PT Whats the deal with Tatooine & hiding Luke there?

The Jedi have done questionable things but I don't see how they could not have been completely open here. They were giving him the daughter of Anakin Skywalker, if that got out he would be killed. Obi-Wan and Yoda wouldn't let one of their friends go off with Leia without knowing the whole story. Besides if Bail didn't save Yoda either time he would have been killed. They owe Bail their lives. If that's not good enough I don't know what is.

 

And that is certainly possible that it played out exactly as you described. I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm saying it's one possibility.

 

I always thought that Vader didn't know he had children until sensed Luke at the Death Star battle, so the kids would be safe practically anywhere you stuck em as long as they were kept apart and in the dark. Given that the father was a slave and the mother was royalty, it seems poetically fitting to send the son to tatooine to be a farmboy and the daughter to alderaan to be a princess. These roles factor into each of their development throughout the saga, with Luke rising from humble beginnings to high destiny, and Leia inheriting a mantle of responsibility. Truthfully, I often forget about the disparity of their upbringings.


...does that add anything? I didn't read the thread at all...

 

Later material has suggested that even after the battle, and even after finding out Luke's full name- he still didn't know the precise nature of their connection, until the Emperor tells him, in ESB.

 

Hey - come to think of it, the later editions to that scene in ESB would certainly conduce this, when Vader says "How is that possible!?".

 

Yep. That was the start of it all, but it wasn't until the 50:45 mark of TESB that Vader could identify Luke through the force... when approaching the forest moon of Endor. Luke realized that Vader could sense him when he said: "I'm endangering the mission, I shouldn't have come."

So yeah, apart and untrained in the ways of the force... both were safe as the OT made them out to be.

 

that's not entirely true, it wasn't until Lucas changed the lines in the hologram conversation with the Emperor in Empire that you could really make the claim that Vader didn't know who Luke was.

I think it's very clear that he did from the beginning of Empire, that is the nature of his obsession with him. Lucas changed the story with his horrible tinkering.

 

I never said Vader didn't know who Luke was; he knew that Luke Skywalker blew up the Death Star and was simply playing chess pazaak with Sidious. Knowing someone's ID and sensing them through the force are not one and the same. As I mentioned up above, Darth Vader didn't pick up on Luke through the force until they were approaching Endor.

 

I'm not sure that's true either. When the empire first sends their droid to Hoth and it sends back that transmission, there is some question as to whether or not the rebels are there. Vader has no doubt of any kind, he says with certainty that they are at Hoth. I think the level of confidence he has in that decision says something to the question at hand. The other officers saw the same thing he did, and were not convinced. I think the force was at work there. I think it may have been Luke's presence that convinced him. The opening scroll makes it clear, Luke is the prize.

I think the original plot worked beautifully. I think Lucas butchered it with his tinkering.

 

Until The Rise & Fall of Darth Vader came out, that interpretation might have made sense- but after that- we find out that while Vader knew his name and that he came from Tatooine and was raised by the Larses, he wasn't sure exactly how the two of them were connected. He did think about Padme's pregnancy- but decided the child died with her.

 

Then that version of Vader must have brain damage.

 

Well, considering how long he'd been cooking on Mustafar before Palpatine showed up, that wouldn't entirely surprise me.

This Is Your Brain on Evil, after all.

 

I was under the impression that Vader's spies informed of the Rebel pilot's ID and as for picking Hoth, I've always thought Vader played a hunch there. Need to check up on Vader's knowledge of "the young rebel" to see what retcons I might've missed.

 

I just go by the movies, that's the impression I think we were meant to get when he acts so decisively. That did not seem like a hunch. That seemed like he knew exactly what he was doing.

As to the rebel ID thing, that's not really in the films one way or the other.

 

I never let my minions know when I'm acting on one, so I don't think Vader would either.

But this thread isn't about that so we'll just move on.

 

That's a fair point

 

Right you are!

This is the most obvious flaw in logic in the entire series. Of course it's just retconned rubbish and nobody would hide Luke at Anakin's relatives in basically his hometown ... out of the entire galaxy. Some people can like a film and still acknowledge its mistakes. Other people, for whatever reason, cannot acknowledge a single flaw, and will argue to the death with you that green is orange if they need to. Better to just let them think whatever they want to think.

 

Vader doesn't know that his unborn child survived. Much less that there was two of them. Vader has no reason to go to Tatooine since that part of himself died a long time ago and Luke never lives a life of value. He's just a farmer that no one paid attention to. He lived near Mos Eisley and wasn't a podracer. That's a long way from Mos Espa where Anakin spent the early part of his life.

 

You have a .... less than satisfactory ... answer for every plot hole or ret-con. Blue is red and orange is green, we get it.

Imagine if James Cameron had the terminator give up when Sarah Connor didn't answer her phone. Why would he do that?
"The Terminator had no reason to go to Sarah Connor's house. He called her phone and nobody picked up. It makes sense that he would think she didn't live there."

 

The analogy doesn't hold. The Terminator was specifically created with the intention of finding someone who existed because Skynet knew that she existed. He didn't know where Sarah was living in May of 1984, nor what her maiden name was, much less her social security number as all those details were destroyed on Judgement Day. The Terminator acted systematically. Darth Vader doesn't know that his child even existed. He was told that he killed Padme and all evidence of Luke and Leia's birth on Polis Massa was erased by Obi-wan, Yoda and Bail. So if he has no reason to know that his child existed, then he would have no reason to go looking for them.

 

1. The Emperor has a reason to go looking for them.

2. Vader has no reason to just go "OK Monster Mash, I believe you. I know you couldn't possibly be lying to me. I'll take your word for it."

 

He'd gone almost twenty years thinking she died on Mustafar, along with their unborn child. If she didn't die on Mustafar, how did she die? The real answer is: she died from a broken heart. But there's no reason Vader would ever suspect that.

So, given that all the evidence points to his child having died on Mustafar with Padme, I don't think he'd immediately conclude that this kid is his just because they have the same last name. Especially since he was hanging around with Obi-Wan. Who knows what kind of tricks Obi-Wan could be up to? He could be trying to play mind games with Vader.

Yoda felt it was important that Luke be raised by someone with a family connection to him. A family could provide Luke with a different upbringing than the Jedi traditionally had, and perhaps make up for some of the Jedi's failures in that regard. A family would also have a natural reason for being unwilling to betray him to the Empire, even at great risk to themselves. Anakin's stepfamily was the best of the two options, because they were more tenuously connected to Anakin than Padme was to her family, and they lived in the middle of nowhere on a planet in the Outer Rim, far from the center of the Empire.

Of course Luke shouldn't have used his father's last name, but we can imagine that he was listed as a Lars on any official records. As to why he used the Skywalker name publicly in his day-to-day life, well, we can't really say. It may be a plothole, but it's a pretty unavoidable one given what was already established in the OT.

(Ditto for Obi-Wan Kenobi assuming an alias that still uses "Kenobi" as a last name. Though maybe that was something Luke alone knew, perhaps because he overheard Owen or Beru accidentally referring to him as such. And it's not like they could then explicitly forbid him from spreading the name around, unless they wanted to give away even more . This is all speculation, though.)

 

You had to write out something that lengthy to refute basic logic? Makes sense.

Look, some of you can believe what you want. But please don't insult the intelligence of the rest of us. You're trying to convince people that 2+2 = 5 just because the movie said so and *gasp* the movie is sacrosanct and cannot be flawed. Every film has flaws.

 

Basic logic?! Please... Your argument is not about basic logic, it's about "I believe things should be this way and they aren't".

Basic logic is to acknowledge Tatooine's insignificance and remote location and the fact that Obi-Wan is there watching over in case of trouble.

 

I already admitted the movie was flawed. You know, in my lengthy post.