Lit The woman that broke the galaxy... and Palpatine!

Sure maybe it could have been done well, maybe it could have been done without being sexist. The problem is, on paper at least, it sounds incredibly cliche. If they rewrote it as a friend who betrayed him or an abusive parent instead of a lover I'd say the same thing. It makes an evil character over simplified. It's "Someone once did something bad to the bad guy, and that flipped the evil switch in his brain so he's evil now." There's a reason characters like Dr. Doofenschmirz from Phineas and Ferb parody the "tragic backstory" trope: it's something that's incredibly easy to write poorly.

To quote the TvTropes page for "Freudian Excuse":
"I always wanted a fire truck when I was little. I never got one. That's why I'm evil, heheheheheh!"
— Zorak, Cartoon Planet

 

Well the movie X-Men: First Class had Mystique (who in the comics is just evil for evil's sake) turn evil because Beast wouldn't accept her and her natural blue, scaly looks. Isn't that sexist too? (implying all men care about is looks)

As with other such stories, Beast's rejection of her is the last straw (she had already been rejected by society pretty much and had to hide as a mutant). With the Palpatine story, I don't think this mystery woman would have been his sole reason for turning evil either, maybe the last straw too. It's only that it's the only aspect of this script we've heard about that it seems so prominent.

I think ian had it right, Palpatine is evil because of nasty teddy bears as a kid. Thats why he built the death star in orbit around them

 

I mean, if this woman was a high level cut throat gangster, then I would assume that Palpatine met her during his early apprenticeship to Plagueis.

In which case this whole thing could have just been one of the Sith’s warped lessons to his apprentice. Palpatine thought this woman loved him, only for it to be revealed the whole thing was a scheme of Plagueis to teach his young apprentice that love isn’t real or something.

Maybe in that scenario I could buy it a little more, in that this was a deliberately manufactured flirtation with humanity created with the purpose of driving Palpatine further into sociopathy than he already was. But maybe that’s me trying to rationalise how this thing would be remotely consistent with the character.

 

Few things make me as appreciative for the Star Wars we have than finding out about the Star Wars we almost got.

 

While this discussion nicely went into the pro and contra and traps of said story and its storytelling with many valid points and concerns, how about debating how it could have been done right? Instead of how not to do it, lets focus on our creativity and how to enrich Star Wars. It is sad that people forget to discuss half of a topics intent over repeating arguments ad infinitum that have already been adressed.

Don't we have that stalling in circular discussions in real life enough preventing important topics to get anywhere in politics and else?

 

Instead of spending energy discussing how to do a bad idea well, maybe we should spend energy towards coming up better ideas. Not only it is a ultimately regressive idea, it is an idea that has been done to death. I mean we've identified multiple examples of that story being told in this thread. It's boring and nothing new. Considering one of the major criticisms of tROS was how completely afraid it was to do anything new, I don't think star wars discourse is served by polishing up turds.

 

I want to point out something I enjoyed in TROS that put a new twist on an old idea - namely, I liked that the Death Star II wreckage fell on a different Endor moon than the Ewok one, it's a take on the Endor Holocaust which I think no one had ever thought of.

 

Not sure I would call that tragic.

He more came off as an entitled **** who probably would have been a horrible person even if he had never joined the Sith.

...And frankly, I kind of like that. Stories this days are tripping over themselves to give villains tragic backstories (usually in the form of passing the evil buck to some other character), so it honestly kind of refreshing to have a villain who is just a monstrously selfish spoiled brat who gets enabled by a fellow evil wizard.

 

Ever since TROS the clock is ticking on a "Palpatine's girlfriend and his kid" story since he has kids, so the story will probably happen somehow. Although some say based on the ages he would have sired a kid in his Emperor days. Which leads me to thinking of something that is basically Adam Driver playing Abraham H. Parnassus the oil baron on SNL



"Oil is not about profit, Marm!"

 

I’ve been thinking about this mysterious character recently.

There was a brief discussion on Twitter this last week where fans asked Pablo Hidalgo about where the idea for the Empire’s anti-alien bias in the EU came from. Hidalgo said this idea emerged in the older EU books and that it was not a Lucas idea because the prequels had shown aliens in high positions close to Palpatine. Then Hidalgo mentioned that “other stories by Lucas would’ve continued that.” The comment was odd to me until I realized he was probably talking about the Underworld series, which is probably still clear in the minds of people working on Star Wars today. For example, Hidalgo had also mentioned some time ago how James Luceno’s EU backstory for Palpatine would likely not transfer to the new canon because of how it differed from Lucas’s ideas for Palpatine’s backstory. That's likely the backstory that Underworld would have explored.

So all of this reminded me of what little we’ve heard of Palpatine's backstory and of the gangster woman who played a big role in it. I was curious to see if anything more had been leaked over the years, and I found a 2013 interview with Ian McDiarmid where he talked about Palpatine’s backstory in Underworld and his hope that some of it would be explored in the spin-offs Disney was working on back then.

Here are the relevant quotes:

It’s not much more information, but it is a confirmation of some sort of tragic backstory, and one that McDiarmid found interesting. I could say that there’s the new hint that it would be a Shakespearean story in some way, but that comment was primed by the interviewer, and I think McDiarmid’s agreement is primarily with the notion that it would make Palpatine a more complex character than he had been until then and give him his own sort of mythological arc. I don’t think it would have been simply a love story gone wrong or Palpatine turning evil because his romantic advances were rejected.

(Note: I don’t think there’s any relation between aliens in the Empire and the gangster woman. That was just the incident that reminded me of Underworld and of how that show would’ve challenged our assumptions of what we thought we knew about Star Wars.)

 

Bury this in the vault forever. Palpatine deserves better than some hackneyed Freudian excuse, particularly one as uninspired as this.

 

@Sauron_18 Yet Luceno said that Lucas told him to make Palpatine evil from birth. Maybe Lucas wanted Palpatine’s “fall” to be before he met Plagueis?

I also wonder if Underworld’s cancellation is why Plagueis was un-cancelled.

 

Lucas has been known to change his mind on story points ... from time to time.

 

Oh, I doubt we’ll see this story produced. I can’t imagine LFL feeling comfortable with messing with a legacy villain like that. They’re being so careful right now that they won’t even do a Vader story on screen that doesn’t have him depicted as a badass unstoppable force. They would for sure avoid the risks entailed in this kind of human portrayal of Palpatine. If they explored anything, they’d likely skip to his Sith training. At least, for the time being.

But despite this being an admittedly tricky story to tell, I do not believe it would’ve necessarily been as bad as some of us fear. I don’t think the point of it would’ve been to provide a Freudian excuse for Palpatine. Lucas didn’t do that for Anakin, so why would he do it for the Emperor? I think it more likely would’ve been a way to explore another facet of human evil, to look at what the journey to greed looked like for another Sith Lord besides Vader.

Lucas probably did change his mind about wanting to tell Palpatine’s story. Perhaps the opportunities of the medium and the universe of stories they were about to be able to tell is what prompted that change. Or maybe it was a pitch from the writers he brought in that convinced him. Either way, I think it highlights the notion that the Sith aren’t necessarily generic monsters so much as they are archetypes of human failure and evil. For all their power, both Jedi and Sith are still fundamentally human characters (psychologically). The Sith are amplified human evils in a mythical setting more than they are unknowable and abstract forces of evil.

The context of the series and the description of this female villain as a heartless gangster suggest that the criminal underworld played a key role in Palpatine’s own journey to the dark side. Lucas’s ideas to use the criminal underworld as the main villains for his sequel trilogy further highlight its role as a sort of shadow counterpart to the Empire and a constant thorn on its side.

Maybe Palpatine was once a regular politician whose experience with the underworld and corruption in the Republic pushed him to lose faith in democracy and in the Jedi as arbiters of justice. This could drive him to want to fix what he saw as the disorder of the galaxy, its chaos under weak leadership, and to decide to take another route to power and order that did not play by the rules of a fixed game. The chaos and lawlessness, as exemplified by this gangster character, would push him to the radical extreme of seeking out training from the hidden Sith Lords, becoming part of that cult which would eventually fit so well with his changing worldview of the Jedi and the Republic.

If the Sith continuously claim to want to bring order to the world, what then is the disorder that they are trying to fix? I think one answer this series would’ve provided is that it’s a response to a crime-ridden world where legal institutional power seems inept at best and complicit most of the time. The gangster character doesn’t have to be a femme fatale, she just has to be a chaotic and selfish character who causes a young politician to lose his faith in democracy and the law. It could’ve been a chance at a good female villain for Star Wars, and one with a history that makes her more captivating than your average criminal. And she would have been a non-Sith villain, representing an entirely different faction to the point where her villainy directly contributes to awakening the demon that is the Emperor.

Don’t get me wrong, I know there’s a lot of ways it could’ve been executed poorly. But I think there’s also a lot of cool potential. And maybe some of this is being recycled in Qi’ra’s shadow war against the Empire in the comics, although with a vastly changed context and with less of a villain role for the main criminal character. But rather than being a mob boss who’s an antihero, this Underworld gangster would have let us see another faction of human evil.

 

Uh, yes he did? Whether that excuse is "valid" or not isn't the point; Anakin was absolutely portrayed as a once-good person whose attachments and latent anger were exploited to mold him into a monster. That's the definition of a Freudian excuse right there. Palpatine doesn't need—and should never have—a similar arc. It would dilute everything the character stands for.

 

I kinda would love to see a Littlefinger style character as a female version, starting as an alliance between Palpatine the politician and her in the underworld to jointly clean up the mess, only she uses him and will stab him in the back. Kinda feels like a Batman/Gotham befitting tale if going with politics and dark gritty cityscape for Coruscant. Kinda like Palpatine fell from White Knight to Two Face villainy himself. I mean, the crime families as a gotra style Court of Owls and the madness of its various villains and antiheroes are only fitting.
One can literally imagine Palpatine influenced between this female Littlefinger, Mistress of Coins, and Plagueis and his little Sith Eternal birds playing Varys kinda to tuse GoT terms. Only he kept his head.. and knew how to play the game of thrones.

And speaking of Palpatines backstory, which as noted above already by others would hardly be something Disney dares to touch upon much, I suspect we have another opportunity of recycled Underworld concepts with the upcoming Acolyte series. I just hope it is not a generic "rise of an acolyte outwitting all other candidates" story but puts some spin and edge on the villain rise stories.

 

@Lord Exor

I think the term “Freudian excuse,” when applied to media, usually refers to a very simplified causal relationship between events in a character’s past and their current behavior in the story, and this is done at the expense of any real character development that might take them from point A to point B. The prequels showed us a careful progression for Anakin, where we saw how his personality and behaviors changed over time and how his greed for power ultimately developed to the point where he would become a Sith Lord. This might be Freudian in the most literal sense (we can see the early forms of that behavior in his childhood) but not in the popular sense, because events in Anakin’s past don’t simply explain his fall. And they’re not meant to. They just let us see how he as a person changed over time to the point where he’d make those terrible choices later on.

For Palpatine to have a backstory would mean the same kind of character development. It would not mean that something bad that happened in his past directly caused who he is in the story’s present. What it would mean is that he wasn’t always the exact same character, that he progressed over time to become who we know. Even Satan has some character development in English literature. And honestly, before the prequels were released, it looked like we might see that for Palpatine himself in those movies, since previous material had hinted that he only fully embraced evil as he gained more power. One twist of the prequels was that Palpatine had fallen long before and had simply been lying to everyone around him. But I don’t think anything is really lost by the sole virtue of having him not be the same character from the start.

Sith Lords stand for human evils, for greed and selfishness and the pursuit of one’s own benefit and power at the expense of all other living beings. They are exceptionally powerful and skilled, but they are also deeply human (psychologically) rather than unknowable. The Sith mentality is not only not rare, it is likely the default human mentality and all too common in the real world. That’s partly why the Shakespearean parallel is not terribly inappropriate. Many characters in Shakespeare’s plays were quite despicable, but they were also very relatable to parts of ourselves that appear to be, for the most part, universal.

If a writer just says that a character’s a psychopath and that’s that, that’s certainly a story choice, but usually it’s not especially captivating or encompassing of human evils. It’s not even a real character in that sense, but a generic role that is easy to accept as is because of story conventions. And while doing that exploration is very risky, I think it can also be very compelling in terms of resulting in a complex villain. It’s hard to say with what little we know how Palpatine’s backstory would’ve fared in this respect, but the fact that it was developed is not alone enough for me to consider his character diluted. Lucas has a pretty great understanding of his characters and of human beings in general, so I’d rather give him the benefit of the doubt with this. Not that it really matters, if we never see any of it come to light…

 

I still want my "Young Palpatine Chronicles" Disney+ show... or at the very least more glimpses into his past, even if they still evade the big buckets they are afraid of. Looking at the Fantastic Beasts movie series of the Potterverse, there is a lot one can do when unveiling a characters past that is unexpected with lots of twists and turns. They could play it like Dumbledore's past and show how he was quite different in his youth, had his failures and flaws and family issues. Something befitting Palpatines family!
Or they play it like Grindelwald, the rising magic world politician, sometimes called evil and sometimes a savior by his followers, with lots of crimes as quickly as they are in the open vanishing under a rug for his political campaign. Charisma can do a lot and short memory of the populace does the rest.
They also could play with it like with Credence/Corvus/Aurelius past and have him struggle to rise torn between factions and allegiances, a web of lies and seeking truth at all costs.

Any depiction of his past needs to not be onesided or pick one villain-past-schemata, but rather craft a web of personality and facettes to his persona that make up all his sides we know later on. His many apprentices each show different sides of Palpatine, too.

 

You don't need something bad to happen to someone in order for them to be evil, and if Palpatine isn't compelling to you or anyone else "as is," he doesn't need "fixing." Some characters can be allowed to be static characters, and that's fine; they have a role to fulfill in the story.

It's also an oversimplification of the human condition to assign negative or antisocial character traits to a linear cause-and-effect relationship. You want a complex villain? Circumvent the Hollywood bromides and explore how someone like Palpatine thinks. He may have arrived at his worldview for any number of reasons.

Let's talk about control. Having a need for control is not always a learned behavior. I can speak from my own experience that an instinctual yearning for control manifests as anxiety over outcomes and, as I've matured, a dissatisfaction with fate and the natural order of life. There was no one event--or even series of events--I can point to that influenced this aspect of my personality. Now the point of this isn't to discuss myself; I want to draw attention to one of many reasons for personality/characterization beyond, "Oh no, I was spurned by a woman/wronged by someone/abused by my parents/my pet duck died when I was four!" Now I'm not a psychopath, nor do I have access to supernatural abilities, but Palpatine is and does so you can imagine he'd have no qualms satisfying a similar itch with a grandiose grab at power.

Complexity is possible without pathos.

 

I firmly disagree. Palpatine is an inherently Satanic figure. And he should remain so.

1. Palpatine being evil from birth and not being “humanized” is key to his character. I would firmly oppose any sad backstory or influence from someone else making him bad.
2. Palpatine is the central antagonist of SW. I don’t think it’s appropriate to say anyone is behind him or is the cause of him being evil or acting as he does.
3. Underworld had some interesting ideas, but “humanizing” Palpatine is the epitome of bad ideas.

*I do not believe every villain needs a sympathetic backstory or some sort of “humanization” to be made “relatable”. The fact this trend has become more prevalent in recent years is not something that has incurred my pleasure.

Not to mention, I think it makes Palpatine less well…grandiose as a villain. He becomes less menacing, less a threat to the heroes, audiences will take him less seriously-to have him go bad because he got rejected or some other poorly conceived origin. The inherent cosmic darkness in the character-the man being a shell, a vessel for simple undiluted evil and malice is what makes Palpatine, Palpatine.

 

Is it possible that in reality, this woman was someone who found out that Palpatine is Darth Sidious and the claim that she wronged Palpatine and that Palpatine went into politics afterwards is “from a certain point of view”? Would any of the characters in Underworld know that Palpatine is Darth Sidious and was behind the Trade Federation and Dooku?

How about seeing what House Palpatine is up to during the High Republic era? How about a story about Sheev’s parents?

 

Regarding satanic Palpatine... I disagree with everyone believing that someone can be born evil. While this is a highly spiritual topic and I do not mean to disrespect anybodies personal choice of believes here, I for my part think that Palpatine is not even as evil as people make him out to be. His character evolved from a not even Forcesensitive Emperor that was under the thrall of darker forces and manipulating advisors (ANH concepts) to a Darkside Forceuser himself (ROTJ). So from the conception he had an, albeit burried, innocence built in and showed the corruption of office and rising to top positions more than any actual satanic mumbo jumbo later slapped on him. Especially once Vader got redemption and a tragic past, Palpatine was used as contrast by some to be so much more evil. But even that did not hold as Plagueis novel paralelled him to Anakin, especially his youth parts, a lot. And all that is before any NJO retcons in Outbound Flight tried to turn him into going evil out of fear of a greater threat, aka the Vong.

So there is quite the history of Palpatine's various characterisations and all, including the more satanic seeming ones, need to be accounted for. Not just this singular misconception of his character that some seem to elevate to being all he is. That can be their headcanon, sure, but it is not the only part of him.

As much as Naboo is a proto-Imperial society with a lot seemingly peaceful, orderly structures revealing later on the underlying foundations of the Empire (anti-Alien/Gungan, monarchic even if with democratic elements, etc.), as much is Naboo also Palpatines character. It's beauty and peace as much as the underlying elements emerging later on or under the right circumstances.

That said, I have no problem if Palpatine is a bad kid. Mean, little monster type of kids that constantly mock, mob and worse other kids. I'd not call him satanic or evil because of that. That may be due to parenting or other circumstances as well as his own choices. I mean, he can be quite different from his adult self when younger, learning curves and all before he knew how to hide that attitude or before he had the means to strike at others covertly and without repercussions for himself. Even such a bad kid might grow up to have good intentions or goals before seeing his dreams fall apart and sink into darker evolutions again. Some terrible kids from my youth became great adults and some good kids became terrible ones. It happens.

Also, I prefer if SW would embrace more mythology than just Christianity, as it always does a mix of many. So even your satanic interpretations need to be bathed in more than one culture to even be considered as an option.

Especially I dislike this satanic interpretation because it takes agency out of humans hands and excuses him. He gets a free card so to speak because that is his nature and not his fault? Ouch! And philosophically and legally that even opens Pandora's Box as if one truly believe such people exist that are born evil, that would support eradicating them as lesser humans, or even pre-natal identifying and killing them. And we should not go there... never ever again! So before one should propose any such interpretation, I hope one thinks through all the consequences of said philosophy. SW never was about condeming or defeating ultimate evil but redemption and even the most evil people having hope and a story. So anything turning Palpatine satanic is flying in the face of that I'd say. But feel free to believe otherwise. Just wanted to tell you my opinion, not critizise any of yours.

 

I think it could be an interesting play on expectations to introduce an ambitious Naboo politician named Palpatine who really was as well-meaning as they seemed, maybe even a striver for reconciliation with the Gungans and a proponent of the Jedi.

 

My impression is that Palpatine's backstory would be an extension of what we already know and of the backstory that Lucas had already developed for him. As @ColeFardreamer mentioned, the Emperor went through a lot of changes as a character, but throughout he has remained a politician at heart, loosely inspired by the likes of Richard Nixon, Julius Caesar, Napoleon, and Hitler.

You can look at the character of Senator Palpatine in The Phantom Menace as the model for his earlier life, because the person he presents himself as—a political idealist disgusted with the state of the Republic—is a perfectly logical starting point for who he could have been decades before, before losing faith in democracy and choosing a different path to power. The difference is that in Menace he has already fallen, trained with the Sith, and initiated his plans for domination. But if you look at his lines, they lay out his position clearly:

"The Republic is not what it once was. The Senate is full of greedy, squabbling delegates who are only looking out for themselves and their home systems. There is no interest in the common good . . . there is no civility, only politics . . . it's disgusting. . . .

Our best choice would be to push for the election of a stronger Supreme Chancellor. One who will take control of the bureaucrats, enforce the laws, and give us justice."​

In many ways, he's a dark parallel to Amidala. Both come from a paradisal world, a place where democracy seems to work in its most ideal fashion. Both are political idealists, not unlike Dooku, but unlike Palpatine and Dooku, Amidala never lost faith in the Republic. But having Palpatine once believe in its ideals, to some degree, only to become disgusted by its reality, cynical and eventually corrupted himself and deluded into thinking he could use force to make it better—this doesn't take away from his villainy. It humanizes him not by virtue of making him pitiable, but because it makes his character more complex, and it illustrates what still exists in his dark heart once he is Emperor.

To add to this, I want to share an excerpt from the novelization to Return of the Jedi, which presented his original backstory at that time. It showcases now only how this Sith Lord is primarily a politician, but also how the state of the Republic in a very real way is mirrored in him, and later the state of the Empire.

"The Emperor sat, regarding this view, as Vader approached from behind. The Lord of the Sith kneeled and waited. The Emperor let him wait. He perused the vista before him with a sense of glory beyond all reckoning: this was all his. And more glorious still, all his by his own hand.

For it wasn't always so. Back in the days when he was merely Senator Palpatine, the galaxy had been a Republic of stars, cared for and protected by the Jedi Knighthood that had watched over it for centuries. But inevitably it had grown too large—too massive a bureaucracy had been required, over too many years, in order to maintain the Republic. Corruption had set in.

A few greedy senators had started the chain reaction of malaise, some said; but who could know? A few perverted bureaucrats, arrogant, self-serving—and suddenly a fever was in the stars. Governor turned on Governor, values eroded, trusts were broken—fear had spread like an epidemic in those early years, rapidly and without visible cause, and no one knew what was happening, or why.

And so Senator Palpatine had seized the moment. Through fraud, clever promises, and astute political maneuvering, he'd managed to get himself elected head of the Council. And then through subterfuge, bribery and terror, he'd named himself Emperor.

Emperor. It had a certain ring to it. The Republic had crumbled, the Empire was resplendent with its own fires, and would always be so—for the Emperor knew what others refused to believe: the dark forces were the strongest.

He'd known this all along, in his heart of hearts—but relearned it every day: from traitorous lieutenants who betrayed their superiors for favors; from weak-principled functionaries who gave him the secrets of local star systems' governments; from greedy landlords, and sadistic gangsters, and power-hungry politicians. No one was immune, they all craved the dark energy at their core. The Emperor had simply recognized this truth, and utilized it—for his own aggrandizement, of course.

For his soul was the black center of the Empire."
​

Some of the events related here would evolve over time to what we see in the prequels, of course. But I think this shows how Palpatine's path to evil could start from him being a regular politician at the very start. I do like the idea that he was not born a psychopath, even if he perhaps had that darkness in him on some level. But he eventually embraced it and chose to seek out the Sith Lord and to train under him to further his own path to power.

I loved Luceno's novel, but I can't deny that seeing Palpatine make this choice as a fully formed adult rather than as a teenager may be more rewarding. And while we have no idea how this would've been broached in Underworld, we do know the series was heavily inspired by film noir, a genre that is all about the confusing moral universe of a crime-ridden world. So it could've lent itself to showing a character evolution that showed us more of Palpatine's psyche, his drive to power.

How this gangster woman would've been involved with that is also unknown. Perhaps she was another senator, someone who also seemed like a political idealist, trying to breathe fresh air into a sclerotic democracy, only to be revealed to be in fact closely tied to the criminal underworld. Imagine, once again, Padme Amidala, if she had actually turned out to be a mask for something more cynical and corrupt. While the vague comments do hint at some romance, it's not absolutely necessary for Palpatine to admire her initially, only to be disappointed and disgusted in the end, with her and the Republic. Perhaps, with her a symbol of the Republic.

 

And that could be part of why people trusted Sheev.