Saga Darth Sidious: Ending the Mask vs Deformity Argument.

Sidious in Son of Dathomir is just old and ugly like in TCW, and he uses his Sith Eyes when engaging his enemies. Dooku has brown eyes, not blue like in that photo above. "Sith eyes" only appear in that episode when he trains Savage, and there it very briefly and again not again after. The movie (and canon) is that Sidious was badly disfigured & damaged by his own lightning after it was turned back onto him by Windu - which in turn is through being consumed and twisted by the extensive use of the Dark Side but out've his control. So getting bolted by your own junk has consequences.

 

This is from the latest Star Wars canon comic: Darth Maul 2017. The image above depicts Sidious before the events of TPM. His corruption is apparent here. Disney has given us a clear indication which direction they are intending to proceed in terms of Sidious' appearance.

Goodbye deformity theory.

 

Maybe Sidious face in ROTJ is a combination of its real appearance and the damage of sith lightning. Making both theories true to a certain point.

 

Now ^THAT^ is a twisted Sidious face!!

...although that could be considered an abstract, dreamlike depiction of Maul's upbringing...
The deformity theory is alive and kicking!!

 

I think Sidious' face in Snow White is better:

 

The movie establishes no such thing, hence the existence of the debate in the first place.

 

^His face melted like candle wax after his own evil lightning was turned back on him, that left him scarred and deformed, a coincidence? I think not. Of course the movie established such a thing - and its official even.



As for the Darth Maul comic, Sidious is depicted pre-disfigured like in TPM and PT, aside from that caption after when Maul just finishing inhaling Dark Side of the Force induced fine ash and bone dust into his lungs, certainly that was meant to create an hallucinogenic and Force visions and voices. Sidious of course does not have white eyes in any state or film, but atleast one apparition of a Jedi or a Sith did there. They also depict a child-like Maul in his adult get up. Maybe thats how Maul saw Sidious as a nightmarish hidious monster figure when he was a boy. Or maybe its just the artist goofing up. Anyhow Maul also dreamt of Malachor before even being there, so he could've have seen into the future.

 

The puzzle is in how symmetrical the "scarring" is and how many hints there are of Palpatine being hideous before that, and hiding his hideousness.

If (to some extent) was the disguise that was destroyed by the lightning, rather than Palpatine's face itself - then it works better.

 

Today at the Star Wars Celebration, Ian Mcdiarmid stated: "One day, in one film, he [Palpatine] would explode into the creature he always was". Ian Mcdiarmid and George Lucas both knew this early on in the prequels.

RIP Deformity theory!

 

I always liked the "mask" theory, then I grew to accept the "scared and deformed" theory, and now we're back to many implying it's a "mask" again.

 

It's not "coincidence" since the lightning incident is clearly the trigger for something, but what something? I don't see any scarring whatsoever. I see him telling a credulous Senate that he's "scarred and deformed" due to a Jedi attack, but that doesn't make it true in the most obvious sense. I see grooves in his face which seem much too perfectly symmetrical to have been the result of a presumably chaotic pattern of lightning damage. And then we have other physical changes not explained by lightning, such as the eyes - they don't melt like candle wax, they aren't blinded, they just permanently change appearance as though contact lenses were removed.

He said pretty much the same thing back in SWI #82 in 2005.

 

His face and body(also including his skeleton) was scarred & deformed due to his Force lightning being redirected upon him by the attacking Jedi(Mace Windu). Was like his flesh and bone twisted and contorted, flesh could no longer remain attached to his skull, capillaries exploded and elasticity ceased, near dead flesh, needed a cane ect..

Of course its "true" since we as an audience witnessed it happening. It was not something Sidious planned on and it left him weakened. Anakin's arrival bought Sidious enough time to recover, as Mace was distracted and hesitated too long in debating and thinking. There is more than one type of scar you know. What would it trigger other than an involuntary injury, that he was using his powers to suppress his bad cases of psoriasis, eczema & scleroderma?That Sidious was a humanoid shape-shifter or possessed by a demon from another dimension? That he was evil and ancient(even though he was only in his 60's in ROTS and 84 when he died in ROTJ) his flesh was long dead and his forehead protruded & became wrinkly butt cheeks?!

Look, his hands & face is visibly scarred and deformed, it also twisted his crania. The intensity of the heat and Sidious' own evil wreaked havoc on his body. It was something he was conscious, his change clearly bothered him, as he was a very vain man and he later on became a recluse and seen by very few. Most of the public images of him are pre-deformed back when he was the handsome Senator from Naboo and Supreme Chancellor . The lightning need not be entirely like real lightning, since its something unnatural and coming from Sidious's own body or through the Force or both , but its still producing electricity, its still visibly clear that he sustained ruptures & damages, beneath his skin even on his hands. You can see his hands close up in ROTJ.

The only things he may of not been able to do anymore, was voluntarily suppress his "Sith eyes" and "Sith rotten teeth" or at that point there was no need. Plenty of powerful Dark Siders used Force lightning for just as long periods or more, and they did not transform their skin and cranio-facial features due to it (Talzin, Dooku, The Son). Why would Sidious willingly want to look like that, and then hide that fact under a hood and keep out've sight from all but his most close & trusted advisors and minions. Sidious and Dooku fired lightning so many times, it was not like we see their hands and especially finger tips all scarred and deformed or explode. So of course something bad happened to Palpatine in his office, something far out've his control and something painful, he was injured and scarred.

Palpatine was the mask, Sidious is the monster, we know that, its like Bruce Wayne being a mask and Batman his true monstrous self. Some of you take things too literally or apparently insist on Sidious being some hideous creature of the night just to prove something, like what I don't know. I guess supposedly cause he's so evil and powerful he has to look like who did it and ran... when he's just a old fart that got blasted by his own Force lightning, same stuff that burns and causes smoke to come off the victim and x-ray someone. Do you think he was immune for Force lightning?! If they were the Sith Lords would not of dodged or deflected their own storms, LOL

 

The ROTS novelization made the point that Sidious's hands were still normal even when his face wasn't - immediately after the incident (I think you can see his hands when he puts his hood up)- it's not till ROTJ that he has different hands.

In The Making of ROTJ they do say something like that - about him being ancient - so, perhaps his Legends age is not the same as his "canon age".

It may be a case of, like Lord of the Rings, he had the ability to put on a "fair form" but lost it - in a similar way to Sauron losing the ability to have a fair form due to being caught in the fall of Numenor.

 

Then I would have to question that EU author's reasoning and eye sight.

Sidious' hands/nails even in the office were of the same new corpse-like white/light gray skin tone as on his face. The finger nails were clearly disfigured even in ROTS:








Looks like Lucas wanted to give him a kind of decayed and leprosy-like look caused by his own evil Force lightning burns, which in any case did leave him scarred and deformed. Whether the heat cause his cells & flesh die and prune up and fall off his bone or whatever the case .


You know different make up teams and applications, can and do account for the minute differences even between takes and even films, cause its obviously movies. And one can argue that his body was still deteriorating and undergoing further scarring & deformity well after the initial attack and there was instant as well as gradual tissue, cell and skeletal damage that he sustained.

 

The novel's version:

"What have I done?" Was it his voice? It must have been. Because it was his question. "What have I done?"
Another hand, a warm and human hand, laid itself softly on his shoulder. "You're following your destiny, Anakin," said a familiar gentle voice. "The Jedi are traitors. You saved the Republic from their treachery. You can see that, can't you?"
"You were right," Anakin heard himself saying. "Why didn't I know?"
"You couldn't have. They cloaked themselves in deception, my boy. Because they feared your power, they could never trust you."
Anakin stared at the hand, but he no longer saw it. "Obi-Wan—Obi-Wan trusts me..."
"Not enough to tell you of their plot."
Treason echoed in his memory.
...this is not an assignment for the record...
That warm and human hand gave his shoulder a warm and human squeeze. "I do not fear your power, Anakin, I embrace it. You are the greatest of the Jedi. You can be the greatest of the Sith. I believe that, Anakin. I believe in you. I trust you. I trust you. I trust you."
Anakin looked from the dead hand on the ledge to the living one on his shoulder, then up to the face of the man who stood above him, and what he saw there choked him like an invisible fist crushing his throat. The hand on his shoulder was human. The face...wasn't.
The eyes were a cold and feral yellow, and they gleamed like those of a predator lurking beyond a fringe of firelight; the bone around those feral eyes had swollen and melted and flowed like durasteel spilled from a fusion smelter, and the flesh that blanketed it had gone corpse-gray and coarse as rotten synthplast. Stunned with horror, stunned with revulsion, Anakin could only stare at the creature. At the shadow. Looking into the face of the darkness, he saw his future.
"Now come inside," the darkness said.
After a moment, he did.​

Anakin stood just within the office. Motionless. Palpatine examined the damage to his face in a broad expanse of wall mirror. Anakin couldn't tell if his expression might be revulsion, or if this were merely the new shape of his features. Palpatine lifted one tentative hand to the misshapen horror that he now saw in the mirror, then simply shrugged.
"And so the mask becomes the man," he sighed with a hint of philosophical melancholy. "I shall miss the face of Palpatine, I think; but for our purpose, the face of Sidious will serve. Yes, it will serve."

He might have gained "deformed hands" shortly afterward - but the implication is - at least in that moment of the conversation, the hands are normal, and the "mask" hasn't dropped from them, yet.​

 

Novel isnt canon. I appreciate your passion, but you're ignoring facts, from the seen(above) movie and even canon and insisting on falsehoods mainly taken from a bad interpretation of an individual author or notes and taken from alternate versions or hearsay sources that are not canon past or present.

Not a normal human hand, easy to see and not hard to accept. The author was wrong.

 

The point I'm making is that the "mask" theory had a certain amount of support for it. Novel was "G-canon" until a few years ago - so it's easy to see why people like Gary M. Sarli treated Palpatine as "masked":

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Mask_(Sith_Alchemy)

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Palpatine


Debates and discrepancies

Appearance

"Palpatine, who has delved extensively into Sith lore, was using an almost-forgotten technique to hide his true self."
―Gary M. Sarli, Jedi Counseling 71
During his confrontation with Mace Windu, Palpatine's appearance changed as he was hit with his own Force lightning deflected from Windu's lightsaber.[25]Palpatine went from being a handsome middle-aged man to having a deeply lined face with burning yellow eyes, scarred grayed skin, and rotten teeth.[10]What caused this radical change of appearance has been the subject of much debate.
In Jedi Counseling 71, published in 2005 on the website for the Wizards of the Coast Star Wars Roleplaying Game, Star Wars roleplaying game author Gary M. Sarli was asked what exactly happened to Palpatine's face: is he scarred, or is he dropping a disguise?[197]
"There are problems with both these ideas: The idea that he was physically damaged by the Force lightning doesn't match Return of the Jedi. Luke was being hit by Force lightning for some time, and he wasn't scarred like that. On the other hand, if Palpatine was using an Illusion-assisted Disguised check… he couldn't possibly keep it up continually. Moreover, Illusion is a mind-influencing Force power. It doesn't work on droids or recordings (in other words, someone might notice that he doesn't look the same in recorded speeches), nor would it work when projecting a holographic image across the galaxy. Finally, one would wonder why he maintained the illusion in his earlier holographic appearances as Darth Sidious. It would seem more prudent to "turn it off" to preserve the Palpatine identity."
―Gary M. Sarli, Jedi Counseling 71

Sarli concluded that Palpatine was using Sith alchemy to hide his face under a younger-looking facade. The technique Sarli identified was given the name "mask," which used Sith alchemical techniques to alter the user's features, either to make them appear more horrific or to conceal them with a fairer appearance. According to the roleplaying game stats he presented in response to the question, this was considered different from a mundane disguise (which was temporary) or cosmetic surgery (which needed much more time to use). Instead, this alchemical mask altered the subject at the molecular level, rendering the subject's genuine appearance undetectable by sensors or even by a medical examination. The mask could be dispelled by another dark side power—in Palpatine's case, Force lightning—and should the subject fail to repel the dispelling power, the mask would be dropped and the subject's true face would appear. The sudden transformation would physically distort the subject with dark-side energies, making any future attempt to use the "mask" ability, even to create a mundane disguise, far less successful. According to Sarli, Palpatine may have voluntarily failed the save and dropped the mask when it no longer served his purposes—he used the damage both to sway Skywalker into intervening on his side, and to convince the Senate and the galaxy at large that the Jedi had attempted to murder him. The consequence of this is that Darth Sidious's true face, whatever it was before this point, was distorted into the ruined countenance that would be seen for the remaining Star Wars films.[197]

Sithisis depicts Sidious literally changing his face from pale and wizened into the benevolent countenance of Chancellor Palpatine with a Sith ritual,[220] and in The Unifying Force, Luke Skywalker muses that Palpatine had been "prematurely wizened by years of calling on dark power."[221] Star Wars: The Visual Dictionary also mentions that his usage of the dark side of the Force had kept him alive well beyond his natural lifespan, and that he was still powerful despite his aged and sickly appearance.[177] Moreover, Sidious's hands (and presumably his entire body) remained unchanged after the disfiguration of his face. The next time he was seen, he had pale, swollen hands with long, black fingernails.[10] Ian McDiarmid also stated in an interview that his healthy-looking appearance was in fact a disguise, and the disfigured visage was his true face.[86]

You're right though about him gaining the blacked nails very early on - even before getting up, while he's still yelling "Unlimited power!" the nails have gone black:


The last shot of him with "normal hands" here:

https://starwarsscreencaps.com/star-wars-episode-iii-revenge-of-the-sith-2005/49/

was right before Anakin started trying to hide his eyes from the brightness of the lightning - Palpatine's face had already began to change shape by that point.

 

The Sith Alchemy technique Mask, genius from him.

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Even as Sidious before the Mace Windu duel, Palpatine didn't look like that under the hood. If he had, I'd say the monster face was his real one, but he didn't seem very strong when he was hit with the lightning. I'd say that caused his face to turn the way it did, but his eyes are probably a result of the intensity of his dark side powers.

 

He was wounded and deformed from the his own lightning that is clear and there is no debate. Either some of you are watching a different movie or simply denying facts, either case its bad. Not sure whats so hard to accept or to debate , its more a matter of what that some don't like or prefer. Which is not the topic. Like the idea of Sidious being weaker than he lets on, and susceptible to defeat because he's simply an evil mortal character same as Maul, Dooku and Vader - and can be defeated and can be yeah wounded and broken. Instead they rather fall back on pretty much nothing and believe him to some genius and invulnerable god that plays 4 D chess with himself at night and decides yeah let me hide my ugly mug?!

Sidious was already prematurely aging as Senator Palpatine because of the strain of leading a double life(stress) in each film that was visible, but its not the same as thing as his disfigurement .


Sidious's Transformation

As Darth Sidious becomes more deeply embroiled in his plot to control the galaxy, his changing face shows the strain of leading a double life. When Jedi Master Mace Windu deflects Sidious's Force lightning back at him, his face is forever transformed. This disfigurement further fuels Sidious's hatred for the Jedi, as it serves as a reminder of his own weakness and mortality.

- Star Wars The Visual Encyclopedia

I'll stick with the film and canon.

 

That's boring though.
To me it seems the strain he is exerting, and the power feeding into a loop back on himself, bring out his true form, and also deforms him.
So a bit of both theories, leaning toward "mask".

 

And on Palpatine being all-knowing and all-powerful, maybe some fans take it a little far, but he is clearly written as having outplayed the Jedi entirely in the PT if you look at the films carefully. His ROTS scheming is the inverse to his complacent blindness at the peak of the OT.

 

Noted.

 

Yeah I'm with Vorax. The mask theory is pretty ridiculous... it was very obvious what happened in the film.