Why didn't Qui-Gon just TAKE Shmi?

It's not the Jedi way.

 

Boom goes the dynamite. Or in this case, Shmi's head.

 

This is just one of the million reasons why the Prequels totally SUCK !!!! I could go on and on and on but I will attempt to narrow it down a bit, First of all, this is a glaring example of Lucas poor writing and story telling.............Putting aside that they should have never discovered Anakin as a 9 year old in the first place, he should have been 16-19,. the same age as Luke in the OT.

1.) Q-gon and Obi-Wan should have sensed that there was great danger in taking the boy away from his mother, if they had been the same character or even if Obi-Wan has brothered to get off the *@^$ ship, they might have, no wait a minute, Obi-Wan just set on the ship the whole time complaining about the Queens wardrobe, and Jar Jar Binks went with them stepping in bantha Poodoo...........

 

If Anakin were 16-19 in TPM, he would've been emotionally capable of letting go of Shmi just like Luke was with his friends and family. Anakin won't have the attachment issues that led him to become Darth Vader in the first place, thereby making his fall to the dark side completely unrealistic.

"The boy is dangerous. They all sense it, why can't you?"

Obi-wan did sense great danger in taking Anakin away from his mother but Qui-Gon had to remind him that Anakin is "not dangerous" and technically, Qui-Gon was right. Anakin was a small boy with no powers by then so he was in no position to be a threat to anyone but once he's an adult, the Jedi made him dangerous by constantly treating him like he's the enemy and allowing him to be friends with a Sith lord who is pretending to be a politician. Even though the Jedi were right about Anakin, it is mostly a self-fulfilling prophecy on their part.

 

"I think it is obvious that [Qui-Gon] was wrong in Episode I and made a dangerous decision, but ultimately this decision may be correct. The “phantom menace” refers to the force of the dark side of the universe. Anakin will be taken over by dark forces which in turn destroy the balance of the Galaxy, but the individual who kills the Emperor is Darth Vader—also Anakin. The tale meanders and both the prediction and Qui-Gon are correct—Anakin is the chosen one, and he did bring peace at last with his own sacrifice. Luke couldn't kill the Emperor himself, but he could make Anakin reflect on his life and kill the Emperor."

--George Lucas, Cut Magazine interview, 1999

That's the whole point there. Qui-gon knew that it was a dangerous proposition in taking Anakin away from his mother, when he was nine years old. He was both right and wrong to do so and even Obi-wan said it wasn't a smart thing to do, as he knew full well that the Council wasn't likely to bend on this issue.

 

"All slaves have a transmitter placed inside their bodies somewhere. Any attempt to escape... and they blow you up."

Had Qui-Gon tried to just abscond with Shmi, she would have died a violent and messy death.

 

that isn't the way of the jedi

 

I imagine it's against the law in the Republic to participate in the slave trade, even if you're buying someone just to set them free. So in order to free Shmi, the Jedi would have to knowingly conspire to violate the laws of the Republic and infringe on the sovereignty of another government, which is a pretty serious infraction for an order of official government diplomats. And even had they done so, it might not have been the morally correct thing to do. They would have liberated one person, but the money they paid for her would have gone right back into the hands of slavers to perpetuate their industry. So in the long run you've just traded one life for another. It's a harsh reality, but there are actually good reasons the Jedi didn't--and indeed, couldn't--help Shmi.

 

Qui-gon and Obi-wan would look like this.

 

Luke was 19-23 in the OT . . . and he had issues regarding emotional attachments, especially when it came to Obi-Wan, Leia and Han. Jedi leaders like Yoda and Mace had emotional issues regarding their attachment to the Jedi Order. So did Obi-Wan. Making Anakin's age closer to Luke's in the first movie would not have helped him.

All of the characters had issues regarding emotional attachments. They either worked it out to a limited degree in the end . . . or they didn't.

If taking Anakin away from Shmi was such a dangerous move on Qui-Gon's part, what does one say about the Order allowing Count Dooku within their ranks? Why did Yoda or any other member of the Order failed to sense the potential danger of Dooku?

 

"The dark side of the force has clouded their vision, my friend"-Count Dooku

Dooku hasn't thought about becoming a Sith lord until after Qui-Gon was killed. Before that moment happened, Dooku was a well respected Jedi knight whose been serving the Order since he was a baby but if the Jedi couldn't sense that the Sith were still alive, then they would have no way of knowing that Dooku would become one of them. As for Luke, when he saw the burnt skeletons of Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru, he didn't go off in a fit of rage and slaughtered a village full of sandpeople like Vadakin did after Shmi died. Even though Obi-wan and Yoda were worried that Luke will join the dark side when he reaches Bespin, he didn't do so for the fact that he found out that Vadakin is his father. Lastly, despite that Luke went beserk and chopped off Vadakin's arm, he knew he was 1 final step away from becoming a Sith lord which is why he threw away his lightsaber as a way of rejecting the dark side. Luke knew how to master himself because he was older as did other characters while Anakin couldn't do the same not only because he was taken from Shmi at a young age but he also lost Qui-Gon and had PalpSidious twisting his mind at the same time.

Making him Luke's age in TPM would definitely helped Anakin a lot.

 

And taking a small boy away from his mother, forever, is arguably one of the most traumatizing things you can do to someone in his formative years. Not to diminish the importance of emotional attachments formed later in life, but speaking from experience it's generally much easier to eventually move on from a loss experienced as an adult compared to one experienced as a child. Throw in the fact that the only closure Anakin got in that trauma from his childhood was witnessing his mother's gruesome death in his arms as an adult, and you have a recipe for an emotional disaster above and beyond anything Luke ever experienced. Luke's status as an orphan and his looking on the charred corpses of his guardians comes closest, but even then it's not as bad as what Anakin went through, in large part because Luke was a nineteen-year-old and not a nine-year-old/twenty-year-old with a nine-year-old's lingering hurt. There was also no way Luke could realistically have prevented their deaths, and the only effect his actions had on the outcome of the situation was that he wasn't killed along with them. Meanwhile, Anakin had to live with the guilt of knowing that, had he only returned a little sooner, he likely would have been able to rescue Shmi and bring her back alive.

Making Anakin so young in Episode I also served to highlight Lucas's point that no monster truly starts out that way; they're made into monsters by outside influences. But these influences do usually start during childhood. If Anakin had started out as a pure, morally upstanding young adult, his eventual turn to evil would be much less understandable. It would seem like he was already a bad person just waiting to fully snap, as opposed to a good person driven to the edge by a lifetime of tragedy and strain. Normal, good-hearted adults don't choose to become child-killing, mass-murdering dictators absent some kind of mental illness--but Star Wars isn't really a story about mental illness. To an extent, it's amenable to being viewed through that lens, but its story is meant to encompass a much wider perspective on the human condition and the reasons we choose to do bad things.