This point is so obvious that I’m sure it’s been done to death, but obviously, if Luke and Leia got their Force powers from Anakin presumably via DNA since he had no contact with the kids after their birth, where did Anakin get his powers? I’m guessing not from some nameless slave woman in East Bumfuck, Tatooine. So the question is, was she swept away by some Force-weilding planethopper in her youth? Or was she Someone prior to becoming enslaved, who never got around to using her powers to escape slavery? Or both?
He had no father. It was something called “midichlorians”, which are some kind of manifestation of the Force, that impregnated Annie’s mom. She said it herself, she simply found herself pregnant, without there having been a man.
A virgin birth, in other words. I’m not kidding, that’s what came out in TPM.
As Palpatine was the mastermind behind the idea of cloning an army, he would almost certainly also be behind genetically engineering a human high in midichlorians.
He may not be the Father of Anakin genetically, but he probably is scientifically.
I continue to maintain that there’s nothing wrong with the principle of midichlorians. They are not the source of The Force they are the genetic explanation of why some are more attuned to The Force than others, and why the offspring of a Jedi are more likely to also be a Jedi. It does not negate the “mysterious energy field” that The Force has always been claimed as being.
I always thought that it was inferred that Palpatine used the force to create Anakin. There’s that long monologue about him having such control over the force that he learned how to create life and stop death. While you might argue that he later changes course and says that he can’t stop death I think everyone would agree that its in Palpatine’s best interest for Padme to die, so whether or not he really has the power isn’t exactly clear.
This explanation also has the bonus of leaving the midichlorian crap out of the equation all together.
What I got out of Palpatine’s little story in Revenge of the Sith was that he was apprentice to the Sith lord who dreamt up the entire plan of creating a child with an unnaturally high attunement to the Force and using it for his own ends. Once Anakin was actually created, Palpatine murdered Plagueis and assumed the plan for his own benefit. Plagueis might even have outlined a plan for taking over the Republic, and Palpatine stole that as well. Given that Palpatine doesn’t appear to have the control over life and death that he promised to Anakin, that explanation makes the most sense to me.
I’ve been surprised for years that certain fundies didn’t get bothered by TPM, seeing as how Vader is the result of a virgin birth.
It does bother me a little, a tiny bit “religiously”, and more as a lame cop-out by Lucas.
Seriously, that guy should never be allowed to write a final script or direct a movie ever again. Imagine what the last three could have been with someone able to tell George that he was off on a bender again.
Virgin birth, eh? Sounds kinda dicey to me. Though it does have its mythological antecedents, I suppose. Of course, people have challenged that whole virgin birth thing in other mythologies as well. It just sounds like something a mom who’d slept around a lot had told her kid.
And of course, being a slave, Schmi might not have all that much control over who she sleeps with.
Anyway, if Palpatine was responsible for the midichlorian thing and perhaps the birth as well, I wouldl still wonder why Schmi and why Tatooine. Seems stupid to leave her out in East Bumfuck when she’s carrying the lynchpin to all his plans. I’d want her at least on the same planet where my agents could keep an eye on her. I mean, look at what leaving Schmi on Tatooine got the Jedi – it was Schmi’s death that turned Anakin to evil in the first place.
If it wasn’t Palpatine, the question still remains: why did Schmi’s kid have all the midichlorians floating around in his system? Random chance? Doesn’t seem to work that way in other cases …
Then again, I observed when I saw The Phantom Menace that Shmi and Anakin “suffered” under perhaps the mildest conditions of slavery ever. They weren’t working very hard, they had plenty of free time, and they even had their own home which was big enough to entertain houseguests. And they were allowed to entertain houseguests.
I’ll grant you that. It’s especially interesting considering that their owner Wattoo was portrayed as such an amoral moneygrubber. And considering that slaves in Jabba the Hutt’s palace didn’t have it nearly as good, what with the constant threat of being killed or slurped on by Jabba. But that’s a side note to the issue of why some slave woman on a backwater planet had Midichlorian Kid.
If I’m forced to admit that TPM exists, I guess I’ll chime in. Shmi never said she was a virgin, only that Anakin has no father. We can’t trust Lucas to have any idea what was happening in that film, so looking at the wistful expression on her face and the whole socio-political climate of Tatooine at the time, I suggest his father was either a Han Solo type adventurer/ship captain, a rogue Jedi, or an off-world politician/criminal.
I agree with Palpy, but I gotta admit, EC’s raised a point I never really thought about - and I tend to debate/discuss SW with the the best of them.
Why Shmi? What was special about her? Was it just some random woman? Did he do it and not know, perhaps, where the baby was going to be born? You know, figuring that the baby, with its destiny and all, would show up at Palpy’s door, so it didn’t matter where it was born, so any woman would have done?
But of all the people…? So that means that no matter where Ani was born, he would have had the appropriate trauma in his life to cause him to fall to the Dark Side. After all, his destiny dictates that he has to balance the Force, and to do so, he would necessarily have to be on the Dark Side - to kill good Jedi.
