a fully trained Sith, and in the event of Sideous’ death, he could have gone to ground, assumed the role of Master, and spent years carefully selecting and training another.
But while Darth Maul was already fully trained, Sideous was already grooming Anakin to be eventually turned. He also had Count Dooku waiting in the wings.
So again, there are always a minimum of two Sith, but not necessarily only two. There are only two main Sith, the Master and the Apprentice, who are competent enough to carry out the evil skullduggery. If you discover there is a Sith around, you better be certain there’s another one around you’re going to have to deal with.
According to a friend of mine, not all Dark Jedi are Siths, so they still have a lot of dark side users at their disposal.
Sure they would. Just train them badly. (“Yes, my young Dark Padawan. Lightsaber tastes like candy. Really, try it…”)