OK, so some link from a thread somewhere on the boards here sent me to a Star Wars wikipedia. I took the opportunity to look up General Grievous as there is something about him that always bothered me (besides him being in a crappy movie). Namely, why was he at all dangerous to Jedi?
The article I read had an exhaustive description of him and his past, but it completely failed to address why telekinetic super-warriors couldn’t just hurl his ass into a wall or convenient reactor or something. Hell, one could just pin his arms to his sides while another lopped him into little bits. Instead he is described as being able to take out four Jedi at a time, no problem. The guy had no force sensitivity at all, he was just a good fighter augmented by technology. While that might make him a superior duelist (though I was always led to believe that you had to be force sensitive just to avoid slicing your own arms off with a light saber), it leaves him completely open to being tossed around like a sock puppet.
I know the real answer is that it was necessary for the plot, but Star Wars geeks are renowned for inventing reasons to explain away everything in the Star Wars universe. What have they invented for this?
In the Clone Wars animated series, they do a much better job of illustrating Grievous’s capabilities. Because he was pretty much a robot powered by a living brain, he had physical power and adaptability. The Jedi in Clone Wars frequently try to shove him with the Force, and he always jumps away just in time.
Force sensitivity is considered necessary for using a lightsaber because it’s too easily mishandled. All the weight is in the hand, which means a light flick of the wrist will cut a large arc in the air. Most living beings need the edge the Force gives them in order to keep from cutting their own limbs off. Grievous had insane motor control and was taught by Dooku. Basically, he just had the best of both mental and physical worlds.
From what I’ve read he was born a warrior. He somehow got manipulated by the Sith to work for them. I read that he wanted nothing more than to die valiantly in battle. He was pure aggression.
He was a military strategist, and so was dangerous that way as well. The republic needed to defeat him in battle and had a hard time doing it mostly because they couldn’t get close enough to him in order to do it.
It’s like asking why the allies during WWII just didn’t get a sniper in there to shoot Hitler. If they could have they would have. As soon as the republic did get a powerful Jedi in close enough Grevious was finished.
As I hear it, Grevious was almsot literally made by Dooku. Dooku found him, blew his body up, had his scientists mess with the man’s head, and plugged him into the custom robo-body.
Now, as far as it goes, the Jedi seem to have a MUCH harder time using their powers on living people, and maybe that applies to part-droid people, too. The jedi don’t, for example, snap necks with the force. Even Darth Vader and the Emperor don’t do that. Vader has to stop the air in someone’s throat. The Emperor solves all his problems by blasting them with Dark Force Lightning.
Also: Why did he have a smoker’s cough? Sure that cyborg’s brain needs oxygen. So how do they go about delivering it to his system? What did they get the Mythbusters to rig it?
Jamie Hyneman: Well, this shouldn’t be a problem. Along with 99% of his other parts, I’ve assembled a simple, yet reliable pump to deliver air to his brain.
Adam Savage: Screw that! I’ve salvaged a quarter of his crippled cardiovascular system to try and bolt in there. Swcheet! Look at him hack and sputter!
His cough was in reference to a shot that he took to the ribcage in the Clone Wars cartoon. Though maybe the Mythbusters did have something to do with it once you put it that way. :dubious:
AFAIK The main reason the force is needed to wield a lightsaber (one of the coolest weapons EVER) is because it’s only by being able to see a split second into the future that one can deflect incoming weapons fire with it. If you can’t do that trick then anyone with a multi-shot ranged weapon could cut a jedi to bits.
There was a multihour Star Wars special a while back which claimed that Grievous was basically the beta version of Vader’s cyborg body. I can’t check - I lost it in my DVR disk crash.
If a Jedi can always block a blaster bolt with his lightsaber, and presumably can even block two at a time by angling the blade the right way, what happens when three shots come at the same time? I have in mind an “anti-Jedi blaster” designed to fire three shots in a triangular spread about a foot apart.
And please don’t say “blaster bolts only travel at about the speed of an arrow, so Jedi can block as many as they need to.” Even if it’s true.
You might as well forget the high fallutin’ technology and just get a shotgun. There’s your “anti-Jedi blaster”. Can lightsabers deflect bullets? A lightsaber may be hot but I think a bullet would be traveling too fast to be melted by it, it’d probably pass right through it. Of course no one in the Star Wars universe uses a normal gun because that wouldn’t be any fun.
At first I thought Grievous might be force-sensitive, but apparently not. In the cartoon, he ends up taking on at least 4 jedi at once and destroying them all. I could imagine him overwhelming a single jedi, but taking on 4 people with telekinetic powers with no powers himself is a bit much. Couldn’t all four of them just throw a rock at him or something? Not even the toughest warrior would be able to block attacks from 4 different directions at once without some kind of superpower.
Non-force guys aren’t supposed to have any problem using a lightsaber as a tool, it is the swinging all crazy that gets ya if you don’t have mystic powers.
Magnetic fields?
This is a good response to the person who said that as soon as a Jedi got involved he was taken out. Honestly, Even if he can jump really fast to get out of the way of even a telekinetic power, those powers aren’t just slamming and pushing, they can move and hold things too (think Luke on Dagoba). Even if they have a hard time “locking on to him”, as soon as he jumps he is easy prey. Force users might be able change direction mid air, but he has to follow an obvious parabolic course. Then one of the Jedi force grabs him and holds him upside down while another rips one arm off after another. Easy. They wouldn’t have to worry about hurting a living creature because 1: his arms aren’t biological, and 2: I don’t think they know that ANY of him was actually biological.
As far as shotguns go though; there is no good excuse for that.
As for all the weazing posts, the wikipedia entry I read said that the weazing originally came about because Lucas had a cold one day and thought it would be cool if they made the evil android have one too. In the SW universe they explain it by saying that the robot/biological interface wasn’t up to par yet and was degrading over time (reminiscent of Vader’s later breathing sounds). This was made made much worse by Windu’s force crush. Speaking of which, if you can crush the incredibly strong metal, why not just hold it in place? It would take a great deal more force to deform the material than to support it.
I suppose I am just being overly critical, but it seems like a friggin huge plot hole to have him be an ultimate Jedi-killer when he had no defenses against one of their most basic weapons.
I personally blame the Star Wars games for the current incarnation of Force powers. To make the game mechanics work, the powers got neatly divided into ‘Force Push’, ‘Force Pull’, and similar, and they worked in a very certain way. Manipulating objects with the Force wasn’t a matter of actually moving that object, but rather pushing something down was more like the Jedi aimed and shoved a wall of air at something to knock it over rather than exert any direct influence on the thing itself.
This worked for the games, and the Dark Forces/Jedi Knight series was a lot of fun, but it seems to me that everything created after the games was informed by them, which isn’t necessarily the best design decision IMO. It turned the Force, which was a mystical, amorphous energy that you can shape as you need, into a D&D wizard’s spell list.
(Speaking of the games, they did have a shotgun-style weapon in some of them. IIRC, you could block MOST of the pellets, but some would still get through. Of course, since games track your health in percentage, this wasn’t exactly lethal.)