PT "At last we will reveal ourselves to the Jedi." Why?

1,000 years is drop in the bucket for a galaxy where apparently thousands of civilizations were already more advanced than our own a thousands of years in their past. Personally, I?d the fact that bad guys wear black and red light sabers look evil, but if that?s not enough there is always the library...

I don't know if I should call the Jedi a religion, but it seems like one to me. That being the case i think they'd have a pretty good idea of what the devil is like (Sith in this case) provided that devil is not in disguise as a politician? which Is another good discussion topic?. Identifying the devil in galactic senate filled with politicians. Anakin didn?t trust many politicians. But of the two he did trust? one he married, knocked up, and then murdered?. The other turned out to be the most evil being in the galaxy. In our world, a lot of people look at Politicians as being bad guys. I guess this makes Lucas choice of Palpatine being a galactic leader a very apt representation.

 

Well, I don't know, but if having someone who has a lightsaber, is well-trained in the Jedi arts, but is not part of the Jedi Order, and that someone starts attacking Jedi Knights... I don't know, if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck...

 

I must disagree. History, what with it being written by the victors and all, is a notoriously shifty thing, and no matter what galaxy this is set in, we're meant to believe the humanity in the GFFA has retained the same foibles with which we ourselves are burdened. You can't even cite the prevalence of holograph recording as a good marker of reliable reporting - look how easily film can be edited today to make it represent complete falsehoods.

If we can't even be certain about events that took place within the last 50 years (especially 'religious sects' as the Sith would be, since I think you're allowed to use that terminology for the purpose of this discussion), which is well within the era of advanced technological recording capabilities, then I think I can state with some confidence that it is very likely the Jedi historians would have been kind of shaky on details of the Sith, when they'd been gone from the galactic scene for over ten centuries. Historical data is also especially prone to corruption when you're looking for information surrounding a time of war. Or, a series of wars as was the case with the Sith.

I just got a general sense of "Whoah, back up, who what now? Those guy? Didn't we, like, kill them all forever ago?" when Qui-gon brought the issue of Darth Maul before the Council. As if the Council had written off the Sith a long time ago and were kind of unimpressed by the idea of Maul being one. During TPM, while Yoda and Mace discussed Maul, it was evident that they then believed he was indeed a Sith, but this was only after hearing a much better first-hand account, where it was no doubt made clear just how skilled in the Force Maul had been.

The red lightsaber is just kind of a weak link, is what I'm sayin'.

 

it always confused me how right after fighting Maul on Tatooine, Qui Gon and Obi-wan aren't too sure who he is. Obi-Wan asks what it was and Qui Gon says he isn't sure but whatever it was, was trained in the Jedi arts. So it's not like they say it was a Sith from the start. I think part of it is because it has been 1000 years since they last saw one, and they (the Jedi) had clearly become comfortable in thinking the Sith were gone

I think that's another reason why they didn't bother sending more than Obi-Wan and Qui Gon, because they weren't sure it was even a Sith. It sounds stupid but they were probably thinking it was some hotshot playing around because they were too confident. Palpatine isn't stupid, he knew that their guard was low. And I'm sure as Senator of Naboo, he could have easily found out who and how many the Jedi Order was sending back to Naboo with the Queen, so if needs be, he could have pulled Darth Maul out

Darth Maul turned out to be a bait. He made the Jedi Order freak out a little but not enough to go into full crisis mode. And then everyone would have a different opinion as to what is going on and maybe create conflict within the order

 

One thing that is being overlooked is long lived people like Yoda. He has lived almost 1000 years. So to his people, the Sith died out only a couple of generations ago. In human terms, events that took place late 19th century.
Sure Yoda's lifespan is not the norm but it did not seem like was totally unheard of.
So with such longlived people, events centuries ago could still be within living memory.

As far as the movies go, only two kinds of people use the Force, Jedi and Sith.
There are no mentions of other Force users other than Jedi and Sith.
So if Maul could use the Force and he was not a Jedi then there is only one alternative.
Also Qui-Gon was a jedi master, sure Maul suprised him but Qui-Gon had to bail.
So someone could fight a Jedi master and that jedi master had to make a run for it.

Lastly, about the lightsaber. Jedi do not use red lightsabers, at least that is what the films show us. So Maul could not have gotten it by simply stealing it.
So either he made it or modified one he had stolen. Is the making of lightsabers common knowledge? In Jedi it seemed that Luke making his own lightsaber was a significant thing.
So it does not seem that is was easy to do or that the knowing of it was wildly known.
Are lightsabers commonly used by people other than Jedi? It does not seem so, it is called a Jedi's weapon on more than one occasion and only one non-Force user made use of it. And he did have some training.

So a Force user, skilled enough to fight a Jedi master until he runs and uses a weapon that only the Sith have ever used. It is hardly a big stretch to think that it could be a Sith they are dealing with.

Regards
Nordom

 

This line of reasoning seems to presume that Maul was intended all along to reveal his existence to the Jedi as a result of the Tatooine encounter. But he wasn't. He was supposed to kill the Jedi and take the Queen back to Naboo.

 

Just when did the Sith disappear (according to the movies)? Ki Adi Mundi says, "The Sith have been extinct for a milennium." Palpatine refers to the Republic standing for over a thousand years. I doubt either of those comments are meant to mean that the Sith war ended and the Sith disappeared exactly 10 centuries 0 months 0 weeks 0 days 0 hours 0 minutes 0 seconds before Qui-Gon was debriefed by the Jedi Council about Tattooine. 1000 years of a Sith-free galaxy is probably a verbal approximation and a rough estimate. The reason why I care about this is because Yoda is roughly, approximately 1000 years old. So was he present for the Sith war and destruction? He's sort of the Sith expert in both Episodes I and II, and he seems to take Palpatine's self-promotion to Emperor very personally in Episode III--as personally as Palpatine seems to take that fight with Yoda. There's the moment where Palpatine seems to be enjoying his revenge.

Granted, Yoda could just know a lot about the Sith because he was alive much closer to the time of their disappearance, and maybe Lucas purposefully did the "Sith have been extinct for a millennium" thing to disqualify even Yoda's direct experience with them by a hair. Granted, maybe Yoda and Palpatine just take their fight personally, because the one has been embarassingly duped by a Sith-in-Chancellor's clothing for the past decade, and the other has spent the past decade quasi-directing, quasi-deferring to a shriveled old green guy he'd rather just fight. Of maybe they take it personally because the two almost stand in for the light side and dark side of the Force for the sake of Lucas' drama, so ideological differences are personal differences.

Still, I've always felt like there's an enticingly vague backstory hinted at in the prequels about Yoda and the destruction of the Sith which may have something to do with this whole idea of Sith revenge.

 

I really think it was to put the Jedi on notice.

 

Yoda says 900 in the OT, thus the Sith have been "underground" since before his time.

 

Yes, of course. Well, assuming he's honest about his age...

 

. . . and assuming that everyone was using very precise language to discuss the passage of time.

I've already explained above that I don't think anyone in the movies precisely dates the Sith's disappearance at 1,000 years before Episode I.

And Yoda never says he's precisely 900 years old. In fact, he never says he's 900 years old. He says he's been training Jedi for 800 years, and he says that Luke will not look as good as he (Yoda) looks in Episode VI when Luke reaches 900 years of age. Now, obviously, that joke Yoda makes implies that he is around 900 years old. I'm not trying to be a perverse skeptic and say we have no idea at all how old Yoda is, just because he never said he was 900. Yoda's no 478 years old, I don't think. Nor would I peg him at 3,006 years old. He's definitely around 900 years old. But that doesn't mean he's exactly 900 years old. He never said something like, "For nine hundred years, zero months and zero days have I lived my life."

 

Of course he was using the same reference to 'the passage of time' - if he hadn't, how was Luke supposed to understand his point? Is there some well-recognized alternate method of counting time that everyone was using, except for Mace in TPM, so that his reference to 1000 years is supposed to mean something different than...1000 years? That's stretching the admittedly elastic limits of movie logic.

It's a good point, though, about Yoda's age. I just still get the sense that, had Yoda been as knowledgeable of the Sith as (as was mentioned) we are about events from the 19th century, he would have been a lot more concerned about the reports that there was another Sith acolyte stirring up trouble. Again, the red lightsaber doesn't strike me as the strongest link with regard to the evidence they had at hand. As far as initial reports of Maul's skills when he fought with Qui-gon on Tatooine, that could be dismissed as a fluke - Qui-gon was not aiming to kill, he was aiming to escape, and it was practically an ambush. I really don't think Yoda and Mace had a grasp of how skilled Maul was until after the final battle on Naboo.

WRT to Luke building his own lightsaber, I always thought Vader made a big deal of it because, 1)it's the mark of a Jedi, so Vader was recognizing how committed Luke was to his becoming one, and 2) I was under the impression that Palpatine had gone to a lot of trouble to wipe out all knowledge of the Jedi; some Outer Rim kid managing to figure out how to construct his own lightsaber would have been impressive, given how little information about such things was available.

 

I never suggested that anyone was measuring time on a different scale, counting years in a different way. What I argue is that Mace, Ki Adi, Yoda, etc. may have been speaking in approximations, using clean round numbers to talk about large quantities of time.

Mace says "1,000 years." If I were to argue that Mace was speaking in some kind of code, that he really meant 557 Earth years which convert into 1,000 Corellian years, or some such nonsense, that would stretch the limits of movie logic. But I don't think Mace is speaking in code. I think he is speaking imprecisely, approximately. People do it all the time. If I were to say in coversation, for instance, that the U.S. has two centuries of history behind it, would anyone really pedantically interrupt me to remind everyone that the U.S. is actually closer to two hundred and thirty-six years old?

What stretches movie logic is the idea that people in movies speak so much more precisely than do real people. I also think it stretches the bounds of my credibility that the Sith would resurface after a neat, clean round 1,000 years of hibernation, when a less round number feels less coincidental, more likely.

 

I see what you're saying, but I think when you're talking about major historical events, those approximations tend to be very close to the actual figures.
If that wasn't the case, though - let's say that the Sith have been absent from the galactic scene for "1000 years give or take 200" - saying that such an approximation gives Yoda a window of time within which to have greater familiarity with those events defeats the purpose of Mace's statement, which was to provide the audience with the information that the Sith have been dead for so long that, on hearing a first hand account of a red lightsaber-wielding, anti-Jedi Force user, the Council is still very skeptical that said Force user is a Sith.

 

. . . but remember that Mace and Ki-Adi Mundi are very skeptical about the return of the Sith, whereas Yoda is less so. Mace smugly says, "I do not believe the Sith could have returned without us knowing," and Yoda responds by reminding him, "Hard to see, the dark side is." Of course, I might be reading too much into that exchange. Yoda was established as the Jedi Master before Episode I was written and released, so of course Lucas would give him all the best/smartest lines and set up the other Council members as less insightful straw men--but because Lucas wrote it that way, he's always left me with the impression that Yoda knows something more about the Sith than your average Jedi.

 

That statement could also simply imply that he knows a bit more about the nature of the Force (rather than the Sith specifically) than the other Council members - he is, after all, ancient.

Or, as I prefer to see it, he's just being the voice of caution and reason, as he was in the OT.

But I'll certainly allow that you can read things more particular into Yoda's nebulous sayings, if you so desire. That's part of the mystique of characters such as Yoda.