The flaw in this is that Vader captured Leia while jetting around in an imperial battle cruiser right above Tatooine. Luke was right fucking there, probably less ten thousand miles away, while Vader is menacing his own daughter face to face. So, we have Luke, Leia and Obi-Wan all in relatively close proximity (by astronomic standards) to this Sith Master who virtually drips puddles of midichlorians off his fingertips and he gets not even a whisper of a tingle from any of them.
Here’s an idea: Obi-Wan was never hiding. He went to Tatooine expecting Vader to follow, and they’d have a big show down. What he doesn’t know is that one of the first things Vader did after waking up was put up an email filter for anything with “tatooine” in the header, because it made him too depressed. Kenobi’s spent the last twenty years living under his own name, on his arch enemy/best friend’s home planet, not even trying to hide. He wanders into town periodically and force chokes a gangster or just waves his lightsaber around, shouting “I’m a Jedi!” and wondering when the hell is ex-apprentice is finally going to show up so they can fight.
Yeah, who could have expected a clannish inquisition?
Which itself Palpatine could not have anticipated, as Vader rushed off on his own to pursue the Tantive IV after the battle of Scarif.
Everybody expected a clannish inquisition!
That’s not a flaw in the “Palpatine knew” theory. That’s just facts from the source material. Vader was face to face with Leia and didn’t know she was his daughter, on the Tantive IV, and multiple times on the Death Star. They probably met before that too, given their banter on the Tantive IV, they seemed to recognize each other. If he didn’t feel anything face-to-face with her, why would he feel anything from Luke from orbit? (Tatooine is a backwater planet, but it’s still a planet. There are probably millions, if not billions of inhabitants.) Bottom line is, “the Force doesn’t work like that”. If I’m not mistaken, the only person seen to maaaaybe recognize a relative via the force is Leia having “always known” that Luke was her brother. And a) they were twins, so a close connection, via the Force or otherwise, makes some sense, and b) BS, Leia, you didn’t know jack. You open-mouth kissed him. yuck.
It’s been a bit since I’ve seen Rogue One, and I only saw it once, but I don’t recall the Emperor being in it. Did Vader pursue the Tantive IV from Scarif on his own initiative? If Palpatine did know about Luke, either he didn’t have time to tell Vader to stop, or Palpatine didn’t care to keep him away anymore at this point, thinking Luke was old enough that it was time for him to be found and turned.
The whole “search your feelings” thing implies that you have to know the person, and then honestly examine your feelings towards that person to recognize the actual connection between you. Vader can’t “search his feelings” and find out about Luke until he’s met Luke and developed some sort of emotional relationship with him. It’s possible Vader and Leia could have figured it out, based on the pre-existing animosity between them in the first film, but neither thought to examine their relationship beyond the surface “jackbooted thug” v. “rebel scum” dynamic.
Also, Vader’s probably very careful about not ever examining his feelings around hypothetical sons or daughters.
When was the first time Vader met Luke? I cannot remember him being in any proximity to or exchanging any words with Luke prior to the dustup in the cloud city.
My wife and I just watched it again last week. After making his way through the rebel cruiser, the last we see of Vader is him standing in the landing dock, watching the Tantive IV speeding away. There isn’t any discussion of pursuit.
Unless you count Splinter of the Mind’s Eye, that’s their first meeting. Luke saw Vader kill Obiwan from a distance, and Vader pursued Luke’s X-wing in his TIE during the Death Star battle. But Luke’s “NOOOO!” at the first, and Vader’s “The force is strong with this one” at the second are the closest they came to exchanging words.
Pardon me if this has already been proposed (long thread):
Vader and Luke don’t start getting Force feelings for each other until shortly after Obi Wan’s death (“The Force is strong in this one”). Maybe Obi Wan was projecting some kind of Force cloak that only worked when he was meat and bone.
Or maybe Obi-Wan is himself part of the bond, being a person to whom both were close, and so when Obi-Wan became “more powerful than you can possibly imagine”, the bond became stronger, too.
That’s correct. Apparently the intended implication is that Vader immediately began hunting down the Tantive IV, catching up with it around Tatooine.
And yet, some of us old farts will remember, the word did leak. Well before The Empire Strikes Back was released, it was widely rumored that Darth Vader would be revealed as Luke’s father, and that Luke and Leia would be revealed as brother-and-sister.
The nature of the scene in which the Big Reveal would occur did not leak ahead of the release, though.
MAD Magazine couldn’t overlook this. In their parody of the movie, where they decide to hide Luke, Obi-Wan and Yoda are shown congratulating each other for their cleverness in sending him to live on Tatooine with his uncle and not even changing his name.
The Emperor isn’t in Rogue One, and it would seem Vader is literally in hot pursuit of Leia’s ship, which would certainly suggest her getaway plan was pretty shitty. So either it’s just a coincidence that he catches her at Tatooine or (I’d assume, because that’s how SW works now) somehow the Force made it happen.
That may be, but we didn’t find out about Luke and Leia’s sibling connection until the next movie in 1983.
Such a rumor did leak but there were competing rumors. For example, we had been introduced to Boba Fett in the Star Wars Holiday Special and it was also rumored that Boba Fett was Luke’s father. Part of the strength of this rumor is because we had been told that Vader killed Luke’s father (and thus couldn’t have been his father) and because we had been given little reason to have been introduced to him.
That Holiday Special was quite the experience. For the longest time I wondered if I had imagined it since no one else seemed to have seen it and you couldn’t find it anywhere.
Like that Fantastic Four movie, which oddly enough remains the best Fantastic Four movie ever made…