SPOILERS!!
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At the end of Return of the Jedi, the Emperor has trouble convincing Luke to kill Vader, so he zaps Luke. Things are looking bleak for Luke until…
But let’s say Luke doesn’t get that help. Emperor destroys Luke, he and Vader reign supreme for, what, a few minutes?
IIRC, the shield is down, the Falcon & Co are already inside the Death Star, and I doubt Vader and the Emperor have time to escape the Death Star explosion.
“Yes, my apprentice, we win…” KA-BOOM!
Luke’s struggle in those scenes was not to aid in destroying the Death Star, but to turn his father from the Dark Side.
Well, clearly some people got out (like Luke…). So it’s not unreasonable that Vader and the Emperor could have gotten off the Death Star.
… and fled in the ensuing chaos? Why not. I’d say that the rebels had scored big hits with the Executor and the Death Star, but you’ve still got a few dozen Star Destroyers and their fighters sitting there, pounding away at the fleet. We never see how that battle ends–my guess is that the surviving Imperials bolted when they saw the Death Star explode.
But, if the Emperor survived, would he be able to call up the commanders from his shuttle and say, “OK. They got the Death Star, but I’m still alive–put an end to this nonsense. NOW.” ? Possibly.
So (a) they still could have escaped from the Death Star (b) the Empire was still strong–tons of forces at their disposal throughout the galaxy, and even lots still intact at the scene of the battle. My guess is, if the Emperor did NOT die in that battle, it would have been the end of the rebels. The fight was too costly for them, and they were still fairly outgunned.
This is one of my complaints about ROTJ and the Star Wars saga in general. You can’t convince me that it was the story of Darth Vader all along. It was the story of Luke. Or the Rebellion. Or R2-D2, perhaps. But not Darth Vader. It clearly wasn’t the story of Vader when the first movie was made (then again, George Lucas has this annoying habit of declaring that certain things were “always intended” - no one can convince me that Leia is Luke’s sister in the first movie or even in the second.)
So yeah, from the Rebllion’s point of view, Luke does nearly nothing for them after the end of the first movie except rescue Han. Nothing Vader does to the Emperor is any more lethal than, say, being on the Death Star when it blows up.
In a way, it’s kind of the opposite of LOTR. In Lord of the Rings you have a sort of confrontation between the hero and the bad guy going on while outside a huge battle rages that makes no difference - the outcome solely hinges on whether or not Sauron gets the ring. In ROTJ, only the huge battle makes a difference. No one else gives a damn if Vader is redeemed or not (including me. Am I the only one who finds the whole Vader redemption thing more or less tacked on and unbelievable?).
Well, this is pushing it (a LOT) but…
The Emperor kills Luke and is thus not being distracted and can then use the Force to focus on the attack and:
Reposition his forces to block the passage (if he killed Luke early enough).
Use the Force’s Dark Side to disrupt the attack (Luke could call to Leia in Empire Strikes Back, the Emperor could make the attackers hear voices in their heads which would cause confusion and slow down the attack).
Vader could get back into his dusty custom TIE Fighter and kick some butt before running away.
The Emperor would have time to escape and regroup, but he would be on the defensive from here on out. After all Luke got out while carrying the dying Anakin, why couldn’t the Emperor?
Vader could order his old friend Darth Jar Jar to trip over some cables which will miraculously destroy only the enemy;) .
In the first movie, I’m with you, mostly… but in Empire Strikes Back , Yoda and Ben are talking about how Luke is their last hope, and Yoda says, “There is one other.” That’s clearly Leia, and we actually knew that at the time Empire was released, for the following reasons:
There were a few other arguments we put forth at the time (after Empire and before ROTJ) which I don’t recollect at the moment.
Legomancer:
I always thought the Star Wars saga was about Luke, too. And, when I was little, I always figured the prequels would be about Obi-Wan, told from the droids point of view. Obi-Wan would recklessly train that superb pilot Anakin, who would fall to the darkside (after the battle in the volcano, of course!).
Ooops! So much for the clues from the first 3 movies.
Some of the paradoxes I don’t mind. It’s hard to make prequels 20+ years after Star Wars, especially since special effects have improved (for instance: why didn’t the Empire keep those cool Destroyer Droids?). And the contradictory parts about R2 and 3PO, I can excuse those. Lucas wanted to include them in the prequels, of which I’m glad (I’m a big Artoo fan!).
Back to ROTJ, I don’t think Lucas put much thought into the Luke/Leia thing. It really wasn’t an important part of the story, and would’ve flowed just fine without it. Perhaps he just wanted to remove all doubt about the Leia/Han romantic angle, especially since I thought after ANH that Luke would get the girl.
The Vader redemption made him weak in ROTJ. After ESB, I thought the story would become whether Luke was strong enough to depose his evil father. But, when they went the redemption way, everyone was kind of just wondering not IF Vader would turn, but WHEN. He was no longer the inhuman monster in ANH and ESB.
It’s no big secret that Lucas will twist his “original vision” of Star Wars to whatever suits his needs at the moment. Proof of this can easily be found in Boba Fett – as originally envisioned, he was merely a supporting character, most notable as the guy who gets to haul Solo’s Carbonite-frozen ass back to Jabba. Yet, because legions of fanboys drooled over Fett, he gets a gratuitous cameo in the “special edition” of A New Hope, countless non-movie appearances (novels, comic books, etc.), a high-profile clone dad in Attack of the Clones, and will probably land even more screen time in the third movie.
If Lucas claims that he intended for Luke and Leia to be siblings from the start, he wouldn’t have given them the lip-lock from the first movie. Ewwww. :eek:
More than tacked on and unbelievable, it borders on morally repugnant. This was a dude who ordered the destruction of entire planetfuls of people just to make a point that was already made (said point consisting of “I’m a supervillain.”) --and we’re supposed to be misty-eyed because in the end he saves his son’s life. Feh.
But it did provide entertaining padding to break up the Ewoks-defeat-the-Empire silliness.
Actually, Drastic, it was Grand Moff Tarkin who ordered the destruction of Alderaan.
Dammit, RJ!
Warn us before you do that!
I agree that the loss of the death star wasn’t a fatal blow to the empire. It hurt them, but what clinched it was the death of the Emperor. Remember that the empire ruled (and the rebels were trouble, but not fatal) even without a death star.
I think they were both just ego projects for the Emperor, kind of like the Russia campaign was an ego thing for Hitler. Just to wave around and show everybody how bad-ass he is. Unlike Hitler, when the Emperor’s pet project blew up in his face, he had enough will and resources to just build a bigger better one.
If he had lived, the rebels’ battle fleet probably would have been crushed (they were losing and about to retreat, even before the death star’s superlaser came online and started blasting them. the only reason they stayed was Lando’s pleading to trust Han’s ability to get the shield down), and there would have been a death star mark III.
So Leia’s able to withstand the questioning. Big deal. He’s a busy supervillain, and she’s a strong person. Is there any evidence that Vader was particularly good at questioning anyone who wasn’t a nascent Jedi?
And of course Leia hears Luke call out – look at his choices:
Yoda? Light-years away.
Obi-Wan? Dead.
Han? Encased in Carbonite.
C-3PO? Ineffectual putz.
R2-D2 and Chewbacca? So clearly sidekicks that they don’t even speak a reasonable human language.
Lando? Still in the Can We Trust Him Yet Category.
And then there’s Leia, who is A) cute, B) apparently interested in the farm boy, and C) in a position to help. I buy that it’s possible that it’s intended to be a clue, but it’s hardly proof.
I’ll grant that by the time the credits are rolling in ESB, Leia is Luke’s sister. But I think it’s clear (and I have no early draft evidence to support this, just a gut feeling) that she was not so until a few re-writes in.
Also, it’s unfair to say that Luke does nothing for the Rebels after A New Hope except save Han. In ESB, he performs the important task of bringing Artoo to cloud city, enabling the escape of Lando, Leia, Threepio, and Chewie.
I agree with Drastic. After Vader’s behavior in the first two movies, much of ROTJ, and what we’re told (admittedly, by Obi-Wan, who’s a proven liar) the one act at the end saves him and lets him enter happy Jedi land? Bah, I say. The Grinch has better evidence of redemption than that. Did Vader’s heart grow three sizes that day? Did get gain the strength of ten Vaders, plus two?
Vader was such a great villain. The scene in ESB when he invites them to dinner is fantastic. It really kills me to see him go out like a chump in the last movie. I wish people had the heart to let villains be villains. Hopefully Peter Jackson won’t have Sauron deciding at the end that he was wrong and apologizing to all of Middle-Earth.
Just a minor point - Leia was from the ruling House of Alderaan. I remember the book and the radio drama mentioning that members of the royal family are trained to resist torture and brainwashing. If the Force did help her fight Darth Vader’s questioning he should have felt the tremer in the Force like he did when he was trying to shoot Luke during the Death Star fighter attack.
I think the Emporer’s death was more important than it seemed on the surface.
Did you notice that the Rebels only started succeeding AFTER the emporer was killed by Vader? Before he died, nothing was going their way. A friend of mine who’s a Star Wars nut pointed that out to me last time we watched it.
Supposedly, the Emporer’s power with the Force was having an overall effect on the situation. When he died, his influence over what was happening (the disabling of the sheild, attack on the Death Star) disappeared, and the Rebels started succeeding at that point.
In other words, you could argue that if Darth didn’t kill the Emporer, the Rebels wouldn’t have succeeded in their other missions because the Emporer’s strong negative influence over the force would have kept the Rebels from getting their “lucky” breaks.
I don’t neccessarily take this point of view–I’m just presenting another possible explanation as to why Luke getting Vader to kill the Emporer was so important.
Yeah, I think that that’s the official geeky answer, in any case. The Emporer, with his Super Bad Force Powers ™ could coordinate his navy during the space battle. Once he dies, or at least starts to get distracted, the Imperial armada goes to pot…the Super Star Destroyer gets blown up by a (un)lucky hit from a disabled Rebel fighter, takes out some of the Death Star as it goes down, and it all goes downhill for the Empire from there.
“So you destroyed the original Death Star? Well, what have you done for us lately?”
I agree whole-heartedly that seat-of-the-pants writing (and in the case of the released “special edition” films, rewriting) gets on my nerves. One of the better examples of a story arc that worked was the first four seasons of Babylon V, but even there they tried to get some more dough out of the franchise and hung on for a weak fifth year.
Vader’s presto-chango redemption is pretty obnoxious. The novelization was a little better, including a moment when Luke has a dark-side thought about killing the Emperor and Vader and ruling the galaxy alone. You go, Luke!
Sauron : Frodo, I must tell you something… I… am your father, Frodo!
Frodo : No, it can’t be!
Sauron : And I’ve realized the error of my ways. So, before I have you throw me forever into the Cracks of Doom, let us share a last meal together. Come, my son… Sit with me and let us feast on roast Ewok…
I think that Lucas had a rough map of the major relationships from the get go, but didn’t try to sell it to the studios because the story was long, difficult and convoluted. Look at the posters for ANH, Vader is the main character. As far as the family relationship went, he decided to do the one movie without expectation it would allow him to do another or any backstory, which he roughed out. I did know someone who said the first day ESB opened that Leia was Luke’s sister. And the clues were there. Stuff like Boba Fett, etc were never in the original back story and clearly added on. There are a couple of main stories in the background that have always been going on.
Vader has been playing a double game for a long time. In spite of his fearsome reputation, the crimes we have seen him commit have not been horrendus. He does not destroy Alderaan. He does not kill Leia. He does not kill Luke, particularly in ESB.
R2D2 is far more important than anyone imagines. R2 is the only really effective help for the good guys in all the movies. Watch again, nothing anyone does without R2 matters at all.
Since ESB at the latest, this has been a story about a Christ figure choosing the devil during the last tempation. Eps 2 and 3 will show us why.