Note: The following is strictly an experiment, and not to be entered into the actual Palpatine article until the admins have had a look at it. And be warned; it'll be written a bit at a time, and that's all I can manage. So please be patient. Thank you.

Palpatine, also known as Lord Darth Sidious, was the last Supreme Chancellor of the Galactic Republic and the first ruler of the Galactic Empire. He was also the last legitimate Sith Lord of the lineage of Darth Bane. Beginning his road to power in near-complete obscurity, Palpatine rose to a prominent position in the Galactic Senate through his skill in political manipulation and his power in the dark side of the Force. Through fraud, clever promises, and astute political maneuvering, Palpatine exploited a manufactured crisis to lever himself into the position of supreme chancellor, and used the same techniques to keep himself there long after his term of office had ended. By creating from whole cloth a mass secessionist movement and igniting the civil war that history has termed the Clone Wars, Palpatine funneled ever more power to himself, until, finally, he was powerful enough to strike down the traditional enemies of the Sith, the Jedi Order, dismantle the Republic, and have himself declared ruler of the new Galactic Empire, at last achieving the long-awaited revenge of the Sith and establishing himself as an absolute tyrant.

Contents 1 Biography 1.1 Part I: Palpatine the Conspirator 1.1.1 Contingency Order 66 1.2 Part II: Palpatine the Emperor 1.3 Part III: Palpatine the Undying 1.3.1 Kuat 1.3.1.1 Postscript I: The Eclipse-class Star Dreadnought 1.3.1.2 Postscript II: Bevel Lemelisk 1.3.2 Operation Shadow Hand 1.3.2.1 Palpatine and Sedriss 1.3.2.1.1 The Subjugation of Sedriss 1.3.2.1.2 The Training and Appointment of Sedriss 1.3.3 The Legacy of Palpatine 1.3.3.1 The New Republic 1.3.3.2 Imperialist and Reactionary Movements 1.3.3.3 The Yuuzhan Vong War 1.3.3.3.1 The First Rumors of the Yuuzhan Vong 1.3.3.3.2 The Galactic Empire vs. the Yuuzhan Vong? 1.3.3.3.3 The Use of Superweapons 1.3.3.3.4 Postscript 1.3.3.4 Darth Sidious and Darth Caedus 1.3.3.5 Darth Sidious and Darth Krayt 2 Behind the scenes 2.1 Character inspiration 2.1.1 Inspiration for the character in real life 2.1.1.1 Julius Caesar and Augustus Caesar 2.1.1.2 Napoleon Bonaparte 2.1.1.3 Adolf Hitler 2.1.1.4 Richard Nixon 2.2 Character development 2.2.1 Development of the character for Star Wars (1973-1977) 2.2.1.1 circa January-March 1973 2.2.1.2 May 1973 2.2.1.3 May 1974 2.2.1.4 November 1976 2.2.1.5 August 1977 2.2.2 Development of the character for The Empire Strikes Back (1977-1980) 2.2.2.1 November-December 1977 2.2.2.2 March-April 1978 2.2.2.3 October 1978 2.2.2.4 March 1979 2.2.2.5 March 1980 2.2.2.6 May 1980 2.2.2.7 Postscript: July 2003 3 Notes and references

BiographyEdit

Part I: Palpatine the ConspiratorEdit

The entry Sidious made in Maul’s journal was made after he had calmed himself, presumably hours or even days after hearing the news. Despite his victories, the anger he felt at the losses he had suffered to gain them was genuine and deep. Kinman Doriana, who was one of his agents and was present during the Naboo incident, would long recall Sidious’ anger at the unexpected defeat of the Trade Federation and the death of Maul. The Federation was supposed to hold Naboo for months or years, creating turmoil in the Senate that Sidious could have used to devastating effect. And Maul’s death had effectively short-circuited a quiet reign of terror, in which Maul would have picked off individual Jedi one by one over time, just as he had with Anoon Bondara and Darsha Assant, which would have distracted the Order even as its ranks were gradually pruned. All of those carefully-laid plans were now useless, because of simple dumb luck, because Kenobi had been a lucky swordsbeing, because Skywalker had been a lucky pilot.

And yet, this was not the last word Sidious had on the subject. When the mysterious Telos Holocron was discovered (ca. 40 ABY), Sidious himself - by then thirty years dead - was found to be one of its hologrammic gatekeepers. Among the numerous reminiscences the artifact stubbornly yielded to Jedi examiners, an account was found recorded by Palpatine in his exile on Byss, an account where he completely revised history. According to this account, the loss of Maul was neither unexpected nor an impediment to his plans; it was the means to advance his plans. He had expected Maul’s death and made no attempt to prevent it; foreseeing that the young Anakin Skywalker, who had come to the attention of the Jedi Council just days prior, would ultimately become his apprentice, he had essentially sacrificed Maul to this end. He stated:

As loyal as he [Maul] was, I made no effort to caution him when I foresaw his death in a duel with the Jedi on Naboo, for by that time, the Jedi had already become aware of their “Chosen One,” the remarkably powerful Anakin Skywalker. I had foreseen that Skywalker would eventually become my apprentice, but that I would have to wait for him. Ultimately, Maul was nothing more than a tool, and despite his sense of purpose he never realized that it was not his destiny to raze the Jedi Temple. But by slaying Qui-Gon Jinn before he was in turn killed by Obi-Wan Kenobi, that tool accomplished a different goal: he rattled the Jedi Order’s long-complacent attitude regarding the exist-ence of the Sith, making many of them nervous and paranoid, and also created a path for Skywalker to be trained in the ways of the Force by Kenobi, a Jedi with relatively little experience. To those who do not know me, my actions - or apparent inactions - during the Battle of Naboo may have seemed less like a calculated risk than a gross exercise in wishful thinking. I’m sure you will agree that such suggestions are insulting. No, I knew exactly what I was doing when I allowed events to happen as they did. Why train an apprentice to hate the Jedi when the Jedi can train him for you?

This passage contradicts previous accounts made by Sidious himself and his aides; however, this account was recorded more than four decades later, when he had the benefit not of foresight, but of hindsight, when the schemes he had been working on at that point had long since come to fruition. It was easy for him to then make the claim that everything - even his failures - were anticipated, were all part of his greater plan, especially when he had no scruples about altering or even destroying the historical record to suit his needs and when there was no way to confirm or refute his words.

Palpatine: This is Supreme Chancellor Palpatine. The war is over. I repeat, the war is over. All Jedi are ordered to return to the Jedi Temple immediately. You will receive further instructions when you arrive.

Contingency Order 66Edit

Practically from the beginning of their training, the clones that comprised the GAR were secretly prepared to execute, without question and only in specific cases of extreme necessity, a series of special Contingency Orders that covered any and all emergency situations. Every one of these Contingency Orders was described as a Large Scale Operation (LSO) and could be found in the document Contingency Orders for the Grand Army of the Republic: Order Initiation, Orders 1 through 150, GAR Document CO(CL) 56-95. Every clone officer was required to know all of them by heart.

Order 66: In the event of Jedi officers acting against the interests of the Republic, and after receiving specific orders verified as coming directly from the Supreme Commander (Chancellor), GAR commanders will remove those officers by lethal force and command of the GAR will revert to the Supreme Commander (Chancellor) until a new command structure is established.

Though sufficiently buried among the other one hundred forty-nine orders as to escape notice, Order 66 stands out for those who observe it closely after the fact. For one thing, the majority of the other known orders take into account other sources of command authority - the Vice Chair, the Senate Security Council, the Jedi Council, the GAR High Command - while Order 66 could only be issued by the Supreme Commander - in this case, Palpatine himself. It was not required that the Security Council, or a Senate majority, declare that the Jedi were acting against Republic interests; Palpatine alone had the power to make that determination. GAR commanders were not required to authenticate the order, or even to report it to any other command authority. If the order came directly from Palpatine, using specific command phrasing and over specific communications channels pre-approved by him for this express purpose, that was all the authentication the ever-obedient clone commanders were likely to need. There was also no apparent mechanism for rescinding the order; the trigger, once pulled, could not be un-pulled.

Furthermore, there was no proviso - as there was in other known contingency orders - that the Jedi should be detained and that lethal force should be used if necessary; they were just to be removed by lethal force, period. Objectively, this could be rationalized: despite secret attempts by the Republic to create apparatus to capture and hold rogue Jedi, such as those who had served Dooku, it was likely generally believed that any attempt to detain a Jedi who did not wish to be detained would fail, except in the event that said Jedi was faced with overwhelming GAR numbers, and even then, such an attempt would surely result in numerous unnecessary GAR casualties. The use of lethal force, in that event, would therefore automatically be considered necessary.

Part II: Palpatine the EmperorEdit

Part III: Palpatine the UndyingEdit

KuatEdit

In the outside galaxy, NRAF forces captured Kuat (8 ABY). Ever since Endor, the Imperial leadership had feared losing this vital system and its shipyards to the Rebels. To try to prevent this, fifteen Star Destroyers were dispatched to guard the system, and spacetroopers had rigged the yards with explosives in case it became necessary to scuttle them. But despite these procedures, Kuat fell into New Republic hands, though its shipyards were so extensively damaged that new construction was delayed indefinitely, and its government joined the New Republic.

Postscript I: The Eclipse-class Star DreadnoughtEdit

Palpatine did gain something from the fall of Kuat, however. The KDY senior engineering design team successfully evacuated the planet and fled to the Deep Core. With them came their prototype Eclipse-class Star Dreadnought, only half-completed, though its drive systems functioned sufficiently to serve as an escape vehicle. Palpatine was pleased by this development; he had commissioned the Eclipse-class in the immediate post-Hoth period (ca. 3 ABY) to function as his personal command ship, and KDY had outdone itself in implementing its design philosophy of "terror styling." The final design was a black dagger tens of thousands of meters long, one of the largest fighting ships ever constructed, armed and armored to an unprecedented degree. The most significant development was the incorporation of a superlaser based on the Death Stars' own prime weapons, capable of shattering planetary shields and searing entire continents with a single pulse. When his plans were finally ready, Palpatine intended to lead his great onslaught against the galaxy from the command bridge of this leviathan, and more ships like it would soon join it.

The Eclipse itself is an example of Palpatine's all-pervasive influence even from anonymous exile. Most Imperial Navy planners had never understood the need for this new class of starship, and after Endor, foolishly operating under the assumption that he was dead, they suggested that the project be scrapped in favor of producing more conventional capital ships. To them, the Eclipse represented one of the many extravagances that the Emperor could have insisted on while alive, but could not be justified now that he was "dead." Traditional ships of the line, they believed, were what was needed now, not some grandiose yacht sitting in the KDY docks for years on end with no sign of completion. But for some reason the planners could not fathom, construction always continued - the result, it was eventually learned, of secret orders by Palpatine himself. This is why the vessel was spaceworthy enough to make the desperate jump from Kuat to Byss when it was most needed.

Postscript II: Bevel LemeliskEdit

Palpatine narrowly missed reacquiring an additional human asset when he reclaimed the Eclipse: Bevel Lemelisk had joined the KDY design team after Endor, applying his experience with superlaser technology to the construction of the Eclipse’s primary weapon. But he had heard rumors of Palpatine’s return while at KDY, and his numerous personal experiences with resurrection left him in no doubt that such a thing was possible; indeed, quite likely. Thus, when the Eclipse design team fled for the Deep Core, Lemelisk did not join them; in fact, he wanted to stay as far away from Palpatine as possible. Though Endor was four years in the past, Palpatine had a long memory. Lemelisk had suffered seven agonizing deaths for the loss of just one Death Star; he could only imagine what he would suffer for the loss of a second. Nor could he defect to the New Republic; the former Rebels would likely try him for war crimes if they laid their hands on him (which was exactly what happened when they captured him four years later). Instead, he fell in with Besadii, a Hutt clan, hiring out his talents to criminals.

If Palpatine ever realized that Lemelisk had narrowly escaped his grasp, there is no evidence that he ever pursued him. Nor is there any way of being certain of what Lemelisk’s welcome would have been had he been captured. Palpatine’s past behavior certainly indicates that he would have continued to devise more terrifying deaths, to chastise his designer for failing again to create an invulnerable battle station. But it can also be assumed that he would have continued to revive Lemelisk as well; the cloning facilities were at hand, and Palpatine was far more able with the technique of transferring consciousness than before. The reason is simple; there was still valuable work for him to do, and always, Palpatine never discarded those things that remained useful. Certainly the World Devastators and Galaxy Gun, though largely Umak Leth’s brainchildren, could have used his talents, and the Eclipse would still need years to complete. If nothing else, the deaths of Lemelisk can be imagined to have made for satisfying entertainment.

Operation Shadow HandEdit

Palpatine conceived his grand strategy to reconquer the galaxy. He would call it Operation Shadow Hand, a code-name imbued with deep meaning; in the furthest past of the ancient Sith, the second-in-command of Adas (ca. 28,000-27,700 BBY), the Sith warrior-king, was referred to as his Shadow Hand, and the term had endured throughout every subsequent incarnation of the Sith in reference to apprentices, right down to the present time and to his own apprentices - Darth Maul, Darth Tyranus and Darth Vader. As the acquisition of a new apprentice to replace Vader would be a key ingredient of this strategy, the name was undeniably apropos.

Palpatine and SedrissEdit

As Palpatine readied Operation Shadow Hand for implementation (9 ABY), he addressed the need for a new supreme commander for his reassembled forces; a military executor he knew would remain absolutely loyal to him. The being he appointed was a young darksider named Sedriss, a tall, imposing figure with an aggressive bearing, and absolute fealty to his master.

The Subjugation of SedrissEdit

Sedriss had begun as an amoral mercenary with a midi-chlorian count sufficient to grant him aptitude with the Force, but it could not be harnessed because he also had a violent disdain for authority. Various Imperial organizations, military and otherwise, had tried to recruit him but found him insolent and insubordinate. Ultimately he had killed several Imperial officers, was arrested, tried, and sentenced to death. He had been awaiting execution when the Inquisitorius spirited him away and dragged him before the Emperor. Palpatine took Sedriss’ measure and clearly saw the problem: Sedriss was so able next to his superiors that he knew they could never be his superiors. He could kill them easily, and so he could never be expected to respect them, much less obey them. What Sedriss had needed was someone to demonstrate true superiority with crystal clarity, so when he was brought before Palpatine, the Emperor asked him simply:

Palpatine: Would you like to kill me?

Palpatine had made a pact with Sedriss: the two of them would duel; if Sedriss won, he could kill Palpatine. If he lost, he had to serve Palpatine without question, or else face the most horrific, lingering, humiliating death he could imagine. Sedriss agreed, feeling his chances against what seemed to be a frail-looking old man were good. Though it is likely that Palpatine was as capable with a blade as ever, rather than resort to it, he put the sheer power of the Force itself to work; the instant Sedriss agreed to the contest, he was crushed to the ground by the Emperor’s power. Sedriss admitted he was bested and promised to honor their pact, but Palpatine did not release him. Sedriss fought to breathe through his collapsing ribs and swore to serve the Emperor, and still Palpatine did not stop. Finally, mere heartbeats from death, Sedriss begged to serve Palpatine, and only then did the Emperor release him. When he was finally able to stand again, he knelt instead, convinced that this was a superior who truly was superior to him.

The Training and Appointment of SedrissEdit

Having brought the rebellious Sedriss to heel, Palpatine saw to his training in the Force (as it was the secretive order of the Prophets of the Dark Side that Palpatine tasked with the early training of some of his darksiders, it is possible that Sedriss was given some training by them before he was given further, more extensive training under the Emperor personally). After extensive study, Sedriss had developed to the point where he could wield the Force in much the same manner - though not as powerfully - as Palpatine himself. Throughout the process, Sedriss wondered just what purpose the Emperor had in mind for him, but Palpatine declined to discuss the subject.

Sedriss remained loyal even after Palpatine's death at Endor. Like most of the dark side adepts, he withdrew to the Deep Core to wait for his master's return. There, he took command of Byss' military defenses; while various other supposedly loyal former lieutenants fought among themselves for power on Coruscant and the rest of the Empire, Sedriss understood that if Palpatine's Empire were to endure, it would depend on the Emperor's facilities on Byss remaining under the control of those who remained loyal to Palpatine. His faith was proved justified when Palpatine was reborn in a new clone body (5 ABY) and later appointed Sedriss his military executor (9 ABY), charging him with the implementation of Shadow Hand. Certainly the strategy was one that Sedriss understood well: assault his targets and stop only when they begged, just as Sedriss himself once had, to be allowed to serve Palpatine.

The Legacy of PalpatineEdit

The New RepublicEdit

Imperialist and Reactionary MovementsEdit

The Yuuzhan Vong WarEdit

As early as Palpatine’s first term as supreme chancellor, there began to emerge rumors and intelligence concerning the existence of an extragalactic species, the Far Outsiders, employing biotechnology and planning an invasion of the galaxy. Fourteen years after his final death on Onderon, the long-anticipated invasion began, resulting in a brutal war that caused more deaths - some three hundred sixty-five trillion beings - than all of Palpatine’s intrigues combined. Palpatine, being dead, was no longer able to affect the course of the war in any way, but it can be argued that he had numerous opportunities either to prevent the invasion, or to alert the galaxy to the threat posed by the Far Outsiders, opportunities that he had either ignored, insufficiently pursued, or simply used to gain greater political advantage.

The First Rumors of the Yuuzhan VongEdit

The first known instance of Palpatine ever hearing of the Yuuzhan Vong by any name - in this case, the Far Outsiders - came in the wake of a secret mission (29 BBY) arranged by Darth Sidious to examine the starships made by the civilization on Zonama Sekot, a rogue planet deep within the Tingel Arm. Sidious dispatched his agent, Wilhuff Tarkin, to discover what he could about these ships, and Tarkin included his old friend Raith Sienar, long established as the head of a shipbuilding firm with whom Sidious had had covert dealings.

One of the extraordinary sources of information Sidious possessed was a recording device, hidden within a droid that Tarkin had infiltrated into the Jedi Temple itself. Through that droid, and from reports submitted by Tarkin and Sienar after the fact, it can be assumed that Sidious learned the following: that a Jedi named Vergere had previously been sent to Zonama Sekot (30 BBY) to examine its shipbuilding techniques, and happened to be present to witness the arrival of scout ships, utilizing a form of biotech, operated by a previously unknown species, which the population of Zonama Sekot referred to as the Far Outsiders.

Through Kinman Doriana’s reports and subsequent investigation, Darth Sidious learned that the Chiss, a near-human race in the Unknown Regions with whom Doriana had established contact, had encountered the Yuuzhan Vong on the far spinward edge of their space. The attackers were small in number, a reconnaissance force, but they fought with a savage ferocity before the Chiss finally drove them away. After his experiences in Chiss space, Doriana was inclined to give this information full credence, and it must be assumed that Doriana - who is not known to have held anything back from Sidious, no matter how insignificant - relayed it to his master with all due seriousness, and provided him with the combat data from the incident.

Doriana informed his new Chiss liaison - a CEDF commander named Mitth’raw’nuruodo, who would eventually go on to achieve both fame and infamy in the Empire as one of its grand admirals - that Sidious’ intention was to inform the galaxy at large of the threat of the Far Outsiders, once he had brought order to the chaotic Republic and assembled an army and a navy capable of dealing with the threat. Until those objectives had been achieved, Doriana claimed, Sidious did not wish to announce it, so as to prevent a mass panic that would leave the galaxy even more vulnerable. But though Palpatine eventually established his Empire, and assembled the largest army and navy in galactic history, there is nothing to suggest that he ever made a public announcement regarding the threat posed by the Far Outsiders, under that name or any other. Furthermore, with the exception of Thrawn, and those officers, such as Voss Parck, that Thrawn kept in his personal confidence, even the highest-ranking command officers in the Imperial armed forces seem not to have been informed about it. In the early days of the actual invasion (25 ABY), it was confirmed that Imperial records contained no mention of the Yuuzhan Vong.

While the galaxy at large was engrossed in fighting, within the Unknown Regions, both the Empire of the Hand and the Chiss Ascendancy largely sat out the war, undisturbed and unscathed. Both powers sent small, less-than-official expeditionary forces to oppose the Vong, and both were quite willing to render aid and assistance when asked, but with the sole but significant exception of a Chiss-designed bioweapon that played a crucial role in ending the war, neither power participated in any large-scale capacity or had a significant impact on the outcome. Whatever intentions Palpatine had nursed for either power in the event of an invasion, they did not come to fruition.

The Galactic Empire vs. the Yuuzhan Vong?Edit

The Yuuzhan Vong War concluded following a pitched engagement over Coruscant (29 ABY), in which NRDF forces fought alongside Imperial forces under the new command structure of the Galactic Alliance Defense Forces (GADF) to liberate the galactic capital. Following the deaths of their supreme overlord, Shimrra Jamaane, his familiar Onimi, and their duplicitous executor Nom Anor, a Vong delegation, led by their warmaster, Nas Choka, formally surrendered to GA forces and exiled themselves to the Unknown Regions.

Thus the conclusion of the war, for better or worse, had been reached, but even before that had come to pass, there were many beings, first in the Imperial Remnant and then throughout the galaxy, who wondered if the singular iron will of an Emperor, equipped with a top-line military with very few restrictions on its rules of engagement, would not have fared better against the Vong than had the weak-willed leadership of the New Republic, with its hamstrung military. The implication is that the Empire would have repelled the Vong where the New Republic could not have, sparing the galaxy uncounted casualties and saving hundreds or thousands of worlds from occupation, or even destruction. Though this particular attitude became widespread during the war, and expressed in various ways, it was expressed most succinctly by a certain Commander Vana Dorja (b. 2 BBY), an Imperial fleet officer who witnessed firsthand the fall of Coruscant to the Yuuzhan Vong.

Dorja: I hope you will forgive my partisan attitude, but it seems to me that the Emperor would have mobilized his entire armament at the first threat, and dealt with the Yuuzhan Vong in an efficient and expeditious manner, through the use of overwhelming force. Certainly better than Borsk Fey’lya’s policy - if I understood it correctly as a policy - of negotiating with the invaders at the same time as he was fighting them, sending signals of weakness to a ruthless enemy who used negotiation only as a cover for further conquests.

In order to consider this question properly, and gauge the potential success or failure of an Imperial response to the Vong invasion, a base assumption must be made first: that the Galactic Empire would have avoided defeat by the Rebels and endured largely unchanged from what it was at the height of its power, and that Palpatine would have remained on the throne as Emperor.

In the first months of the invasion (25 ABY), the Yuuzhan Vong were concentrated in the Outer Rim, a region of the galaxy that both the Empire and the Old Republic before it showed little concern for. The Republic had barely a care when the worlds of the Outer Rim were abused by the Trade Federation’s practices, and during the New Order, news of Imperial atrocities in the region was generally ignored. Palpatine was even able to cover up any news about the ravaging of Rimward systems by the Ssi-ruuk. Thus, though the Vong were installed on remote worlds like Belkadan, Dantooine and Bimmiel, these names would have meant nothing to the average Imperial citizen in the Core, Palpatine’s main source of grassroots support. He could afford to do without such systems in his Empire. There is, therefore, no reason to assume that any measures the Empire would have employed against the Vong at this point would have been noticed by the galaxy at large.

The Use of SuperweaponsEdit

Solo: What the Empire would have done was build a super-colossal Yuuzhan Vong-killing battle machine. They would have called it the Nova Colossus or the Galaxy Destructor or the Nostril of Palpatine or something equally grandiose. They would have spent billions of credits, employed thousands of contractors and subcontractors, and equipped it with the latest in death-dealing technology. And you know what would have happened? It wouldn’t have worked. They’d forget to bolt down a metal plate over an access hatch leading to the main reactors, or some other mistake, and a hotshot enemy pilot would drop a bomb down there and blow the whole thing up. Now that’s what the Empire would have done.

Solo may have scored a debating point, but this is not to say that, in the case of the Yuuzhan Vong, he would have been correct. His point probably would have held true, had the enemy still been the Rebel Alliance, a very loosely-organized force composed of highly individualistic beings employing highly unorthodox strategies. It is true that there are numerous incidents of Imperial superweapons being undone by individualist forces; the Death Star fell quite easily at Yavin 4 when the Rebels, using captured intelligence, looked for and found a barely-noticeable flaw in the station’s design. So too did the Tarkin testbed at Hockaleg, when a small Rebel insertion team gained access to its internal mechanisms. So too had the battlemoon Eye of Palpatine when it was sabotaged by a pair of intruders which it was not prepared to repel. In every recorded case, these Imperial superweapons were brought low by forces who fought as individuals, and this is a far cry from the way the Yuuzhan Vong operated.

PostscriptEdit

Perhaps the ultimate conclusion is not an objective one, but subjective, given by a certain Lieutenant Titch, an officer in Galactic Alliance Intelligence (GAI). This young man, born just as the long and harrowing conflict between the New Republic and the Empire was coming to a close with the signing of the Pellaeon-Gavrisom Treaty, never experienced life under the New Order as Palpatine had envisioned it, and ultimately this armchair perspective left him oblivious - or simply uncaring - to the moral and practical need to destroy it. He was old enough, though, to experience the deep wounds, physical and psychological, dealt by the Yuuzhan Vong War, and like so many others he accepted, without question, the common belief that the Empire would have dealt with the Vong in a decisive fashion:

Titch: I’m sick of hearing the Rebel Alliance generation brag about how they stomped the Empire and then whine about how the galaxy owes them a living, or special favors. The Empire would have kicked the Yuuzhan Vong in the teeth, and I wouldn’t have lost almost everyone I knew when I was a kid, if you hadn’t “won.”

Thus Palpatine had had one of his last great triumphs, thirty years beyond his last death, in that the lesson of the Vong invasion learned by the generation that lived through it, sundered by time and perspective from any first-hand knowledge of life in the Empire, was this: parliamentary democracies cannot protect their peoples, and highly centralized governments can; the very lesson that Palpatine had attempted to demonstrate. An entire generation, their consciousnesses seared by fear and trauma, had embraced of their own accord the philosophies of the New Order and gave the beings that had defeated it - many of whom were also crucial in finally ending the threat posed by the Yuuzhan Vong - no gratitude at all. Palpatine had won the hearts and minds of this generation from beyond the grave. It was a singularly bitter form of revenge, all the more so because it prepared the ground for the imposition, with just a little prodding, of yet another galactic dictatorship, again headed by a Sith Lord.

Darth Sidious and Darth CaedusEdit

The deaths of Darth Sidious and Darth Vader ended, for the immediate future, the lineage of the Dark Lords of the Sith dating back to the time of Darth Bane. Though there were numerous pretenders to Sidious’s legacy, and numerous would-be Sith, it was only with the coming of Darth Caedus that the Sith again emerged as a viable threat. Like Darth Vader, Darth Caedus was a former Jedi, and both were of the Skywalker bloodline.

Darth Sidious and Darth KraytEdit

After Darth Caedus came and went, the Galactic Alliance endured, largely untroubled, for another ninety years, while the Imperial Remnant reorganized itself to meet the needs of the post-insurrection galaxy. But at the end of that interregnum, the Alliance was ultimately brought down, and the Galactic Empire found itself restored to prominence as the dominant galactic power. This great sea change was the work of one being, a being who himself had been a victim of Palpatine’s actions, and, in his own way, was yet another legacy that Palpatine had left behind.

Behind the scenesEdit

Character inspirationEdit

Inspiration for the character in real lifeEdit

Julius Caesar and Augustus CaesarEdit

Lucas cited the Roman military commander and noble Gaius Julius Caesar (102/100-44 B.C.), and his nephew, Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus (63 B.C.-14 A.D.), who during a traumatic period of upheaval and civil war did away with the Roman Republic and established the Roman Empire, which would dominate Europe for the next thousand years. From the DVD commentary for Revenge of the Sith:

Lucas: After the Senate in ancient Rome kills Caesar, they turn around and give the Empire over to his nephew and make him Emperor.

Napoleon BonaparteEdit

Lucas also cited the Corsican military commander Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821), who used his success in battle to gain popular support and gain control of France. From the DVD commentary for Revenge of the Sith:

Lucas: With the French Revolution, after they’ve gone to all this trouble to have a revolution and get rid of the king and all the people in power, eventually they turn the democracy over to Napoleon and make him the Emperor.

Adolf HitlerEdit

Lucas also cited the Austrian politician and demagogue Adolf Hitler (1889-1945), who levered himself into power in the German Republic in a way that most closely resembles Palpatine’s own road to power in the Galactic Republic. After serving in the German army during World War I, Hitler, then an army spy, was ordered to observe a meeting (1919) of the insignificant German Workers’ Party (DAP), found himself attracted by their ideas, and joined them himself. In a very short time his natural gift of oratory (he had been trained in speech after the war as an army morale officer) elevated him to a leading role in what came to be called the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) or Nazi Party. Popular support enabled him to oust the rest of the party leadership and assume absolute control (1921), becoming its new leader or Fuehrer. After a brief prison sentence (1924-1925) for his involvement in an uprising against the Bavarian state government (1923),

Richard NixonEdit

Though the period of history in which Lucas began to assemble the elements of the Star Wars story – the 1960s and early 1970s – impacted that story in many ways, one major historical influence, which has often been cited as having particular relevance to the character of Palpatine, was the tumultuous presidency of Richard Milhous Nixon (1913-1994). In fact, Lucas has specified, then and long after the fact, that Nixon was the foundation for his exploration of history to find precedents for the Emperor. From the DVD commentary for Revenge of the Sith:

Lucas: When I first started making the film [the first Star Wars], it was during the Vietnam War, and it was during a period when Nixon was going for a third term - or trying to get the Constitution changed to could go for a third term - and it got me to thinking about how democracies turn into dictatorships. Not how they’re taken over where there’s a coup or anything like that, but how the democracy turns itself over to a tyrant.

From a Lucas notation dating to the spring of 1974:

The Empire is like America ten years from now, after: Nixonian gangsters assassinated the Emperor and were elevated to power in a rigged election; created civil disorder by instigating race riots, aiding rebel groups, and allowing the crime rate to rise to the point where a “total control” police state was welcomed by the people, then the people were exploited with high taxes, utility and transport costs, gangsters, a cartel made up of power companies, transport companies and crime organizations. Other companies had to pay bribes to stay in business.

Lucas did not exactly guess right concerning how the United States would develop ten years after he set pencil to paper; by 1984, no further heads of state had been assassinated, though there were several close calls; elections had been conducted unchanged and unhindered; race riots had ended and been replaced by a more measured form of racial dialogue; the underground revolutionary groups of the 1970s had calmed down and were generally seen as a thing of the past; crime increased in some areas and sharply decreased in others. The American people had never clamored for a totalitarian police state, nor had any major candidate proposed one; instead, Ronald Reagan had campaigned to reduce the size and influence of government, and won election by a wide margin. Rather than being raised to new heights, taxes were actually being lowered by a significant amount. Power – in the form of oil – had actually lowered in price. Transport companies were restructuring to meet competition from foreign car markets. In short, America in 1984 was largely the same as in 1974.

Still, Lucas cannot be faulted for failing to predict the future of the United States accurately; he was doing what all science-fiction writers did; extrapolating forward from the political situation as they then understood it. The Galactic Empire as he then envisioned it was just like the 1970s, only more so, just as the Emperor as he envisioned the character was like Nixon, only more so. Such events as a dictatorship imposed by corporate interests and criminal organizations on a frightened and weary populace did seem possible in the chaotic time in which he was writing. Radical changes such as those that really impacted America between the 1970s and the 1980s simply could not have been anticipated.

Character developmentEdit

Development of the character for Star Wars (1973-1977)Edit

circa January-March 1973Edit

From the very beginning of the writing process on Star Wars, George Lucas had a character in mind that would eventually develop into the character of Emperor Palpatine as is presently known. One of the earliest documents to be found in the Lucasfilm archives – quite possibly the earliest – regarding the project (then not yet even called Journal of the Whills, [Part] I) is a paper dating to early 1973, a roster of names he compiled to potentially use in the story, many of which were not used. At the very top of this list is the name "Emperor Ford Xerxes XII" (Xerxes was a historical Persian king who was assassinated by his own son), soon after changed to "Alexander Xerxes XII," then "Emperor of Decarte."

May 1973Edit

Mentions of the Emperor character are quite sparse in the original fourteen-page story synopsis for what Lucas then called The Star Wars, though there is a single mention of a similar character, the Sovereign, who occupies a similar function as the ruler of the Empire, the very first mention of the government that would become the antagonist of the Star Wars saga. But at this point in the development of the story, the Sovereign/Emperor ruled over an Empire located not in a distant galaxy and time, but in our galaxy circa 3200 A.D. From the story synopsis:

It is the thirty-third century, a period of civil wars in the galaxy. A Rebel princess, with her family, retainers, and the clan treasure, is being pursued. If they can cross territory controlled by the Empire and reach a friendly planet, they will be saved. The Sovereign knows this, and posts a reward for the capture of the princess.

The wording of this quotation in the treatment betrays the strong influence of Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa (1910-1998) on Lucas’s thinking at the time he was writing it. The quotation from the synopsis is itself a near-exact paraphrase of the opening paragraph of a review (1965) by Donald Richie of Kurosawa’s film The Hidden Fortress (1958), the film that established the framework for the Star Wars treatment. From Richie’s book The Films of Akira Kurosawa:

It is the sixteenth century, a period of civil wars. A princess, with her family, her retainers, and the clan treasure is being pursued. If they can cross enemy territory and reach a friendly province they will be saved. The enemy knows this and posts a reward for the capture of the princess.

The use of Kurosawa and Richie in this treatment offers a possible hint at the way he was then imagining what the ruler of the Empire – in this case, the Sovereign – was like. His romanticized galaxy in the 3200s was likely to bear at least a partial resemblance to a romanticized version of Japan in the 1500s. In the sixteenth century – the period of his country’s history Kurosawa believed to be the most interesting – Japan was ruled, just as it is today, by a hereditary sovereign, the Emperor (though his powers today are constitutionally regulated), who was then believed to be a literal descendant of the sun goddess Amaterasu Omikami and thus a divine figure. In theory, the Emperor possessed absolute temporal and spiritual power, but in practice, he was sequestered in his palace, ruling little more than the proceedings in his court, while his advisors – and, more importantly, the many feuding warlords or daimyo, held the actual power in the country. The potential influence of Japanese history on the story synopsis strongly hints that the long-held description of the Emperor as a charismatic but powerless figurehead, a front for more powerful but secretive advisors who rule in his name behind the scenes, had its origins at this point.

May 1974Edit

The rough draft of The Star Wars introduces its version of the Emperor in the second sequence. This is a character named either Cos Dashit or Cos Dashhat (alternately named either Son Hhat or Son Hhut in the July 1974 first draft), who as ruler of the New Galactic Empire (as described in this draft) is not just the Emperor, but also lord of Alderaan (at this time identified as the Imperial capital world rather than as the doomed world sympathetic to the Rebels) and consul of the Supreme Tribunal. Emperor Dashit is physically quite different from Emperor Palpatine. The rough draft describes Dashit as he stands on a rostrum, flanked by his henchmen and accompanied by a figure that could have been the predecessor of Tarkin:

On the huge, austere platform stands the dark COS DASHIT, Lord of Alderaan, Consul to the Supreme Tribunal, and ruler of the Galactic Empire. He is a thin, gray-looking man, with an evil mustache, which hangs limply over his insipid lip. Standing at rigid attention on his right are several generals, dressed in the black and gray uniform of the realm. Five members of the Supreme Tribunal sit off to the side. On the emperor’s left stands CRISPIN HOEDAACK, newly appointed Governor of the Aquilaean System, a young, treacherous man with stone-cut, angular features and piercing gray eyes.

In the story, Dashit stands on a huge austere platform overlooking the Plaza of the Daders, a location within the floating Imperial capital that resembles nothing so much as a glass canyon. Taking place within the plaza is a parade of a thousand Imperial troops, arranged in a hundred rows of a hundred men each. Also participating in the parade are giant Imperial air tanks (precursors of the Trade Federation MTTs and AATs deployed on Naboo in The Phantom Menace), floating two to three feet off the ground. A quartet of Imperial fighters flies low in formation over the plaza and executes an impressive barrel-roll maneuver. The great red banner of the Empire flaps in the breeze. Finally, Dashit gives a speech, in which his amplified voice is carried throughout the plaza as it speaks of the coming Imperial conquest of the Aquilaean system:

Dashit: Upon this battle stands the survival of the Galactic Empire. Upon this battle depends the life and long continuity of our civilization. Not since the Jedi Rebellion has our destiny been placed in such a balance. This is to be the most magnificent campaign of all! Never have you been called without doing something to be remembered, something notable and striking. The conquering of the Aquilaean System, the last of the Independent Systems, and the last refuge of the vile, outlawed sect of the Jedi, will have such important and lasting consequences that I can’t but consider it as an epoch in history.

Thus Dashit, like Palpatine after him, was portrayed as a quite capable and engaging public speaker in the manner of the real-life charismatic dictator Adolf Hitler (in fact, to give the scene the proper sense of power and grandeur, Lucas planned to use Triumph of the Will (1935), Leni Riefenstahl’s propaganda film of the 1934 Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg, as reference). Had it been executed on film as written with a sufficient budget, it would have been an impressive display of Imperial pageantry.

In this draft of the story, an Imperial victory on Aquilae would have been two-fold: the last source of dissent against the Empire would have been eliminated, and the Empire would also acquire the liquid distillation of the living brains of Aquilae’s thirty-three greatest scientific minds and the ability to clone new and fully-restored versions of all of them, giving the Empire a tremendous scientific and technological edge. In the end, as with Naboo in The Phantom Menace, the conquest of Aquilae is foiled, but it is never said what happens to Dashit after this debacle.

November 1976Edit

The name Palpatine appeared in print for the first time in the foreword to the Star Wars novelization, ghostwritten for Lucas by experienced science fiction writer Alan Dean Foster and published six months before the release of the film. Though Foster was a very capable writer and no doubt altered the dialogue to suit his prose style (a practice that was allowed to continue up to 2005 with Matthew Stover’s novelization of Revenge of the Sith), it has to be assumed that Lucas contributed additional material and personally proofread the text prior to publication, so is likely that the name of Palpatine was Lucas’s invention, not Foster’s.

Aided and abetted by restless, power-hungry officials in the government, and the massive organs of commerce, the ambitious Senator Palpatine caused himself to be elected President of the Republic. He promised to unite the disaffected among the people and to restore the remembered glory of the Republic. Once secure in office he declared himself Emperor, shutting himself away from the populace. Soon he was controlled by the very assistants and bootlickers he had appointed to high office, and the cries of the people for justice did not reach his ears. Having exterminated through treachery and deception the Jedi Knights, guardians of justice in the galaxy, the Imperial governors and bureaucrats prepared to institute a reign of terror among the disheartened worlds of the galaxy. Many used the Imperial forces and the name of the increasingly isolated Emperor to further their own personal ambitions.

So at this point, Palpatine was conceived as an ambitious and corrupt senator, a Nixon-like politician who had recruited ambitious government officials and numerous commercial concerns to elevate himself into high office, first by arranging his own election as president, and then by consolidating his position to the point where he could declare himself Emperor. He appointed the bureaucrats and governors who had been his allies as his advisors, only to find that they were even more ambitious and unscrupulous than he was. Seeking to control the galaxy behind the scenes using Palpatine as their figurehead, they isolated him and ruled in his name, using their wide discretionary powers to pursue their own personal agendas. This interpretation lasted up to and through the release of the film.

August 1977Edit

The unforeseen and unprecedented success of the film changed everything, including his interpretation of Palpatine’s character. Previously, all the information about the nature of the Star Wars universe was strictly in Lucas’s head, or else scribbled on lined yellow notebook pages few were ever likely to see. Suddenly, numerous merchandising deals were underway, including a sequel novel by Foster, Splinter of the Mind's Eye (1978), and a monthly series from Marvel Comics, and it became paramount that information about this universe be provided to the people who would be writing those stories, to keep everyone involved on the same page.

Lucas sat down with Carol Titelman, a member of his staff, to get what was in his head on record, and uniquely, he did so by a form of role-playing in which assumed the role of a particular character and answered questions regarding that character’s background, homeworld, personality, et cetera. There were three such recording sessions. In the session of particular relevance to this discussion (5 August 1977), Lucas assumed the persona of Princess Leia Organa and used that to explore not only Leia's character, but also the politics and history of the Star Wars galaxy as he then envisioned it. Though this material was somewhat changed over the years, a lot of what he dictated in 1977 held up in 2005, including the then-recent change of the title of the Republic's chief of state from "President" to "Chancellor" (though many writers in the Expanded Universe remained uninformed of this change for decades). He said to Titelman:

"In the Old Republic, all the systems sent their representatives to the Senate. It wasn’t an Imperial Senate; it was a Republican Senate, which made the decisions that control-led the Republic. There were 24,372 systems in the Galactic Senate. The Senate would vote in a Chancellor or an overseer who would work for four years as the leader of the executive branch of the Republic. You were only supposed to be able to run for one four-year term – you were only eligible for one term. "What happened was that one of the Chancellors began subverting the Senate and buying off the Senators with the help of some of the large intergalactic trading companies and mining corporations and intergalactic power companies. Through their power and money, he bought off enough of the Senate to get himself elected to a second term, because of a crisis. By the time the third term came along, he had corrupted so much of the Senate that they made him Emperor for the rest of his life. "Giving the Emperor that title for life and doing away with the elective process was all done with a lot of rationalizing. Many in the Senate felt that having elections and changing leaders in the time of an emergency disrupted the bureaucratic system. And the bureaucracy was getting to be so big that changing leaders made it impossible to have any effect on the system and make it work – moreover, the bureaucracy was running amok and not paying attention to the rulers. So they reasoned that the Emperor could bring the bureaucracy back in line. So the Emperor took control of the bureaucracy. The Galactic Senate would meet for a period that was similar to a year, but after it became the Imperial Senate, the meetings were less and less frequent until finally the meetings were only once a year, and they were very short. "With the bureaucracy behind the Emperor, it was impossible and too late for the Senate to do anything. He had slowly manipulated things; in fact, it was he who had let the bureaucracy run amok and therefore had blackmailed the Senate into doing things because he was the only one who had any power over the bureaucracy. It was so large that there was no way to get things done, but he knew the right people; the key people in the bureaucracy were working for him and were paid by the companies. "When he became Emperor, a little over half the Senate as it turned out was not involved, was not corrupted – and they reacted strongly against this whole thing. There was a rebellion in terms of the Senate against the Emperor; they tried to oust him legally and have him impeached. But many of the Senators who were fighting the Emperor at that time mysteriously died. The Jedi Knights were alerted immediately and they rallied to the Senate’s side. But there was a plot afoot and when the Jedi finally rallied and tried to restore order, they were betrayed and eventually killed by Darth Vader."

A separate portion of this same transcript depicts Lucas, still in character as Leia Organa, describing the way in which Darth Vader, then still described as a separate person from Annikin Skywalker (as the first name was then spelled), betrayed the Jedi Order. He continued:

"When the Jedi tried to restore order, Darth Vader was still one of the Jedi. What he would do is catch the Jedi off guard and, using his knowledge of the Force, he would kill the Jedi without them realizing what was happening. They trusted him and they didn’t realize he was the murderer who was decimating their ranks. At the height of the Jedi, there were several hundred thousand. At the time of the Rebellion, most of them were killed. The Emperor had some strong forces rally behind him, as well, in terms of the army and the Imperial forces that he’d been building up secretly. The Jedi were so out-numbered that they fled and were tracked down. They tried to regroup, but they were eventually massacred by one of the special elite forces led by Darth Vader. Eventually only a few, including Ben and Luke’s father, were left. Luke’s father is named Annikin."

This was a very detailed account for late 1977, and though not every detail would survive unchanged in the prequel films (Republic membership would be measured by sectors, rather than systems, and its sector membership would count to 1,024 sectors rather than 24,372 systems, though given the fact that the math would average out to more than twenty-three inhabited systems per sector, the figure could still be realistic) a great deal of it remained intact.

Development of the character for The Empire Strikes Back (1977-1980)Edit

Because the Emperor was only referred to in conversation by other characters in Star Wars, but never seen - or even named Palpatine, save in the prologue of the novelization - his character was still largely a blank slate when Lucas began pondering the storyline of the sequel. It was always his intention to do more with the character in a sequel, but research reveals that, because of a pivotal decision he made regarding the character of Darth Vader, the character of the Emperor was changed to accommodate this decision. The result of this was a far more complex character, one who changed from being a background character of little significance to the actual story, to one who, whether on screen or not, loomed large as the fulcrum of all events in the Star Wars saga, and as a chilling icon of evil.

November-December 1977Edit

Lucas began as he had with the previous film, with a handwritten story treatment (28 November 1977), but this time he hired pulp sci-fi novelist and acclaimed screenwriter Leigh Brackett to assist him in writing the script. During a series of story meetings, Lucas and Brackett decided that the two main concerns in the sequel would have to be the Force and the Emperor. Certain portions of the Emperor’s backstory, a broad outline of how he came to power, had already been established in discussions with Carol Titelman, but that was all, and it did little to describe what kind of a person he was. According to Laurent Bouzereau, he was still envisioned at this time as a Nixon-like bureaucrat, not unlike the Wizard of Oz (the reference possibly being a hint that, like the Wizard, Palpatine was not as powerful as he made himself appear to be, a small man behind the curtain).

March-April 1978Edit

The thing that changed Lucas’ perception of Palpatine was to be was his pivotal decision to merge the then-separate characters of Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker’s late father into one character. Only seven months prior to this point, Lucas had been functioning under the belief that Luke’s father, then named Annikin Skywalker, was separate from Darth Vader, and that Vader had killed Annikin during a terrible three-way lightsaber duel that sent Vader into a pool of lava - and into his iconic life-support system - and Kenobi off into exile on Tatooine. The first draft of the sequel film (23 February 1978) proceeded under this assumption (the spirit avatar of Annikin, many years dead, actually appears to Luke during his training, and administers the Jedi oath to his son, at the same time that Vader is active and pursuing his friends elsewhere in the galaxy, an obvious sign that they were not the same character at this point). As a way of simplifying and improving the story, Lucas merged the two characters

This change in Darth Vader’s backstory also necessitated a change in the Emperor’s backstory as well. In Star Wars, Vader, like Annikin Skywalker, was a former Jedi apprentice of Obi-Wan Kenobi, until, impatient and lusting for more power than the Jedi way could offer, he was seduced to the dark side of the force and became a Sith, a member of an evil Force-using mercenary clan who were mortal enemies of the Jedi. As long as Vader was a one-dimensional villain, Lucas had no need to go into further detail about why Vader turned to evil. But once he had decided to merge the characters of Vader, the Sith villain, and Annikin, the Jedi hero, into the same character, a more emotionally and intellectually satisfying reason was needed to explain why a celebrated Jedi could have turned to the dark side and betrayed his comrades.

Though it would require a new behind-the-scenes book, on a level of detail equal to Rinzler’s book The Making of Star Wars (2007), exploring the writing process for Empire to examine the issue in detail, the answer Lucas came up with, in brief, was that, rather than just siding with the Emperor when he seized power, Annikin Skywalker was seduced, lured to the dark side by the Emperor. Furthermore, since Annikin was supposed to be a good character, it required that the Emperor had to be a superb manipulator to lure Annikin to evil. Thus he himself had to be a Force-user, who was extremely powerful in his own right. Though he was never said to be a Sith at this point, it can be assumed that this was Lucas’ intention.

October 1978Edit

The fourth draft of Empire (24 October 1978)

A twelve-foot hologram of the GALACTIC EMPEROR materializes before Vader. The Emperor’s face cannot be seen, for it is shrouded in dark robes with a monk’s hood, reminiscent of the cloak worn by old Ben Kenobi. His voice is even deeper and more frightening than Vader’s.

March 1979Edit

The revised fifth draft of Empire (19 March 1979), which, for all intents and purposes, can be considered the finalized draft of the film as ultimately shot and released, made very little changes to the description of the Emperor given in the fourth draft, though the character of Sate Pestage was eliminated (later to be resurrected and given a significant role in the Expanded Universe). The sole revision is that the Emperor’s face is no longer described as being shrouded by his robes and hood – in other words, it can be seen in this draft.

A twelve-foot hologram of the Galactic Emperor materializes before Vader. The Emperor’s dark robes and monk’s hood are reminiscent of the cloak worn by Ben Kenobi. His voice is even deeper and more frightening than Vader’s.

March 1980Edit

The scenes involving the Emperor were shot (3 March 1980) in a darkened room, entirely devoid of light save for the spotlight on the actor. The irony is that this male character was actually portrayed by an old woman (never identified) wearing pale green makeup. Many subsequent incarnations of the character were guided by what was established during this simple shoot. Photographs taken on the set reveal that there was a significant amount of wrinkling on the actor’s forehead, which may not necessarily have been the actor’s own forehead but may instead have been pro-sthetic makeup, and these wrinkles were duplicated and enhanced in the makeup for the character of the third film. The yellow-tinted eyes came about because ILM filmed the eyes of a chimpanzee and matted them into the actor’s darkened eye sockets.

May 1980Edit

The evidence for this change in Palpatine’s character is easily found. When Empire was being readied for release, the phenomenon of Star Wars had become so large that it got a cover story in Time magazine. In a sidebar to the article, published in the 19 May 1980 issue, Lucas revealed the rough framework of what would later become the prequel trilogy, and in these paragraphs emerges the first description of Palpatine as Lucas now envisioned him.

For years the universe was governed by a republic, which was regulated by the order of Jedi Knights, who bore a vague resemblance to Japanese Samurai warriors. But event-ually the citizens of the republic “didn’t care enough to elect competent officials,” says Lucas the historian, and so their government collapsed. A sorcerer, a bad counterpart to Yoda, blocked all opposition and declared himself Emperor… The Emperor subverts Darth Vader to his side, and together he and Vader betray the other Knights, nearly all of whom are killed in their trap. Ben Kenobi escapes, and after a fierce struggle he does such injury to Vader that forever after Vader must wear a mask and that noisy life-support system.

This was a tremendous change in the character from what Lucas originally envisioned. Rather than an isolated and manipulated figure who was the victim of his own, more unscrupulous advisors, Palpatine became an evil sorcerer, Yoda’s equal and opposite, and though he was not explicitly stated to be a Sith Lord himself until the publication of the Empire’s End comic (1995), it had been revealed as early as The Empire Strikes Back novelization (1980) that he was the one being that ever inspired fear in Darth Vader, himself a fearsome Sith. This character was not only ambitious, but

Postscript: July 2003Edit

During the filming of Revenge of the Sith - on the same day, in fact, that Ian McDiarmid performed his pivotal speech announcing the foiling of the Jedi rebellion and the founding of the Empire (29 July 2003) - Lucas adjusted a scene from The Empire Strikes Back. As reported above, for the original version of the scene in question, the only one in the film in which the Emperor appears, the character had been portrayed by an unknown female actor and voiced by Clive Revill. McDiarmid had only portrayed the character from Return of the Jedi on, and for multiple subsequent re-releases of Empire the film retained the proto-Emperor character for this scene. To put McDiarmid into the elaborate prosthetic makeup just for a scene that could be shot in minutes would be impractical, but now that Lucas already had him in the makeup for numerous scenes in Sith, he took advantage of the opportunity, and the upcoming 2004 DVD release of the original trilogy, to re-shoot the scene with McDiarmid.

Lucas may only have sought to address the changes in the backstory by having this revised scene now be the moment in which Darth Vader actually learns that Luke Skywalker is his son, and Vader’s new line “How is that possible?” would seem to bear this out. Had this scene stood alone, it would have made sense: Revenge of the Sith revealed that, as far as anyone knew, Padmé Amidala had died while still pregnant, and at Vader’s hand, and the only ones who knew otherwise were Obi-Wan Kenobi and Bail Organa (both of whom were dead as of the events of Empire), Yoda (who had disappeared and, as far as the Empire knew, had long since died), the droids R2-D2 and C-3PO (one of which had had his memories carefully wiped and the other of which was inscrutable), and some Polis Massan laborers (who never came to the Sith’s attention). It was sensible that, given the significance of this revelation for Vader, the discovery of this fact should be seen in the film. The change also established a new similarity of theme for both characters: Vader learns that Luke is his son just as Luke learns that Vader is his father, and both characters do not believe it at first and are told to “search your feelings. You will know it to be true.”

Notes and referencesEdit