Probably his most vulnerable point was directly interacting with master Jedi and the sword fight in ROTS.
But you realize there was really no way even at the beginning of TPM he could lose, no matter what the Jedi or our heroes do. If Padme got killed back on her home planet then it would be an outrage and she would be a martyr and it would justify republic action. If the Jedi turned Anakin away and refused to train him, Palpy would just snatch him up and train him.
If the Jedi refused the clone army, then what? A couple million clones who know nothing but war are released in the galaxy, so the separatists hire them and attack the republic with them starting the same damn war.
Basically the galaxy was screwed for a decade at least before the start of TPM, and no matter what the protagonist’s do it probably would have turned out the same way.
One of the few cool things I noticed about the prequels.
The way I see it, if Yoda refused to use the clone army, then the Jedi would have been slaughtered. It would probably take decades, at least, before they rebuilt their numbers enough to be of any consequence. In the mean time, the Republic would really have no choice but to use the clone army to fight the Seperatists.
The only way for him to lose would be getting voted out of office. I’m not entirely clear on the Old Republic’s rules for doing that. We know there was a call for a no-confidence vote to remove him early, but was there some kind of regular election or popular vote that he could have lost?
Otherwise, it’s Palpatine as Chancellor controlling the Republic fighting Palpatine as Sith Lord controlling the Separatists. Not too hard to make sure you win one way or the other when you’re pulling all the strings.
Not a huge Star Wars nerd, but if Anakin hadn’t stopped motherfuckin’ Mace Windu from motherfuckin’ killing motherfuckin’ Palpatine with his purple motherfuckin’ light saber I think things would have ended right there!
I assume the Jedi would have seized control after declaring Palpatine’s administration null & void for treason, and being an honorable group they would relinquish power back to the senate once a legitimate ruler was elected/appointed…
Palpatine was in complete control in that scene.
Making Anakin have to “save” him was an important step in gaining control of Anakin. He was allowing the appearance that he couldn’t handle Mace Windu to make Anakin act, thus completing his fall to the dark side.
I think there’s room to argue that point. One good force push unexpectedly by Windu or Yoda and he falls. We already know that Palpatine is vulnerable to falls from great heights (like any good villain).
But yes, one of Palpatine’s strong points was setting up crises and having advantageous solutions no matter which way the decision tree went.
Certainly he could have failed. The Jedi in charge of negotiations could have let the Separatists… separate. If they’re allowed to go, that takes the immediate threat of war away, so that the Jedi would have time to figure out what was up with the clone army before they had to be deployed at full force.
The Jedi failed when they became entangled in the political structure of the Republic. Their goal was supposed to be fulfilling the Jedi Code, but instead they were trying to maintain the Republic and ended up beholden to political masters. Which is exactly what Palpatine exploited.
If they’d stayed a scattered, independent order, with no obligations to the Republic, it’s likely the Republic would’ve fallen or turned against them sooner. But they’d been better equipped to survive and defeat the Sith.
But Palpatine controls the Separatists and he can manufacture one crisis after another to keep the pressure up. Naboo was just one attempt, but he could have repeated the same sort of crisis elsewhere*. And since Palpatine has the Republic under his control, he can manufacture the Republic’s response as well.
The best the Jedi could do would be to sit it out… which works to Palpatine’s advantage anyway, since it’s his goal to eventually eliminate the Jedi.
In the Clone Wars cartoon, these sorts of manufactured conflicts occur several times as “independent” systems are occupied by one force or another “for their own good.”
No one allows to have their forehead look like a butt for the rest of their life, no one.
The Jedi failed because there is absolutely no way something the size of the Republic could ever be controlled effectively by anyone. According to Wookiepedia, Coruscant alone has a trillion citizens. The Republic itself probably has a population of hundreds of trillions. We never see more than a handful of Jedi. In Attack of the Clones we see Yoda training about two dozen Jedi children. For the Jedi to have any meaningful presence in the universe he should be training hundreds of millions at a time.
According to Wookiepedia there’s only two thousand members in the Galactic senate. For the average Republic citizen there’s virtually no difference if the highest power resides with the senate or Palpatine. Both are equally dictatorial in nature. Neither can possibly represent his interests in any way.
Not that Palpatine has the highest power. Like fleas fighting over a dog there’s probably dozens of empires, senates, rebellions and Jedi orders at any one time, unaware of each other, thinking they’re fighting for control over the incomprehensible thing that is the Republic. After the *Return of the Jedi * the citizens of Coruscant sector 7G are probably happy of their liberation. Meanwhile, in sectors 11467B through 633147-Q9-90, the people are annoyed at Kaiser Sudiox and his assistant Darth Evilous. Somewhere, at the edge of the Republic, Lass Heavenhopper dreams of ending their evil Caliphate.
I have never understood this idea. It only works if we accept a priori that the Replublic and Senate are doomed, and that in the event of failure Palpatine is theonly one who could possible come out on top. If we accept that the Senate is a perfectly capable body that can govern effectively, or that people other than Palpatine might rise to the top after a revoltion, then there are any number fo ways for Palpatine to fail.
The obvious one is that Princess Armadillo is forced into signing a treaty and acts as a figurehead government for the invaders. Palpatine gains nothing out of that and the invading aliens become a much stronger faction
Another possibility is that the aliens have taken the simple precaution of recording their phone calls. Palpatine’s face can be clearly seen in the calls, he is the most famous man in the cosmos, he appears alongside an assassin that a senior Jedi can identify and announces that the assassin is his apprentice. If any of that gets out, Palpatine is screwed.
The whole idea that it was all some clever gambit requires large amounts of fanwankery and an acceptance that Palpatine could provide enough guns and money to the rebels to keep them doing exactly what he says without leaving any paper trail.
It also relies on the idea that things will collapse exactly as he planned, with the senate granting him dictator status. Of course in the real world, the collapse will almost certainly end with the Republic fracturing and some people electing him leader and other electing other leaders or simply going independent. And there is no particular reason why the leader of the failed government would command the most popular faction.
It also seems ridiculous to think that if the Queen is killed, the Republic will be spurred to action against the invaders, when there was no outrage when those same invaders killed what are implied to be millions of people in order to get the Queen to return and surrender. An invasion and genocide resulted in a debate and stalemate. Why would the death of one elected head of state change anything?
This whole idea that the plan was some sort of Batman Gambit seems to have spring up from fanwankery devoted to explaining the massive plot holes in the plan of TPM. The whole plan, as we are told, relies on the queen escaping before she can be forced to sign a treaty. But she only barely managed to escape, with the help of the Jedi, who themselves only barely managed to arrive at all. So fans had to invent this idea that there was a backup plan for what would have happened if the queen had signed the treaty, or been captured and locked in prison, or her ship was destroyed running the blockade, or she simply disappeared on Tatooine because her ship couldn’t be repaired or the assassin that Palpatine sent to kill her actually succeeded. But there is no mention of such plans in the movie. Not even a hint. It was just a badly written script with massive plot holes.
I have never understood
The clarinet player from the Mos Eisley Cantina had a forehead that looked like a butt and that dude got laid all the time!
Besides, Palpatine’s forehead only looked like a butt until the swelling went down. By the time we see him again in Return of the Jedi his forehead no longer looks like that. His terribly scarred appearance had a major influence in turning the Senate against the Jedi, only strengthening my assertion that he was in total control during the Windu encounter.
I honestly think Lucas made everything up as he went along and didn’t know what the hell was doing. Anything that makes sense or is cool in the Star Wars universe was either the result of luck or came from Gary Kurtz, Harrison Ford, Irvin Kirshner, or the magicians at (pre-CGI) ILM.
I thought that the force lightning simply revealed the ugliness underneath the mask, either figuratively (symbolically), and/or literally (as in he had been using makeup or such before to cover it up).
The Senate isn’t a perfectly capable body, though - when one part of their polity engages in open war against another, the Senate is paralyzed and unable to act. It’s like if Texas invaded Oklahoma, and Congress just sat on their thumbs saying, “Let’s see how this plays out.”
On the contrary, he’s shown to the entire galaxy that the Senate is unable to protect its own members. The purpose of the invasion of Naboo was to undercut faith in the democratic processes that underlie the Republic.
I’m not sure about that one - in most of his dealings with the Trade Federation, his face is obscured by a deep hood. The Separtists are not supposed to be aware that the Chancellor of the Senate is directing their actions - just that this mysterious cloaked figure keeps giving them surprisingly useful intelligence.
I think Palpatine is mostly providing intelligence and direction, not material goods. The Trade Federation is massively wealthy, even by interplanetary standards - I think they can bankroll a good chunk of the war by themselves.
Which is more or less what happened - hence the Rebel Alliance in the original trilogy, which was a coalition of all the factions that started to splinter off from the Republic when Palpatine declared himself Emperor.
It wouldn’t. Remember, the invaders are part of the Republic. It’s not an outside force attacking, it’s internal politics breaking down to the point of open war. Amidala being killed and Naboo being conquered would fracture the Republic, with some systems opposing the Trade Federation’s naked aggression, and other systems allying with them as the only force in the Senate strong enough to protect them from their own enemies, now that it’s been demonstrated that the Senate as a whole is not capable of acting to protect its own membership.
When Naboo is invaded, he leverages the current Chancellor’s inability to get the Senate to act into a vote of no confidence, proposed by Queen Amidala. And he’s already laid the groundwork, Frank Underwood-style, to be voted in to the vacant position.
Of course he couldn’t lose. That’s his whole shtick. As Palpatine he was leader of the Republic. As Sidious he was leader of the Separatists. Whoever loses, he wins.
The only real risk he ever took was in mentoring Anakin and eventually coming out as a Sith to him. If Anakin had sided with Windu over Palpy during their fight, that’s really the only time that he really could have been stopped.
