I don’t think it’s a matter of power for Darth Vader’s lack of Force Lightning, but that he just kinda put his points into another branch, namely Force Choke. You never see the Emperor Force Choke anyone, do you? So, while Sidious is all about the lightnings, Vader prefers a good choking.
The movie clearly implies that Anakin’s unlikely survival is based on technology. You see droids working away at him and the whole point of his suit seems to be some life support dealie. Doesn’t Palpatine even tell the guards something like ‘Take him to the medical bay’?
If his survival was tied into some Dark Side of the Force magicks, I seriously doubt it would have been presented that way. Lucas would have show Force lighting or life sucking effects or witches standing around a cauldron or some such hokum.
-Tom[/quote]
I think the point is that he should have been dead by the time Palpatine found his body. A normal person would certainly be dead, and a lesser Jedi probably would be too.[/quote]
Well, that one Dark Lord in Knights of the Old Republic 2 had a shattered body held together by “hatred and the Dark Side of the Force”. It wouldn’t surprise me then if Anakin stayed alive, yet crispy, due to the force of his rage fueling the Dark Side to keep him alive.
The midichlorians were strong within him.
I’m not much into defending the logic of Star Wars, but I think the appropriate fanboy excuse is that Vader no longer has human hands with which to actually generate Force lightning, which would in any case fry his artificial ones.
Here’s another piece of poor logic: if the ability to retain your spirit self and commune with the living after death is a rare, little-known skill that a Jedi has to learn, how come Anakin is able to come back at the end of Return of the Jedi alongside Yoda and Obi-Wan? It seems highly unlikely that he learned this when he was Vader; who would have taught him?
FATAL LOGIC ERROR WOOP WOOP.
I think the point is that he should have been dead by the time Palpatine found his body. A normal person would certainly be dead, and a lesser Jedi probably would be too.
The issue is whether or not Palpatine was the young apprentice who killed Plagueis and learned how to cheat death. Holding up the fact that Anakin should have been dead after getting burned up by lava doesn’t support this, since the movie shows him being saved by medical technology.
So you’re saying that Palpatine was indeed the apprentice in the story, that he really did learn how to cheat death, and that he then taught that skill to Anakin offscreen so that he could stay alive long enough to survive a serious lava scalding?
See what happens when you jump into the middle of a thread, Whitta?
-Tom
Obi-Wan was probably harassing him. That’s why Obi-Wan wasn’t always around to help out Luke.
“Dude, remember that time I said to give up, and you didn’t, and I cut your legs and your last good arm off? Yeah, man. Hey did that fire hurt any? You know I let you kill me there on the Death Star so Luke would get away. I could have totally clowned you again. Hey, how do you go to the bathroom in that? Did your dong burn off when you caught on fire? OK, be back in a sec, gotta check on a few things. Try to stay not on fire while I’m gone, k?”
After a few months of that, Vader probably got the vibe on how to do it himself.
No. I’m saying that since it seems that a Jedi can take more of a beating than a regular dude, and Anakin is one of the most powerful Jedi ever, I have no problem with him surviving a burning that would have killed anyone else. It’s got nothing to do with the “cheating death” Dark Side power, which may or may not exist.
I’m saying that since it seems that a Jedi can take more of a beating than a regular dude, and Anakin is one of the most powerful Jedi ever, I have no problem with him surviving a burning that would have killed anyone else.
And I totally agree with you, so I’m not sure why you’re telling me what you’re telling me. :)
The point is whether or not Palpatine knows how to cheat death, not how tough Anakin is. Damned intarnet messes everything up.
But the bottom line is this: Fuck Star Wars.
-Tom
If he doesn’t know then we have to assume that he’s got some plan to bullshit his way out of it when the time comes. Seems like he lucked out insofar as Padme died before Anakin could have reasonably expected him to teach him.
Having said that, was that the fastest pregnancy ever, or what? Padme goes from not showing any physical sign of pregnancy to childbirth in, what, weeks? Days? I have a hard time believing that the events of ROTS took place over the course of several months.
Nah, she hadn’t seen Anakin in months. She was already showing when she sees him again at the beginning of the movie. The twin might have been born a bit prematurely but I think the movie’s pretty consistent here.
This raises another question. Shouldn’t Obi-Wan be able to win any duel with Darth Vader, simply by using that line?
I’m not going to be buying this. First of all, who do you mean by “they” in your first line? If it’s the Sith and their ilk, who cares what they say about their own powers. They all lie, so surely you can’t be using the Emperor as a source for this. If it’s not him (and his ilk), then who?
The most blatant time it’s dealt with, that I can recall, is when Luke asks Yoda if the dark side is more powerful. Yoda’s answer is fantastic. And clear. “No, no, no.” He does not say the dark side is more powerful. He says it is quicker, easier, and more seductive.
The Sith are no more powerful than Jedi than a drag racer is faster than a Formula One car. Who cares how fast you can go for a quarter of a mile if the race lasts for twenty years?
“Clear your mind of questions.”
-Amanpour
It wasn’t even a “little-known” skill prior to Qui-Gon Jinn, it was completely unheard of, at least from what I remember Yoda telling Obi-Wan. Qui-Gon figured it out on his own, after death, and would teach his former student how to do it.
One could probably assume that Anakin would probably be able to pull it off as well, though not with the ease and instantaneousness that he does at the end of RotJ.
Vader doesn’t use force lightning cause it shorts out his artificial parts. The jolt he gets from the Emperor in Jedi kills him.
I always thought that The Force was so strong around Luke that the dead Jedi were drawn to him.
In one of the books – either the novel or one of those big picture books, I forget (read through a bunch of them while waiting for my wife at a department store a couple week ago) – it says that Vader was never able to wield Force lightning because he lost his natural arms. And much of his Force power, too, apparently, explaining why Vader in Eps. 4-6 is a lot lamer than Anakin in 1-3.
Agreed. But Palpatine did kneel down and briefly touch Anakin by the lava, didn’t he? And Anakin wasn’t even locked into a medical tube or anything; he was just tossed onto what looked like a floating gurney. I think there’s evidence for the tech and Force explanations; probably was a bit of both. But, as usual, Lucas didn’t make either completely clear in the movie. There’s all this lead up about the Sith being able to cheat death, unlike the Jedi, yet when Anakin is almost killed, there isn’t any emphasis on Palpatine doing anything to keep him alive. Is there anything more about this in the book?
I’ve got more problem with how the finished Vader costume was just sitting around waiting for somebody to get his limbs cut off and fall into lava. Some cut about keeping Anakin alive while Palpatine was preparing a suit, maybe modelled after something an old Sith Lord wore (judging by KOTOR, they seem prone to disfigurement), while Obi-Wan and Yoda were heading into exile would have made more sense than the quickie “Here’s your new duds, Lord Vader” stuff. Back when this prequel started, I imagined some kind of pre-Vader suit in Episode III, so he looked similar to what he would up as in Ep. 4, but different, like the way they did the Clone Troopers.
That is until the next version of Star Wars comes out. There have been reports that Lucas is having the fight between Obi Wan and Vader in EP4 redone to be more like a fight in EP1 thru 3