# Star Wars contradiction
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/star-wars-contradiction/233268
**Category:** Cafe Society
**Created:** [March 9, 2004, 6:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/star-wars-contradiction/233268 "2004-03-09T06:55:15Z")
**Posts on this page:** 17
**Page:** 3
### Author:  [@Max\_Torque](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Max_Torque)
#### Post date: [March 13, 2004, 5:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/star-wars-contradiction/233268/41 "2004-03-13T17:00:18Z")
> [@Evil Death](#):
>
> > [@Thea Logica](#):
> >
> > The mechanical arm would probably have been rendered non-functional, so I’m figuring at least one good arm and leg, and a torso- internal organs would have had to have been mostly intact for him to survive long enough to be put into the HAZMAT suit.
>
> Also, we know his head didn’t go under.
[Pretty close, though. It doesn’t look good](http://cgi.theforce.net/theforce/image.cgi?Image=/episode3/newspics/anakin_uk_paper.jpg).
I should note that that picture is not a “final picture” per se. It’s a composite of several makeup test pictures, with the mechanical arm from Ep 2 spliced in for good measure.
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### Author:  [@Guinastasia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Guinastasia)
#### Post date: [March 13, 2004, 9:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/star-wars-contradiction/233268/42 "2004-03-13T21:08:36Z")
> [@Thea Logica](#):
>
> And one of these days I’m going to get around to writing that nearly pornographic fanfic in which a female Imperial officer (of which there are some few, Daala can’t be completely alone) has the nerve to wonder about Vader within thought-picking-up distance of the Dark Lord
>
> and has her questions answered in ways nobody thought possible. Afterward, she wakes up in the hyperbaric oxygen chamber, slips the blindfold off and finds herself lying beside a male form that is pale, severely scarred, and incredibly buff. Seems that the only thing that’s mechanical is the right hand and arm.
You’ve been beaten to it, already. I’ve seen more than a few. (Although I don’t think they were officers, more like Imperial prostitutes/sex slaves)
Man, if that picture is accurate, it’s pretty freaking disgusting. I almost vomited when I saw it.
But um, I would hope that the injuries would try to match up with the scarred visage of Anakin we saw in ROTJ.
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### Author:  [@DocCathode](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DocCathode)
#### Post date: [March 13, 2004, 9:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/star-wars-contradiction/233268/43 "2004-03-13T21:53:44Z")
**Thea Logica**
I see the revelation being almost entirely the opposite. A preliminary sketch-
“So(respirator), you wonder how much is man, (respirator) and how much machine?”
The officer says nothing, but is quietly curious, literally fearing for her life, and slightly aroused.
“When I dragged myself from that pit(respirator), almost all of my flesh was destroyed.(respirator) Do you truly”
Vader leans in menacingly
“Wish to see(respirator)”
He raises one hand to caress her cheek. She flinches at the touch, then rubs her face against his finger.
“To touch(respirator)”
His hand moves to her shoulder
“What remains?”
She looks at him, starting at the boots and taking in the sight of him until she’s staring into his black lenses at her own reflection.
“Yes, Lord Vader.” In a whisper.
“Very well. Almost all my flesh was burned away(respirator). But, not all.”
He lifts off the exterior helmet and pulls off the face plate.
He looks her in the face, hairless, scarred, yet still her dreaded leader.
“I had little time. My injures were extensive and severe. Taking the time to save one part meant another would die while I worked.”
He punches a combination of buttons on his chest panel, and clamps release.
“I had to prioritize.”
He pushes a few more buttons on his belt, and the chest panel falls to floor. His torso is gaunt, and horribly scarred. One shoulder and arm remain. The other shoulder has too much missing to attach just an arm, and is fitted with artificial scapula as well. His stomach is gone, the skin in that area puckers inward. Clear tubes can be seen circulating some form of nutrient fluid. Artificial kidneys are implanted to only half their depth. Clear windows in the steel organs show Vader’s blood circulation. He turns a knob on the exposed lip of the waist. The belt releases.
“But the truly important parts, I was able to save.”
Vader turns another knob, and pushes it. The crotch plate falls away. Horrified, nauseated, yet unable to resist the urge, she looks.
The skin here is almost perfectly healed. What few scars remain are little more than stretch marks. She looks at the Sith lord’s last remaining organ. It is unscarred, and at least the size of the lightsaber on his belt.
“Now, officer, I will interogate you. Prepare to be probed.”
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### Author:  [@Miller](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Miller)
#### Post date: [March 13, 2004, 10:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/star-wars-contradiction/233268/44 "2004-03-13T22:56:08Z")
> [@Thea Logica](#):
>
> I’ve often wondered just how much of Darth Vader’s body was actually mechanical. He did, after all manage to crawl out of the fabled molten pit (mentioned in the novelization of ESB). I really don’t think the pain he would have been in would be conducive to the concentration required for levitation. The mechanical arm would probably have been rendered non-functional, so I’m figuring at least one good arm and leg, and a torso- internal organs would have had to have been mostly intact for him to survive long enough to be put into the HAZMAT suit.
Keep in mind, once he crawled out of the pit, he would still have been covered in molten rock and on fire. Much of the deep tissue damage might have happened after he pulled himself out, and many of his organs might have functioned just well enough to keep him alive until he could get medical aid, but were still so damaged that without replacement, he would never have been able to function as more than an invalid.
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### Author:  [@The\_Asbestos\_Mango](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Asbestos_Mango)
#### Post date: [March 14, 2004, 7:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/star-wars-contradiction/233268/45 "2004-03-14T07:36:13Z")
but I don’t think it has been established that it was molten rock, unless you’ve read some EU stuff or have access to spoilage that I’m not aware of. For all we know, it could have been metal that has a relatively low melting point. Also, considering the medical technology that would be available in the Star Wars Universe. I mean, bacta (whatever they are) that can heal some pretty extreme injuries with minimal scarring? That alone would probably signifantly reduce some of the damage. Plus I really don’t think that a society with the technology to travel through hyperspace would _not_ have medical technology that would enable them to clone body tissues, so they could probably graft muscle tissue cloned from a relatively undamaged part of his body. Ditto for digestive organs, liver, kidneys… it seems unlikely that the damage would go all the way to the bone, but hey, bone is living tissue, that could be cloned, too. They probably wouldn’t have the technology to clone an entire organ, but surely they’d be able to create enough, oh, say, small intestine or stomach tissue that could be formed into an organ that would be able to digest food, though he might require a specialized diet or maybe have to take some extra digestive enzymes.
So, I still maintain that though there would be extensive damage, possibly even to internal organs (and I doubt the damage to his innards would be that extensive) but not that much of him would have to be repaced by machinery.
I think the worst, and probably the most irreplaceable part, would be damage to the nervous system. Nervous tissue grows incredibly slowly, which is why spinal cord injuries are such a bitch. If the major nerves of his body suffered severe damage, then they would most likely have to be replaced by some sort of artificial wiring. It might even be necessary to have many of the autonomic functions such as heart rate and respiration governed by a microcomputer, possibly implanted somewhere inside his body, but with an external connection to the suit so that its functions could be monitored.
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### Author:  [@Evil\_Death](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Evil_Death)
#### Post date: [March 14, 2004, 8:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/star-wars-contradiction/233268/46 "2004-03-14T08:37:48Z")
> [@Thea Logica](#):
>
> They probably wouldn’t have the technology to clone an entire organ,
Huh? They’ve got the technology to clone an entire _army!_
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### Author:  [@The\_Asbestos\_Mango](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Asbestos_Mango)
#### Post date: [March 14, 2004, 9:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/star-wars-contradiction/233268/47 "2004-03-14T09:15:07Z")
But they couldn’t clone Anakin a complete new arm. They had to give him a mechanical one.
With cloning a complete animal, you basically take the genetic material out of an egg, insert the genetic material from an adult specimen, then put it somplace warm and wet and with a nutrient supply and let it do what an egg cell would do naturally once you had a complete set of chromosomes. Adding some hormones to accelerate growth might speed up the process.
Once your animal has grown into adulthood, and the tissues are differentiated, things would get more complicated. There really isn’t such a thing as “stomach tissue”. The stomach is made up of epithelial tissue, muscle tissue, and probably a couple of other kinds of tissue- I haven’t read that chapter in my physiology textbook yet. These tissues grow at different rates of speed, so it wouldn’t be a simple matter of cutting a slice of stomach, adding nutrients and stimulating mitosis. You would probably have to grow the muscular stomach wall first, then add some epithelial cells to form the lining.
Using stem cells might make things easier- there are organ specific stem cells that could probably be persuaded to form into that community of different types of tissues working together for a common purpose that we call an organ, but, isolated from the rest of the body, it might be tricky to get them to form an actual stomach.
All of this is purely speculative, of course. But given the relative rarity of entire organs needing to be transplanted, rather than growing actual organs, the medical technologists of the SW universe might just work out ways to clone tissues using cells from the undamaged sections of an organ, or use stem cells to create the tissues, then shape them into what would essentially be an artificial organ made from living tissue.
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### Author:  [@Guinastasia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Guinastasia)
#### Post date: [March 14, 2004, 6:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/star-wars-contradiction/233268/48 "2004-03-14T18:57:22Z")
I think it’s pretty much established that Anakin DOES fall into a lava pit-it’s been confirmed by LFL, at least from what I’ve read.
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### Author:  [@Evil\_Death](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Evil_Death)
#### Post date: [March 14, 2004, 10:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/star-wars-contradiction/233268/49 "2004-03-14T22:24:31Z")
> [@Thea Logica](#):
>
> But they couldn’t clone Anakin a complete new arm. They had to give him a mechanical one.
No, they could have cloned him a new arm - they’d just have to have nicked it from a full clone. A Jedi couldn’t do that, but a bona fide Evil Bastard ™ could.
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### Author:  [@The\_Asbestos\_Mango](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Asbestos_Mango)
#### Post date: [March 15, 2004, 1:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/star-wars-contradiction/233268/50 "2004-03-15T01:23:14Z")
Yeah, but who wants to wait around for ten years while the clone grows to adult size?
Of course, if you were rich enough, you could probably have a few clones grown and frozen in carbonite, just in case you needed some spare parts…
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### Author:  [@Love\_Rhombus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Love_Rhombus)
#### Post date: [March 15, 2004, 1:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/star-wars-contradiction/233268/51 "2004-03-15T01:38:42Z")
With the resources of the entire Empire Anakin couldn’t fix himself? Of course, maybe Palpatine didn’twant him to, keeps the hate fresh…
Steady dark Side use probably didn’t help his injuries…isn’t it true you can’t heal with the Dark Side? And has anyone used cybernetics to replace the withered parts caused by it?
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### Author:  [@Tuckerfan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tuckerfan)
#### Post date: [March 15, 2004, 5:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/star-wars-contradiction/233268/52 "2004-03-15T05:00:58Z")
You know, the problem with all of this is that when the movies first came out, the thought of cloning new body parts wasn’t all that prominant in society. Now, of course, we’ve got Dolly the sheep and everything else. So Lucas has _got_ to figure out a way to logically work this into the story line of how _no one_ has cloned organs as spare parts.
I can think of one easy way for it to work in Vader’s case, however. Seeing as how everyone bitches about how damned whiny Anakin sounds, it makes sense for him to _want_ to keep the mechanical replacement parts since hearing, “I’ll kill you.” resonating in James Earl Jones’s rich baritone is a helluva lot scarier than hearing in Hayden Christiensen’s whiney little voice.
Oh, and **Doc** , do I need to send you another book? Because it looks to me like you’ve got disturbingly too much time on your hands.
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### Author:  [@Evil\_Death](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Evil_Death)
#### Post date: [March 15, 2004, 9:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/star-wars-contradiction/233268/53 "2004-03-15T09:26:37Z")
> [@Thea Logica](#):
>
> Yeah, but who wants to wait around for ten years while the clone grows to adult size?
>
> Of course, if you were rich enough, you could probably have a few clones grown and frozen in carbonite, just in case you needed some spare parts…
If the Dark Apprentice novels are to be believed, you can grow a clone in three weeks if you want. The reason the Kamino cloners don’t is because it affects the mind of the clone.
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### Author:  [@Max\_Torque](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Max_Torque)
#### Post date: [March 15, 2004, 3:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/star-wars-contradiction/233268/54 "2004-03-15T15:19:59Z")
It’s probably a matter of “what’s more appropriate”. Cloning an entire person is a relative snap. If you lose an arm, however, your choices are: live without an arm for months or years, whatever, while your clone grows to maturity, harvest an arm from it, then graft it to a stump that has long since given up on nerve sensation, blood circulation, and muscle activity, which is bound to hurt.
OR…you can get a shiny mechanical arm the very next day, which probably performs better than your original arm ever did, and if ROTJ can be believed, even senses pain. And at least with Luke’s hand, the mechanical part can be made to look completely natural. Was that level of prosthesis-making unavailable in Anakin’s time, or do we know if perhaps the shiny metal arm we saw at the end of AOTC was just a quickie without the natural covering put in place for the wedding, with the covering to be added later?
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### Author:  [@Evil\_Death](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Evil_Death)
#### Post date: [March 15, 2004, 4:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/star-wars-contradiction/233268/55 "2004-03-15T16:36:25Z")
> [@Max Torque](#):
>
> do we know if perhaps the shiny metal arm we saw at the end of AOTC was just a quickie without the natural covering put in place for the wedding, with the covering to be added later?
It’s been stated by Someone From Lucasfilm that the artificial hand we see at the end of AotC is not the one Vader had in RotJ. So it’s definitely upgraded at some point; we just don’t know when yet.
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### Author:  [@DocCathode](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DocCathode)
#### Post date: [March 15, 2004, 7:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/star-wars-contradiction/233268/56 "2004-03-15T19:19:15Z")
On a serious note,
I don’t think any scientific explanation of why Vader has his body repaired with mechanical parts rather than cloned ones is needed. A simple psychological explanation will do nicely.
“I don’t want to be like I was before! Before, I was too weak to save Padme. The fire burned away my flesh. But, it couldn’t touch my steel arm. Flesh is soft, weak, and flawed. I will make myself steel. I will make myself strong.”
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### Author:  [@Mister\_Rik](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mister_Rik)
#### Post date: [March 16, 2004, 3:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/star-wars-contradiction/233268/57 "2004-03-16T03:10:10Z")
I’m being reminded of the book Spares by Michael Marshall Smith:
[http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0553579010/qid=1079406364/sr=8-1/ref=pd\_ka\_1/102-0458644-7223361?v=glance&s=books&n=507846](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0553579010/qid=1079406364/sr=8-1/ref=pd_ka_1/102-0458644-7223361?v=glance&s=books&n=507846)
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