Saga Should Palpatine really be made pure evil?

The message from Star Wars that resonates with so many fans was that anyone, even someone as evil and consumed as Darth Vader, can be redeemed. There's probably been threads about this, but could the same be applied to Palpatine? I know he's the Sith Master, the one who enjoys orchestrating the deaths of trillions, but I'm just wondering. Does his sociopathic personality contradict the theme of redemption?

 

Palpatine doesn't contradict anything. You can't be redeemed if you don't want it and aren't prepared to sacrifice anything for it; other people can't make you do it or do it for you.

 

IMO, it is theoretically possible even for Sheev to see the error of his ways, attempt to right all his wrongs, and seek redemption. But he had invested his whole life in his own selfishness and would not ever choose to throw away everything he had worked for. Letting go was clearly not his strong suit; he couldn't even let go of his Dark side lightning when it was turned back against himself.

 

He isn't pure evil. He even showed one small moment of humanity in ROTS, when he appeared to exhibit genuine tenderness towards Anakin immediately after discovering him injured on the banks of Mustafar.

But as was already said, you can't be redeemed if you have no desire to be redeemed. The sad fact is, some people don't.

 

He's the embodiment of evil, so I don't think so.

 

This is true. But there's no such thing as yin without yang. Only a Sith deals in absolutes, and all that (note, that doesn't mean that the Sith themselves are absolutes; it just means that's how they interpret the world). So even the very embodiment of evil must by necessity have a counterbalancing quality of good within it somewhere. But for Palpatine, it must have been almost infinitesimally small, and there was never any realistic chance of anybody ever being able to draw it out of him.

 

Hm....

Nah...

 

I'm all for SW having its morally grey lines, but no. Palpatine should be the fantasy embodiment of pure evil in a GFFA. I don't want a redemption idea for him. To me, it's as useful as making a solo SW anthology on a Sarlacc looking for love.

 

Thematically it's useful to have one Sith Lord in there who really is rotten to the core and signed up purely for the evils. Maul was inducted as a child, Dooku and Anakin both started out as heroes before being corrupted, Anakin eventually even managed to find his way back over to the light... Palpatine is the contrast to all of those things. A bad person doing bad things for selfish reasons with no remorse and no repentance.

For the ''shades of grey morality'' to work properly and not just be a bunch of jerks jerking jerkily, you need to have an absolute dark (Palpatine) just as much as an absolute light (Luke) at either end of the spectrum, for me anyway.

 

His "tenderness" comes about because of his need for Anakin and nothing else.

Still, Palpatine was someone's baby once.

 

Exactly. He's just worried he's going to lose his precious weapon/tool. That's what Vader is to him.

 

His mama must be very proud.

 

Well, according to Ian McDiarmid, he played it as a genuine moment of humanity for Sidious. I wish I could find the exact interview quote (I think it was in an Insider issue) but I know I'm not the only one on this board who remembers it.

 

In my humble opinion, maybe he shouldn't have been made so purely evil, at least politically speaking, as he is from the beginning (TPM). I mean contemplating Naboo invasion, the wiping out of the Queen and her allies, then the Clone Wars and the complete destruction of the Jedi order in AOTC...

It would actually have made it easier to swallow Anakin's turn to the dark side and his eventual siding with him. Apart from a pure emotional and flawed personality-driven one we ended up with in ROTS.

But it would have meant a different kind of story and screenplay. George Lucas envisioned something else and decided otherwise.

Movie-wise speaking, Palpatine/The Emperor indeed seems completely unredeemable. He basically personifies pure and definitive Evil.

 

I always felt Darth Sidious had a likeness for Darth Vader. He was his most effective officer and served him well. Lord Vader was also going to deliver his son to the Emperor to take his place. Palpatine had moulded Anakin Skywalker creating a vast empire with their combined power. He realized he needed Darth Vader in the finish to crush the rebellion and once and for all wipe out the cursed Jedi. In that sense he embraced Vader as an equal.

 

I don't see how.

Having Palpatine be a bit nicer - apart from not making any sense for the story as a whole - does nothing for Anakin's fall. Anakin clearly didn't side with him because he wanted to, he sided with him because he needed him to save Padme. He isn't supposed to be sympathetic to Palpatine's cause. When he interferes with Mace trying to take out Palpatine, he only does so to prevent Palpatine from getting killed, not to side with him. It's only when he has directly caused Mace Windu's death, that his options to use Palpatine to save Padme are down to siding with him. Everything that follows is Anakin pretending to be okay with things, up until he reaches the point where he believes the nonsense he puts up as an excuse.

It's not like Palpatine doesn't have his moments where he appears as a nice guy. In fact, for most of the time his evilness is hidden beneath a mask of nice demeanor. He doesn't run around and declare everyone else to be evil either, he hides it behind the need for "order" and "peace".

Making Palpatine more appealing actually would make Anakin's fall weaker, because at that point it would stop being a deal with the devil that Anakin knows he shouldn't take but takes anyway. The reason for his fall would be diminished big time, while Palpatine being kind of a swell guy does very little to raise the impact again. Not to mention that portraying Palpatine in such a way would either not fit with his later portrayal in the OT at all, or actually make him the "good reasons, bad outcome" guy, while Anakin looks worse than that.

 

But there's no such thing as "pure evil." Look at a yin yang. There's no grey whatsoever on a yin yang, so you don't have to worry about any "shades of grey morality." But there's also no such thing as yin which does not also contain yang within itself. It simply is not a thing which exists. Regardless of the word games people like to play to make Obi-Wan look like an idiot, that's the kind of absolute Obi-Wan was talking about. And, ironically, people only begin to buy into those kinds of absolutes when the moral system itself has become blurred and grey. They buy into a moral relativism which defines everything they do as completely right and everything their critics do as completely evil.

They take the blurry grey blob which has replaced the clear lines of the yin yang and they mold it in their minds to their own liking--something which would be impossible to do if the moral lines were still clear. In a healthy society, we can recognize that there are some bad results associated with every good action, and some good results associated with every bad action. That can be a little confusing at first, but the crucial point is that we know which part of the results are bad and which part of the results are good. And so we can make an informed decision about which path to take. You can't do that in a morally grey society, because you can't even tell whether something like murdering innocent children is evil or not--if it furthers your own goals, then it must be good. And anyone trying to hinder you in your goals can't simply be a well-intentioned friend who disagrees with you--they must be your enemy.

 

Possibly so. But if you can find a single thing that Palpatine did for entirely altruistic reasons please let me know, or otherwise I am going to keep right on assuming he's as evil as it's possible to be. Maybe not 100% but near as makes no difference whatsoever.

 

I can see it quite clear...

He then wouldn't pledge himself and join someone he eventually knows to be the great evil puppet-master behind everything, who envisioned and devised from the very beginning the destruction of the Old Republic, the Clone Wars, and the wiping out of the Jedi order.

Whatever his reasons...

That's exactly what I was personally disappointed with....That whole pact with the devil arc, and the over-attachment to loved ones causing his eventual fall.

That's why I mentioned above it would have entailed a rather different prequel story, plot and screenplay...

 

Palpatine was far more evil than Anakin was. Anakin was tragically duped out of desperation and ego-based weakness. Palpatine on-the-other-hand made a conscious choice fully-knowing to ultimately serve evil and the Darkside. Anakin's situation is forgivable, misguided as it was; Palpatine's however is an entirely different animal altogether. That's not to say that he is beyond redemption, since forgiveness finds it's power in it's very nature, i just think he's too far gone to ever even want to come back. Sidious was supposed to be the embodiment of evil for the saga, so redemption was never in the cards for him. Just like the devil of spiritual and religious mythologies, Sidious represents that particular state of being that is completely void of anything good. Redemption doesn't even factor into his nature. It's a non-issue to the character.

 

I'm not arguing that he's not pure evil, I'm just wondering if his character could have worked otherwise. As for Anakin's situation being forgivable:
"I killed them. I killed them all. And not just the men. But the women, and the children. They're like animals and I slaughtered them like animals! I hate them!"

"Master Skywalker, there's too many of them. What are we going to do?"

 

Dark Side is like a religion for these guys ; Talzin, and her clan. Sith Lords who was never been a Jedi before ; Maul, Plagueis, Sidious.

Redemption is only possible when you realise that you've made some big mistakes, Anakin sees his mistakes because he was a fully-fledged Jedi Knight once and Light Side of the Force was once a religion for him, so he could always choose the Light Side as a redemption or a path to escape.

But these guys (Maul, Talzin, Sidious, Plagueis) never felt the Light Side, they've never worshipped to the Light Side, they can't be redeemed because they simply think Dark Side as a religion, they can't think or believe that Dark Side is evil or wrong, because that's how they are, they never worshipped to Light Side, and their philosophy and their religion is the Dark Side from the beginning.

 

So you're saying there's no possibility that they'll ever open their eyes and realize there's a better way to live? I don't think I can agree with that.

 

I don't know; Palpatine lived on hate by himself since he was young.

I don't think he even wants, and will always to refuse that there's a better way.

As to the OP, Anakin was always alive in Vader. Vader has his remorse; it just needs the right person to bring it out.