Just got done watching *Revenge of the Sith * for about the millionth time. My son, who is eight and has a new hobby of trying to find a reason behind everything, posed the following question and I have no answer:
Why did Emporer Whatshiface, after having turned Anakin into Darth Vader, his new bionic apprentice that he had killed Padme?
I mean, he didn’t know she died following childbirth in the previous scene. He didn’t know that Padme knew he had turned to the dark side for certain, did he? Wouldn’t it have made more sense to tell Vader that Obi Wan had killed her, thereby perpetuating the hatred he was cultivating? What purpose did telling Vader that he was responsible for Padme’s death serve, other than to make him full of agony? How could Emporer Redeyes guarantee that Padme wouldn’t have come looking for Anakin, which would have proven Master is a big fat liar?
Having inquisitive kids can be a bitch. Help me out here?
The movie is so hopelessly incoherent that it’s hard to explain anything, but this part at least makes sense. We have to assume the Emperor knows Padme is dead. Given that he’d look pretty stupid if she shows up for her next appointment in the Senate, he has to know she’s dead.
If you assume that, then telling Vader he’s murdered the woman he loves makes sense, because it completes Vader’s giving over to the Dark Side. If you’ve murdered your true love, well, shit, might as well go the full evil monty. Having Vader track down Obi-Wan Kenobi isn’t an important issue to Palpatine, really; he’s destroyed the Jedi as a force in the galaxy, so he’s won, or so he believes.
Of course, that leaves open the question of how Vader couldn’t find out later Padme had died in childbirth, but a common thing you have to assume in Star Wars - it’s not just a problem with the prequels, but with the originals, the books, video games, you name it - is that for some reason, people don’t seem to get a lot of information about anything outside of their immediate surroundings or job, and they’re not terribly inquisitive. The Star Wars galaxy doesn’t seem to have an internet. It doesn’t even seem to have a banking system.
If he tells him Obi Wan did it, then Vader goes running off looking for Obi Wan. If he tells Vader that he did it himself, then he loses all hope in life and will always doubt and hate himself for doing it. He becomes an immensely powerful emotional cripple (not that he wasn’t before) with nothing left to live for but to serve the Emperor.
Because his love for Padme was the only thing keeping him back from fully embracing the Dark Side. Once he did go over fully to the Dark Side, there would be no going back – even if he later found out that Padme still lived, he would have already committed himself to the Dark Side.
Just finished watching the thing on Spike Channel tonight. I like the theory someone else came up with (no idea who)–Palpatine was using his Dark Side powers to drain the remaining life energy out of Padme to save Anakin’s life. That way, he severs Anakin’s one last emotional tie and mind-screws him into thinking that he himself did it, and the droids are left wringing their hands and meebling about ‘a broken heart’.
Being a sci-fi fan, I hate to say it, but that is a prerequisite for much of the genre. Personally, I think I’ve lost the ability to even formulate such questions.
But she didn’t die from childbirth, she just died during childbirth. She died from either or both her Anakin injuries and a loss of will to live (which was also an Anakin injury, just an emotional one).
Palpatine’s whole shtick to get Anakin to the dark side was the promise that they would find a way to save Padme’s life. If Palpatine would have admitted that despite all Anakin did his wife still wound up dead during childbirth, he most likely would have gotten a face full of Vaderfist[sup]TM[/sup]. But by saying Anakin killed Padme not only does it get Palpatine off the hook, but it also makes Anakin more committed to the dark side.
I think there is supposed to be a Star Wars internet called the holonet, but it gets suspended by Palpatine as part of his crackdown on civil liberties during the Clone Wars. And there is clearly a banking system because the Banking Clans join Dooku, like all the other capitalist institutions.
If that’s a reference to why Republic credits weren’t good on Tatooine, that’s been explained multiple times: The Hutt worlds had a closed economy, with the Hutt gangsters holding a monopoly on all imports and exports. The penalty for currency trafficking was death by slow torture, and the Hutt didn’t bother with niceities like trials or presumption of innocence.
I always liked JRRT’s assertion that “Secondary Belief” was a better term than “Suspension of Disbelief”.
But given how abysmally convoluted and self-contradictory the prequels were, I must admit that “Suspension of Disbelief” is the more appropriate phrase here.
I don’t think the Emperor ever lied to Anakin. I think the only lie Palpatine ever tells in the movies is when he tells the Senate that the Jedi are plotting to overthrow the Republic, and even that’s not entirely a lie. Mace Windu had just tried to kill him.
