CT How did the Emperor know Luke would be his undoing?

I just watched Return of the Jedi again today and have been thinking about a few points that were made in the film that could have been, but never were expanded on in the previous films or the prequels. The main thing that I noticed is that for some reason, Palpatine fears Anakin's children. In the other movies, he doesn't seem to fear anyone and everything he plots pretty much works out exactly the way he wants it to. But then in The Empire Strikes Back he has found out about Luke, who is still untrained, and fears that Luke could destroy him. In Return of the Jedi, Obi-Wan says that the Emperor knew that if Anakin had any offspring that they would be a threat to him. So why would the Emperor, who had practically destroyed the entire Jedi order and corrupted the chosen one feel that Anakin's son could be his undoing all on his own? Perhaps there's more to the prophecy of the chosen one than was ever mentioned in the movies? Maybe the Emperor saw the future and knew that if Anakin had a son that he could destroy him? In Revenge of the Sith Palpatine knows that Padme is pregnant, but doesn't seem worried about it at that point. I also thought it was interesting that ROTJ made a point of showing that the Emperor couldn't sense that Luke was on Endor but Darth Vader could. Vader would have obviously had a stronger connection with Luke, but maybe the balance of power in the Force was shifting as well, and giving the Emperor the same sort of problem that the Jedi were experiencing in Episode III when Mace Windu said their ability to use the force had diminished.

 

the emperor senses conflict in vader. the only thing that would cause this conflict is his family ties. his memories of padme, his life as a jedi, the past, etc. this is all brought back when vader realizes he has a son that lived. before this vader had no hope at all and was the emperor's slave. sidious knows this and knows it's dangerous for him now that vader has something to hold on to.

 

"Through the Force, things you will see. Other places. The future, the past." The Force can be used to see the future. But it's really 'a' future, whether because the future is actually in motion, or because the viewer has to do a lot of 'reading in' to the visions (thus making them, figuratively, 'always in motion'). Exactly how much information is available in these visions is dependent on what the story needs, but it still could make sense if all visions are pretty vague and the surety comes from the viewer. Palpatine could have seen something very vague involving Luke, and assumed a lot of the details on what would come to pass.

 

As a fan of individual choice over destiny, I've always favoured the idea of the visions being of 'a' future, with the actual future consequently remaining always in motion. The Sith, with their emphasis on fear and the need for control, are likely to be pretty determined to eradicate any possible future possibilities that they don't like the look of.

 

I think we've probably discussed the whole 'future in motion' thing before (basically, I can't make sense of it, with the universe functioning as it seems to), but maybe the SW universe has physics that aren't consistent, or maybe it is just a figure of speech (which achieves the same goal of having the characters have to assign different weights to aspects of their visions, and take action based on their interpretations), or maybe I missed a possibility.

In any case, I agree with the sentiment/point of your post.

 

"always in motion the future is" means exactly that. there are an infinite number of possible futures for every decision we make, decisions others make and random events that can happen. just because you have a vision of the future doesn't mean that's the future that will happen. there are many possible outcomes.

this is also true of our real lives. there is an infinite fractal of possibilities for our future based on chance, our own will and others will.

think of this as your future. every different path is a possible outcome.

 

Wouldn't that depend on whether you think that there is a multiverse, or that the waveform actually collapsed right at the beginning of time?

I had not thought of the Force as a tool for observing the sea of probabilities, but that indeed might be a good explanation.

 

there doesn't have to be a multiverse to explain the future having many possibilities. it fits though. either way, we can't see the future (at least i can't) but there are random events and free will that decide what happens to us. some people believe in divine intervention and i'm not opposed to that but if it exists there's no way to prove it.

in sw they have visions but they aren't static. there are many different things that can happen. anakin saw his mother in pain and he couldn't save her. he saw his wife die but in trying to prevent it he actually made it happen instead. this is why future visions are dangerous to try to interpret. you never know how things will come to be or if what you saw was one possible version.

 

I don't believe that he believed that Vader would turn on him. I believe it is more due to the fact that Luke is training to be a Jedi. In ROTS, Palpatine orders the elimination of all the Jedi in the Temple, while issuing Order 66 to the clones in the field. The Jedi destroyed the Sith once, long ago and if they survive, can do so again. So when he starts to feel a disturbance in the Force due to Luke's landing on Dagobah, Sidious orders Vader to kill Luke before he can get them. He's not worried about the Chosen One, but he knows that said offspring of one who was strongly connected to the Force and be an issue for the both of them.

 

Its interesting that Vader is the one who poses the option to "turn" Luke to the Dark Side. The way the Emperor responds, "Yes, he would be a great asset," indicates that was the not the Emperor's initial idea.

 

Palpatine might have been trying to throw Vader off.

 

Do you think because Vader immediately proposed turning Luke to the Dark Side, The Emperor saw that his apprentice might be vunerable and thus agreed only to test him. Palpatine, being the great Puppet Master then would be allowing Vader to pursue his supposed plan to turn Luke; while Palpatine was seeing if Vader's loyally will be shaken and thus pose a threat to his Empire. Which then makes me wonder, did The Emperor intend to destroy Vader as well as Luke if they did not submit to his mastership?

 

I believe we have, L.C.T ... at length! I, like you, can't make sense of it either. I think these days I'm just settling for the fact that the relationship between destiny and free choice in SW is beyond human comprehension. Well, this human's comprehension at least!

 

When these kinds of subjects are discussed, I try to figure out how the workings of the Force could function logically in terms of time, space, and the universe. If there is but one universe with one future, then either that future is 'determined' from the very start (block time) or it exists as quantum randomness until the wavefunction collapses (which is caused by ???). It's also possible that each quantum possibility leads to a different future scenario, so all of them are simultaneously 'true.' Some of those options might even overlap with one another. But in none of these options is the Will of a given sentient creature 'free' of its own past, plus quantum randomness. The Will can affect choices and actions, but you can't, at bottom, choose what you choose, or what occurs to you to choose.

... though it occurs to me that my last point may be irrelevant to the point you are making.

Maybe the Force gives a glimpse of a quantum sea of probabilities, with the user reading a lot into what they see. Each possibility may happen simultaneously, in different parts of the multiverse (in which case, what use would viewing this miasma be to a person looking to see something more specific?), or perhaps something happens that 'collapses the waveform' as time goes on, leading to a single future (what is the magic ingredient that does this?). Or maybe the Force doesn't actually know the future, but it is tied to everything living and happening now, and so the visions of the future may be normal human guesswork-about-the-future, except with the mind plugged into the Force - which would function like access to the Library of Congress, and with the prediction algorithms running on the fastest supercomputers.

 

whichever form you believe it takes, the future can always change. do you go out today or stay home? if you go out you open up many possibility branches. you could (a.) get in a car accident or (b.) not get in one. if (a.) happens something else could or couldn't happen. if (b.) happens you'll probably need to get a new car. the variables are endless.

 

He would have kept Vader if Luke hadn't turned. If Luke turned, then as we saw, Vader would have been dead meat since Palpatine ordered Luke to kill his father in cold blood.


"Anakin, as Skywalker, as a human being, was going to be extremely powerful, but he ended up losing his arms and a leg and became partly a robot. So a lot of his ability to use the Force, a lot of his powers, are curbed at this point, because, as a living form, there’s not that much of him left. So his ability to be twice as good as the Emperor disappeared, and now he’s maybe 20 percent less than the Emperor. So that isn’t what the Emperor had in mind. He wanted this really super guy, but that got derailed by Obi-Wan. So he finds that, with Luke, he can get a more primo version if he can turn Luke to the dark side. You’ll see, as this goes on, Luke is faced with the same issues and practically the same scenes that Anakin is faced with. Anakin says yes and Luke says no."

--George Lucas, quoted in J. Windolf, “Star Wars: The Last Battle,” Vanity Fair, 2005

"At this point, Vader’s plan really, now that he knows he’s his son, is to convince him to come with him. Join the dark side and together they’re going to overthrow the Emperor, which is the thematic devices used through the whole movies in terms of the Sith, which is Sith Lords are usually no more than two because if there are three, then two of them will gang up on one to try to become the dominate Sith. Anakin would have been able to do it if he hadn’t been debilitated and now he’s half machine and half man, so he’s lost a lot of the power of the Force, and he’s lost a lot of his ability to be more powerful then the Emperor. But Luke hasn’t. Luke is Vader’s hope. His motives at this point are purely evil. He simply wants to continue on what he was doing before which is get rid of the Emperor and make himself Emperor. He only sees his son as a mechanism for the ambition. His mad lust of power."

--George Lucas, TESB DVD Commentary.

"And when he finds out Luke is his son, his first impulse is to figure out a way of getting him to join him to kill the Emperor. That's what Siths do! He tries it with anybody he thinks might be more powerful, which is what the Emperor was looking for in the first place: somebody who would be more powerful than he was and could help him rule the universe. But Obi-Wan screwed that up by cutting off his arms and legs and burning him up. From then on, he wasn't as strong as the Emperor -- he was like Darth Maul or Count Dooku. He wasn't what he was supposed to become. But the son could become that."

--George Lucas, Rolling Stones Interview, 2005.

"The Emperor wants Luke to kill Vader so that he will have a new young Jedi. Let's face it Vader is half mechanical and he is not half as good as he could be. He is not nearly as good as he was hoping Anakin would become because Anakin ends up in the suit. He is hoping he gets a new better apprentice in Luke. If he kills his father then he would take his place as an apprentice; which actually there is something that in the next film is how Anakin becomes his apprentice. There are a lot of things repeated in these movies. Fathers vs Sons."

--George Lucas, ROTJ DVD Commentary.

"One of the themes throughout the films is that the Sith Lords, when they started out thousands of years ago, embraced the dark side. They were greedy and self-centered and they all wanted to take over, so they killed each other. Eventually there was only one left, and that one took on an apprentice. And for thousands of years, the master would teach the apprentice, the master would die, the apprentice would then teach another apprentice, the master, and so on. But there could never be any more than two of them, because if there were, they would try to get rid of the leader, which is exactly what Vader was trying to do, and that's exactly what the Emperor was trying to do. The Emperor was trying to get rid of Vader, and Vader was trying to get rid of the Emperor. And that is the antithesis of a symbiotic relationship, in which if you do that, you become cancer, and you eventually kill the host, and everything dies."

--George Lucas, Bill Moyers Time Magazine Interview; 1999.

 

It's possible that, for all his bluster about his skill as a planner and his power as the absolute ruler of the Empire, Palpatine figured everyone was a threat to him. Absolute power as a dictator and absolute paranoia frequently go together.

 

I agree. It makes sense when you consider that the fundamental driving force behind the dark side is fear.

 

A Light Side Luke or Leia could be a threat to the Emperor in many ways. One of them is toppling his Empire.

He didn't think that Luke would succeed in bringing his father back and since destroying the Master or the Apprentice is the way of the Sith than he should have been proud that Vader had finally decided to put in a serious effort in killing him.

I doubt that Sidious decided out of the blue that he was going to kill Luke in RotJ. The decision was made when he saw that Luke refused to kill his own father and defiantly claimed to be a Jedi "like my father before me". Sidious doesn't react immediately but waits while Luke takes several deep breaths before acknowledging what Luke said and than letting Luke know that his defiance was going to end in death.

I don't think that Sidious knew that Luke would be his undoing but he DID know that Luke was a threat to at least the Sith.


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This is pretty much what I believe. Besides, for what it's worth, Obi-Wan and Yoda also seemed to think that Luke constituted a threat to the Emperor, seeing as training Luke to kill Vader and the Emperor seems to have been their whole plan. As far as I can tell, anyway.