Books The Official Darth Plagueis Discussion Thread (Spoilers Allowed)

Well, no, I'm not sure either; none of us are. It all depends on what Sidious shared with Maul at this point. What the episode confirms is that he shared more with Maul than we were aware of up to that point, based strictly on what The Wrath of Darth Maul told us. What is in dispute is how far that sharing went.

But the Plagueis novel (amazingly, on page 327, LOL!) does give us a very good idea of what Sidious himself knew leading up to the day of Maul's death. As of the events of TPM, and for as much as two months prior, Sidious was already aware of the following aspects of the Grand Plan, jointly decided on by him and Plagueis:

1.) That the Sith will engineer a war in which both sides will have to be managed.
2.) That on the one side will be the Republic, defended by the Jedi Order, which will be maneuvered into being placed at the head of an army of cloned human soldiers created by the Kaminoans.
3.) That on the other side will be a loose alliance of the Sith?s corporate allies and the disenfranchised systems of the Rim, led by people the Sith can control and supported by an army of battle droids.
4.) That neither side will secure a quick victory; instead, a drawn-out conflict will leave the galaxy exhausted and ready to embrace a new order.
5.) That at the end of a long war, with victory apparently in sight, the clone army will launch a surprise attack on all combat-capable Jedi in the field, killing the majority of them instananeously and all at once.

That's quite a lot, and very much what actually happened, even if only described in broad strokes, as it would be at this point. So we do know without question that Sidious himself knew this much. If indeed Maul was convinced that he was meant to have some greater role in this war (and we have to assume that Talzin's green-magic restored his full sanity - or what passes for that - or he would still be a babbling spider, so he can't have been delusional when he said it), we have to assume he knew some part of what Sidious knew. It would be perfectly in character for Sidious to leave certain things unsaid, of course; that's one of the reasons we love him. But would Maul say what he said if he knew nothing at all about that plan, beyond the fact that there was a general intent to sow chaos? The potential is there for him to have known much more than that; as you say, we have yet to absolutely confirm that he knew everything I listed above, but his phrasing leaves the possibility open.

 

And on another subject: am I alone in thinking that Hego Damask killed his mother as his sacrifice in order to formally begin his apprenticeship to Tenebrous? We know that at this point it had become something of an commandment that an apprenticeship could only begin if the initiate was willing and able to kill or destroy someone to whom he had been attached as a means of demonstrating his committment to the Sith cause. Only then could they shed their old names and lives, and become a Darth of the Sith. Vader sacrificed Windu; Tyranus killed Sifo-Dyas; Maul was ready to kill Sidious, the closest thing he had to a father-figure; Sidious killed his entire family. It's entirely believable to me that Plagueis sacrificed his mother, especially given the timing of everything: in the same year, approx. 120 B.B.Y., Caar Damask returns to Muunilinst from Mygeeto, Hego officially becomes Tenebrous' apprentice Darth Plagueis, and Hego's mother is never seen or heard from again.

Is this scenario something you all pretty much inferred from the text, or am I alone in seeing it that way?

 

I inferred that, with her task done, Tenebrous had made her disappear -- either off to do something else for him across the galaxy, or at the bottom of a lake, out of the way. I suppose it's possible that Plagueis killed her, though isn't that passage from Plagueis's POV? You'd think he'd just go ahead and mention if he killed her.

 

Hego "the Nose" Damask hired a bogus doctor to poison his family so he could inherit the entire Damask fortune. I don't know whether that was the sacrifice, but that's what I infer from the text. The mother was probably offed by goons working for Rugess "the Head" Nome on her way to collect the paycheck for seducing Caar and raising Hego (steps off a car [landspeeder], a bag over the head, a block of cement [or durasteel, or whatever] tied to the feet, and the bottom of a lake it is). Again, not stated, just what I got from reading the text.

 

I just interpreted that as Luceno being vague so that others could have the freedom to be able to tell that story in detail later, if they chose, and if LFL gave them the green-light to do so. Luceno actually left a LOT of material free for further exploration in this book. As far as POV, I always interpreted that as being as much the omnipotent author POV as Plagueis' POV. But just for the LOLs, let's include the relevant passage here:

I do agree that such a killing, whether accomplished by Hego himself or by Tenebrous, or by a third party, would have to have been given approval from Tenebrous, and for the obvious reason: he didn't need her anymore. And frankly, he didn't; her sole purpose, so far as is known, was to seduce Caar Damask and sire a son who was sufficiently Force-sensitive to become the vessel that would hold Tenebrous' spirit when the time came (see The Tenebrous Way), or, failing that, a capable apprentice in the meantime. She'd done that already, got the kid ready. and turned him over to Tenebrous, and now Tenebrous had clearly decided Hego was ready to take the final steps to becoming a full Sith. She was of no further use, she probably had to go one way or another. But it could only have been to Tenebrous' advantage to have Plagueis do it, if only to seal the bond between them and divorce Plagueis from other concerns like family. Only that which served the Grand Plan mattered; all else was just so much trash, meant only for disposal. It just fits too well into what else we know about the Sith for me to think it means anything other than that he killed her at Tenebrous' bidding, and in so doing took the final step to becoming a Sith Lord.

If you're referring to the story Damask told Palpatine about how he hired a bogus doctor to fool his clan relatives on Muunilinst and then watched them die off one by one from a genetic heart abnormality, as described on p. 135-136, I don't think that applies here. At the very least, we cannot take it at face value. The passage immediately after this story describes it as an "amalgam of fact and fiction," and frankly, it is never really stated how much is true and how much isn't. When Palpatine later asks Plagueis if any of the story about his siblings was true, (p. 144), Plagueis answers, "Some of it. But that scarcely matters now." So I'm not really sure what bearing it has on whether he murdered his mother or not; even if that story has a kernel of truth (and it very well might), the implication is that it came after Hego's mother disappeared because it supposedly took place after his father has returned to Muunilinst, which occured in the same year the mother vanished.

And while we're on the subject, it probably couldn't hurt for us to agree on a brief timeline of events just so we can all keep track of this stuff easier...

 

The way I took it was: Entire family dying = fact; that family died from heart condition inherited from clan mother and not from some disease Tenebrous cooked up = fiction.

About the other mother, this line points to what you're suggesting: And Hego's apprenticeship to Sith Lord Darth Tenebrous commenced. So, if the POV of the sentence is not 100% omniscient, but rather "common knowledge," then yes, that is the suggestion. If Plagueis killed her, then to friends, family and neighbors, she would simply have vanished without a trace.

Here's my attempt at a timeline (this is not serious scholarship, just from memory):

c. 200 BBY | Tenebrous's master messes the Force up
c. 160 BBY | Tenebrous kills his master
c. 130 | Tenebrous meets Caar Damask, hatches plan to create storage-apprentice
c. 125 BBY | Tenebrous finds the mother
c. 120 BBY | Hego Damask is born
c. 115 BBY | Hego is given over to Tenebrous
c. 110 BBY | Caar gets big promotion; the mother gets whatever it is she gets
c. 100 BBY | Tenebrous and Plagueis go to Kursid
c. 90 BBY | Plagueis kills Kerred Santhe the Elder
c. 80 BBY | Plagueis inherits the entire Damask fortune
67 BBY | Plagueis kills Tenebrous

The dates could be off by a decade or two.

 

I've actually thought long and hard about timeline placement, seeing as this book's so important. In order to do it properly, you have to have both the Plagueis novel and the Tenebrous short story, to say nothing of a working knowledge of other timeline stuff. In order to explain myself, I'll have to cite some chapter-and-verse, but let's see how we do. Here goes nothing:

ca. 168 B.B.Y. - Darth Tenebrous, at this time a Sith apprentice, experiences a vision in which he sees the coming of a great shadow, the turn of an age, and the coming of One Sith - several decades after his death. Tenebrous determines to find a way to survive long enough to becoming the One Sith himself. (This is based on the idea in the Tenebrous Way short story that this vision happened "more than a century before" his death, set in 67 B.B.Y. I am arbitrarily setting this vision at exactly 101 years before, until we get more specific information. This one's certainly up for discussion, though, as are the entries that spring from this base assumption.)

ca. 168-165 B.B.Y. - Tenebrous spends three years researching various translations of the Journal of the Whills and eventually discovers that a child could be created of pure Force. Deciding that this child and the One Sith must be the same person, Tenebrous decides to become that being by transferring his essence into it at birth - but first he has to find someone to carry his essence long enough for the child to be born. (The short story specifies that Tenebrous spent three years researching the Journal.)

ca. 165 B.B.Y. - Tenebrous kills his own Master, becoming the twenty-eighth Master of the Bane line, and begins a decades-long search for an apprenticeo fh is own, one specifically intended to hold his essence until the One Sith he foresees can be born. (The short story specifies that Tenebrous killed his Master as soon as he had completed researching the Journal. As for his decades-long search, the dates below will establish that this search took, more or less, thirty-five years, which certainly qualifies as decades in length.)

ca. 140 B.B.Y. - Caar Damask is dispatched to become administrator of Mygeeto. (When we get to the Santhe assassination, etc., I'll be explaining my rationale in the dating, now that we're in Plagueis novel territory, because a lot of the dates I'm giving about Plagueis' backstory are based on that. By the way, it is entirely possible that this is when Tenebrous, as Rugess Nome, happened to meet Caar and discovered that he was Force-sensitive, but we can't confirm that yet.)

ca. 130 B.B.Y. - Caar Damask meets a lower-caste Muun female who becomes his assistant, then his codicil wife, bearing him a son, Hego Damask - in actuality, this female was a servant of Tenebrous, purposefully sent to insinuate herself into Damask's confidence and bear a child Tenebrous has predicted with be strong in the Force (The Plagueis novel specifies that Caar met his wife ten years after his own arrival on Mygeeto.)

ca. 125 B.B.Y. - The young Hego Damask, five years old, begins to sense his powers. One day, he uses Force-suggestion to make another child commit suicide, and his parents realize something's up. They tell him to keep his powers on the down-low, and begin talking to Tenebrous about Hego. tenebrous brokers a deal: Caar gets a high-rank IBC position in exchange for Hego. Hego is brought into his father's office and turned over to Tenebrous. (The whole five-year thing speaks for itself on this one; there will be a certain amount of time between the accident and the office scene, but we don;t know exactly how much, so it probably all took place in about the same year.)

ca. 120 B.B.Y. - Caar Damask returns to Muunilinst to take up his high-rank IBC position, while Hego officially becomes Darth Plagueis, Tenebrous' apprentice. The mother is never seen again. (The novel specifies that this was five years after the office metting.)

ca. 95 B.B.Y. - In the twenty-fifth year of his apprenti

 

Pflueger: It's quite possible that Plagueis offed his mom, I'll agree. I'm leaning toward it even being probable now. I just recalled the impression I had when reading it, but it looks like you picked up on something I didn't. Good catch.

 

The date given for this is a century before 67 BBY. This seems to conflict with the date given in LOE: 200 years before "the coming of Sidious", which I don't think should mean 200 BBY.

 

Is this really what we're going with now? Anakin didn't even like Mace. Mace Windu's hand was an even worse sacrifice than Ben Skywalker's affection.

 

Yeah, insofar as Anakin had a Sith loyalty test, I would think it was destroying the entire Jedi Order, not stopping Mace from killing Sidious.

 

What do you want me to say? This is what the authors established, not me. An example (emphasis mine):

 

Can anyone explain to me why the back cover of the Plagueis novel says he never died, even though Palpatine killed him in the story?

Is he not really dead?

 

bad marketing for one, same sucking blurp writers as with most novels, that and the unlikely possibility of Plagueis still living under the name of San Hill if you believe certain fangirls here

 

I use to be a believer that he's San Hill, and still may be one.

 

he can't be San Hill.. if any he is San's brother Silent Hill

 

It doesn't say he never died. It asks, "Could he be the only one who never died?" This is a question, not a statement. It is reflective of his quest to be the only Sith Lord who never dies. It is the question around which Plagueis's efforts revolve. The final answer, we learn, is, "No."

 

Maybe, but it could also be asking if he was the only Sith Lord that never died, especially with Maul being on it.

 

It's no different than asking "Can Luke escape Vader's sinister plan?" It's an invitation to read the book and find out the answer to a question that underlies the plot. It's not a statement that there was one Sith Lord who never died, and hey it's Plagueis, or maybe it's Plagueis, or anything else.

 

I reread the prologue to Darth Plagueis the other day and remembered that my initial impression of the prologue's final words hinting that Sidious was flow-walking, "peeling back the decades," to Tenebrous's death and beyond. I also recall that The Book of Sith suggests Plagueis had at least functioning knowledge of the technique.

 

Haven't read a single post in here. Trying to avoid spoilers 100% before I read it next week when it comes out in paperback.

Quick question though:

Does the paperback edition come with an extra short story or anything like some do?

 

If you haven't read it yet (and still dare to call yourself a Star Wars fan!), be prepared to have the foundation of your world rocked.

 

I don't think it will rock anything for me, other than the ridiculous new back story for Darth Maul, which I ignore anyway.

 

I am a star wars fan. I just don't see the point in spending 20$ bucks for a SW book in this market/time, especially since it goes to Del Rey, a horrible publisher.