Signs of Evil and Empire

So, I was driving to meet some friends for dinner, and a thought occured: Two of the PT movies are done, but have we really witnessed any evil on Palpatine's part? If the SEs are "truly" what Lucas wanted in terms of realizing his story, and the crowd on Coruscant toppled his statue in celebration, then what could justify their reaction?

There are seventeen years between Ep. III and A New Hope, when the Senate is dissolved. While the Chancellor has emergency powers, the only act we've seen is the creation of the army, which (ostensibly) defends the Republic.

What needs to happen in Ep. III to show the overt evil of the Emporer? Do you feel we've seen enough thus far (in five of the six movies) to warrant such a celebration? Palps is a major player in three of the six movies (no, I'm not counting his cameo in Empire), but we haven't seen him really being bad.

Enough rambling - my sincerest apologies. Do you feel that the Empire and the Emporer have been shown (thusfar) in sufficient light to warrant the title of ultimate evil in the SW Universe? If so, why? If not, what would you need to see?

 

I think everything is set up pretty well. He can't be the big, bad guy in every movie. Right now Lucas is just showing how Palps set up his master plan. He wouldn't be able to take over the Universe if everyone knew he was a bad guy already.

 

The movie viewers have seen plenty of evil. Assuming Palpatine is Sidious, he did order an invasion of Naboo, organize the separitists and start a civil war. In ROTJ, he encourages a father and son to fight to the death. We know this, but within the SW universe, I doubt the average citizen of the GFFA would know this stuff. He's got to be somewhat likeable to get into power in the first place. I guess he eventually raised taxes, suppressed freedoms, had secret police, persecuted dissidents, etc. We haven't seen any of this yet, but Ep 3 awaits. I'm spoiler free and don't know if we'll see this. It may be left to the period between Eps 3 and 4.

 

Yes, but a lot of his "master plan" occurs off-camera, and he possesses near absolute power at the end of the first film (and explicitly in the second). Everything else is done by an underling, with only a passing reference to the Emperor. Five films of six are in the can, but people are thronging in the streets to celebrate the downfall of a man who's only overt acts of evil come in the last film. That doesn't make sense.

EDIT: We can speculate on what he did off-camera until the cows come home, but does that make him really an evil person worthy of the kind of celebration we see? I'm not sure I'd really feel satisfied as a film-goer to learn that all of the acts I'm supposed to hate this man for will never see the light of day.

 

I am of the belief that just because it happened 'off camera' between Episodes III and IV, that doesn't mean it isn't real to the characters in the films. Those same characters who toppled the statue of Palpatine at the conclusion of Return of the Jedi. So anything that happened during that 17 years between Ep.3 and ANH would be very real to those characters, and ample justification for the level of celebration seen at the end of ROTJ. Why does it make him less evil simply because we, the audience, didn't see all of his evil actions first hand? I would say it's quite obvious from the reactions of characters in the films that Emperor Palpatine is evil.

 

Palps doesn't want to give his secret away and have the Jedi find out.
That would be very bad for his plan.
The "Master" Plan!

 

I think part of the problem comes from the different portrayals of the Emperor - in ANH he seemed to be someone who allowed others to run things, this is supported by the intro to the novel which says that he was controlled by his own assistants and bootlickers etc.
Then in ESB Lucas seems to have decided that the Emperor is the Big Bad Guy complete with Force powers, this affiliation with the Force wasn't apparent in ANH if it were why would Motti be so sneering about it.
Then in ROTJ the Emperor and his storyline seem to have been condensed into one movie, what he might have got up to in the unmade final trilogy we don't know.

Then came the SE - I never really understood why the people of Coruscant were celebrating, wouldn't they have been the ones to benefit from his rule?

And now the PT - and I'm guessing, but it would seem that the Empire doesn't really get going until the end of ep.3.

So Palpatine remains a shadowy figure throughout the saga as far as the general population are concerned.

I think Lucas needs to tie in the Death Star's destruction of Alderaan as something which Palpy did, or at least the people of the GFFA should see him as the person who did that.

g

 

At this point in time with 5/6 of the saga being complete, I don't think the Empire/Palpatine has been justified as being the epitome of evil in the universe. Yes, they destroyed the planet of Alderaan and all of it's inhabitants but we really had no emotional ties to Alderaan, thus the hienous nature was lessened in some reguard.

The second act would be testing the carbon freezing process on Captain Solo, which really had more of an emotional impact than the destruction of Alderaan for me at least. While very cruel, it was nothing that would cement Palpatine or the Empire up there on the list of all-time evils.

 

Many planets with humans as a majority were mostly happy with Palpatine's regime, such as Kuat, Corellia and the upper levels of Coruscant. The superiority of humans gave them major advantages in trade and politics.

Empire's evils are uncountable. Destructions of Alderaan and Caamas, The Ghorman Massacre, Slavery of undesired races such as Wookies... The fact that they build a weapon capable of destroying a planet shows how good their manners are. Plus, given the size of the Imperial Fleet (numbering about 25,000 ImpStars) we can guess what kind of a government they are: a Totalitarian Despotism led by Racists.

 

The Emperor's dictatorship turned the citizens of the galaxy into slaves driven under his iron heel to work for no good but his galaxy-spanning ego. He turned the universe into a mirror of his own soul, a place of to suffer without freedom, love, or sanity.

The Empire is the worst totalitarian government you can imagine, all Earth's evil regimes magnified to their mythological quintessence: a hell, a slough of despond. We indeed do not see this outright in Episodes IV-VI, because we don't see ordinary's peoples lives at all -- partly due to budget, partly because it was one imaginative task too many for GL at the time (we know he deliberately avoided having to think about civilian costumes) -- but the symbolism requires it to be the case. And at the end of VI, bang, eucatastrophe, the macrocosm is the microcosm, the cosmos itself is redeemed, the shackles of evil are broken, evil itself destroyed, the long-held breath is exhaled, joy returns universally to the world.

 

The Emperor is the one who constructed the Death Star and dissolved the Senate. Not only that, but the gestappo walks all worlds.

By today's standards, that's not always considered evil. But George must think so. And so do I.

 

The way that it is presented in the movies clearly does not give such an impression.

It sure gives me that impression. This is not speculation but (as best I can tell) the certain implication of the mythic structure of the films as well as the reactions and behaviour of characters. But as I said, much is not made explicit, partly for known reasons, so that trying to understand the evil of the Empire purely on the basis of what we see it do will give a distorted picture. (Same for, say, the Jedi, who we see fighting battle droids and Sith, but who are mostly diplomats; the Republic, which is somewhat corrupt when we see it but not for most of its existence; and so on.)

 

The Death Star almost blew up 2 planets in one movie. If not for Luke, another planet would have gone boom.

I think that is a pretty awesome hero's quest...saving planets and all.

The Empire was evil. If George Bush was always strangling his admirals for messing up, wouldn't you say that was an evil government? From there you can extrapolate how they would treat inhabitants. It doesn't have to be on screen.

 

Thats the beauty of Ep3 - weve been watching the dam weaken and now we will we see the devastating flood.

 

If you build a weapon capable of destroying a planet, that means you intend to destroy one. If the Rebellion had another Death Star, then it would have been acceptable since it is self defense. But the Rebellion in pre-Yavin is not even a hundreth of the Empire.

Again if you give the command of your weapon to someone, that means you take full responsiblity for his actions. We also have no proof that Tarkin didn't ask permission to blow up Alderaan.

 

If you build a weapon capable of destroying a planet, that means you intend to destroy one.

I'm not so sure. The theory of nuclear weapons is that you have them so you don't have to use them. Not saying this is a good or workable policy, but the theory is "we have them to keep people in line, not to use them."

 

Palpatine is evil, as has been shown in the OT as well as the Prequels, but neither trilogy has done a good job of showing how the Empire is evil. (Of course, it's kind of hard to show how the Empire is evil in TPM and AOTC, seeing as to how there's no Empire yet. )

I, like all other SW fans, started out assuming that the Empire is evil and the Rebellion is good, but after reading this one very long thread in the Classic Trilogy that makes a case for the Empire, I'm second-guessing myself.

Edit: If you build a weapon capable of destroying a planet, that means you intend to destroy one.

Actually, that's not true. United States has nuclear weapons, but that doesn't mean that we intend to use them.

But even if the Empire did, so what? We bombed Hiroshima; that's not to say that we're evil, though. The Empire is at war with the Rebellion and Alderaan might as well be a valid target. (Just because it doesn't have weapons doesn't mean that it's not supporting the Rebels, who, in the minds of the Imperials, are terrorists.

If the Rebellion had another Death Star, then it would have been acceptable since it is self defense.

It's kind of funny that the Rebellion building a Death Star means it's doing so for self-defense; but the Empire building one means they're using it to terrorize people.

Depa Billaba

 

You got me wrong on the Rebels. What I meant was that if the Empire had build the Death Star to counter a Rebel Death Star (or vice versa) then it would have been to a degree acceptable. But building a Death Star to hunt Rebels is like US building more nuclear missles to kill terrorists which is totally ridiculous.

 

You got me wrong on the Rebels. What I meant was that if the Empire had build the Death Star to counter a Rebel Death Star (or vice versa) then it would have been to a degree acceptable. But building a Death Star to hunt Rebels is like US building more nuclear missles to kill terrorists which is totally ridiculous.

Who said the Empire built the Death Star to hunt down the Rebels specifically? The Death Star's prototype was shown in AOTC, which means that it predates the creation of the Rebellion.

Depa Billaba

 

We saw that the Separatists had developed a battlestation at the size and the shape of a Death Star but we have no proof that the planet destroying superlaser had been developed yet. Actually according to EU (which many in this forum consider unreal) it was developed by Bevel Lemelisk.

Plus, the Death Star becomes operational at the beginning of Ep 4. (which is about 20 years after the Clone Wars end) It doesn't sound logical to build a weapon after the Clone Wars if you intended to use it there.

 

We saw that the Separatists had developed a battlestation at the size and the shape of a Death Star but we have no proof that the planet destroying superlaser had been developed yet. Actually according to EU (which many in this forum consider unreal) it was developed by Bevel Lemelisk.

Are you saying that we have no way of knowing whether the Death Star-shaped hologram in AOTC was Death Star? Or are you saying that the development of the superlaser came later?

The Death Star's primary weapon is the superlaser. Without it, the Death Star would be little more than a very big transport from one place to another.

Plus, the Death Star becomes operational at the beginning of Ep 4. (which is about 20 years after the Clone Wars end) It doesn't sound logical to build a weapon after the Clone Wars if you intended to use it there.

I never said that the Death Star was built to be used in the Clone Wars. (Its prototype might have been developed to be used during the Clone Wars, but perhaps the implementation just never went through.)

ROTS also happened approximately 2 decades before ANH - during which the Empire built up a fleet of super star destroyers, star destroyers, TIE-fighters, whatever. The Empire might not have enough credits to devote to the Death Star.

Also, considering how large the Death Star is (120 kilometers in diameter), it makes sense that it would take a long time to build it.

btw, why is it ridiculous to build a Death Star to hunt down the Rebels?

Depa Billaba