Characterizations: Count Dooku

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Nowhere is there a character more troubled by divergent points of perspective than the great Count Dooku. Jude Watson and Mathew Stover paint a picture of a Jedi Knight whom has never been good, noble, or decent. Count Dooku was always Count Dooku even when he was a Jedi Master. An elitist snob and a disgrace to the Jedi Order that was able to keep to the no attachments rule because people were playthings to him.

Dark Rendevouz paints a Count Dooku at the polar end of the spectrum that is an utter failure as a Sith Lord. A fundamentally good man whom finds that all of his hopes and dreams to be realized in the Dark Side of the Force are wearing at the soul and only his pride keeps him from returning to the light. Even our short picture of him in Open Seasons is one horrified by the massacre of a bunch of armed men (something few Jedi would be rattled by).

Who is your Count Dooku?

 

I love Dark Rendezvous Dooku. The Count at his best.

 

Here's my interpretation and how I'd write him if I was asked to do a Star Wars novel.

He tried so hard at being bad....
-Count Dooku's epitheth

In the world of Star Wars there are genuine monsters like Palpatine and there are people whom can have the force that drove them to be good turn them into forces for evil as equally strong (Anakin Skywalker, Darth Revan). There are people whom could be viewed as good or evil depending on the circumstances that they find themselves in (Jango Fett, Villie).

Then there are people whom aspire to greatness but simply lack the quality that would bring it about.

If Count Dooku had one defining sin that could summarize him, it wasn't Pride like Anakin Skywalker but Envy. Count Dooku struggled constantly to be 'more' than he was. He wanted to be the greatest dualist, the strongest Jedi Knight, the leader of the galaxy, and the Master of the Sith. If there was anyone that he could honestly understand be understood by it would be Darth Malak.

If Dooku had asked himself these questions...would his fate have been different?

"Still . . . still spouting the wisdom the Jedi, I see. Maybe there is more truth in their code than I ever believed. I . . . I cannot help but wonder, Revan. What would have happened had our positions been reversed? What if fate had decreed I would be captured by the Jedi? Could I have returned to the light, as you did? If you had not led me down the dark path in the first place, what destiny would I have found?"

"I wanted to be Master of the Sith and ruler of the galaxy. But that destiny was not mine, Revan. It might have been yours, perhaps . . . but never mine. And in the end, as the darkness takes me, I am nothing."

Count Dooku wasn't an evil man by nature but he was deeply insecure for his entire life. The incident with Lorian Nod scarred him from trusting anyone. Even his own padawan was never able to fully trust or care for him. Who knows what feelings lead to his second apprentice falling in love with him and the disgust he must have felt when she failed to become a Jedi Knight.

I have no trouble buying Dooku's racism because it's an attempt to elevate himself and the Jedi Order's eliteness. It's not deeply felt racism anyway but another part of his attempt to make himself feel better by believing that the human race is innately superior. That he wanted to be the Chosen One of legend also smacks of the levels of fear that drove him. A fear of unimportance that he'd claim a prophecy from the founding of the Jedi Order.

In the end, its this ultimate lack of malice that blinds him to his master's own treachery.

 

You missed several versions. I'll write them all up after work

And honestly, conflating Legacy and ROTS' characterizations is a mistake because they're not the same. Dooku in LoTJ believes he loved Lorian, and that that was a mistake he would never commit again. Also, he has an alien friend. Jude Watson's Dooku is a profoundly traumatized child who cuts himself off deliberately from love because he doesn't want to get hurt, and appears to be an effective Jedi. His "non-Jedi moments" are significantly less serious than acts she shows Obi-Wan, Qui-Gon, or Anakin committing in other books. And the moral of the book. "It's all your fault, Dooku, because you told me I'd be punished if I stole the Holocron and that it was wrong so I stole it anyway and was so scared I blamed you, and then you didn't lie to the Council for me and you're a horrible person" is so staggeringly illogical it makes my head hurt.

And his disapproval of Tahl is pretty logical too, even if Qui-Gon doesn't see it that way. Qui-Gon's attachment, after all, did mess him up big time.

Dark Rendezvous is a gorgeous work. But honestly I like Labyrinth of Evil's characterization of Dooku the best. More on that later.

Dooku just seems to have this huge red Dark Horse-esque blinking "BETRAY ME" sign on his back, and this is the root of all his problems.

 

Lorian Nodd recognized that there was something screwy in Dooku's brain to begin with I think even if he's trying to self justify himself in his dying words ;-)

But yes, I think Stover and Judes are close enough to be called the same.

 

Sadly, my own experiences with Dooku have been limited to the comics (where he was generally portrayed as the Bond-esque "master villain"), Labyrinth of Evil, the "Clone Wars" cartoon, and the films. However I consider myself a big fan of the character, and think he was really poorly treated in general as a character. Here was an opportunity for a character with a tremendous amount of depth, and it was generally ignored. Too often he's written off as a "placeholder" or generally regarded as one of the least powerful/popular Sith. Fooey I say! The man was a master duelist, very powerful in the Force, and was clearly a tremendously charismatic and dangerously manipulative man.

It sounds like I really need to read "Dark Rendezvous" because it seems that portrays Dooku precisely as I see him: A once-noble man who fell too far, too fast, and was too proud to admit that he had made a mistake. To me, Dooku -couldn't- have always been this selfish, arrogant character that people describe from the Watson books. Yes, the Jedi may have been oblivious to some things, but by all accounts, Dooku was very highly regarded among the Jedi, even if he was a bit rebellious/iconoclastic. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, the Jedi (Mace Windu included) refuse to believe that he's truly gone evil. I can't believe any Jedi would reach those heights of respect if he were so fundamentally flawed as Dooku is sometimes portrayed.

It's funny, because in many ways I see Dooku as a mirror-image of Anakin, from a certain point of view. In the beginning, he's driven by his overwhelming desire to change the galaxy for the better, but his pride and his fear twist those good intentions and allow him to fall to the Dark Side. And don't get me wrong, he does some undeniably evil things as Darth Tyranus, but I think that ultimately, if the circumstances had played out differently, he may well have been redeemable.

All-in-all, I hope the EU sources don't abandon this character now that his final fate is known. Personally, I'd love to see more of Dooku during the heights of his career as a Jedi Knight/Master.

 

Eh, no. LoTJ Dooku knows what's going on with Lorian and just doesn't know what to say to make it better. He can't say no to Lorian when they're in his room together, so he's quiet. A critical point in Legacy is that Dooku cares deeply about that betrayal. The split is nasty and bitter but very human. I've known critical relationship breakdowns like that. And it was pretty much entirely Lorian's fault.

The critical, critical difference, is here:

 

Other versions of Dooku:

The RPG sourcebook, which has him both a follower of the Potentium and believing he's the chosen one, both things I have much difficulty accepting because they just seem to be thrown in there randomly to stir the pot.

Cestus Deception & Labyrinth of Evil: This Dooku believes that the Jedi have lost the path of the Force, and seems to think that the prophecy of the and the Jedi should follow that will by evolving into a new Order serving the Dark Side, though he doesn't seem to really think of it as the Dark Side. Submission to the will of the Force is emphasized. He's even vaguely sad about it, but thinks the Jedi have to be destroyed if they can't change. He appreciates Obi-Wan and Anakin's camaradie. Doesn't seem to be in it for permanant Sith domination, and recognizes the Sith's power will wane in time. Also thinks Sidious is destined to rule the galaxy. His description of his fall to the Dark Side seems to be "meh, Palpatine is going to win anyway, and the preservation of balance requires the Dark Side to be on top. For a time." This Dooku apparently bought the "it is your destiny" line. And heh, maybe it was. Emphasis on becoming an instrument of the Force, and certain ideas that seem realistic for an elderly Jedi Master who defected late in life.

I like this one because Luceno, almost uniquely in the EU because he looks at things from a historical as opposed to a story perspective, takes Dooku seriously.

New Droid Army: 'nuff said. Dooku raids the Jedi Temple, is retconned to steal some holocrons, and gets out alive without much trouble. Also apparently kicks Obi-Wan's butt again offscreen. Then Anakin kills him and he gives a very bizarre speech. Video game Dooku in general tends towards "I am the exposition, dammit"

 

I dislike his ROTS characterization. He gets turned into a naive, overconfident, overtrusting, rambling racist when we really haven't seen that at all in him before. The closest is his arrogance, but that's not the same as overconfidence.

Jedi Trial's characterization (what little of it there is) also didn't make sense to me at first, but fit in better after ROTS, when it was made clear that he was aware of Palpatine's plan to gradually turn Skywalker.

 

That's not the worst part. The worst part is if that characterization's true, the entire Jedi Order is orders of magnitude more stupid than that not to have ever noticed.

 

I don't think that's the case. I think that the Jedi Order respected Count Dooku as someone whom obeyed the forms of the Jedi Order, did what was asked of him, and only rebelled by saying the right things at the right time. The fact that they missed a rotten apple amidst them doesn't impress its a major failure if he's as charismatic as Christopher Lee impresses.

 

When he was allegedly a racist sociopath from the time he was a little kid - and they're both mostly alien and very empathic and have known him that long, it certainly is.

There's no -motivation- for a sociopath like the ROTS characterization to remain within the Jedi Order for that long, even. Or save people's lives, or do anything he had to do to get enough of a reputation he could move a good part of the galaxy into secession on his word alone. Think of what kind of leadership would be needed to get a US state to secede.

It's all really laughable, and ruins the ROTS novelization for me. The worst part is that the Dooku "introspective" is an utterly unnecessary part of the novel in the first place.

 

The point of the story is that he views people in a detached manner. It's a lauded Jedi aspect.

The irony that he is TOO detached I don't see a problem with.

He's not necessarily a sociopath even if he doesn't have the capacity to make friends.

 

Dooku wasn't just this guy, you know. He was the most powerful Jedi of his generation, certainly closely watched, friends with Mace Windu, apparently a member of the Old Guard, etc. And yet he never slipped in maintaining a lie he had no motivation even to continue? Ugh.

I wouldn't even have a problem with the too much detachment thing. Except he's not detached. He's all possessive and sneery even as he's supposedly objectifying things.

ROTS Dooku is crude in language (probably the most unforgivable aspect), has obnoxious opinions, and won't shut up. The Jedi would have noticed. If he wasn't a Jedi - and a Jedi Master even, the personality might make sense, but it just doesn't fit into the big picture unless everyone's an idiot. When even Jedi Trial does a better job at making a plausible villain, there's a problem.

 

The critical similarity is that both passages are from Dooku's point of view. Placed side by side like that, they don't show us a contradiction in his character, they show us a fundamental change that has been wrought in Dooku over the seventy years or so that separate each of these two reflections.

Lorian was his friend, and Dooku loved him. But then his friend betrayed him, opening Dooku's eyes to a whole galaxy full of lies and betrayal and corruption and inadequacy and failure. He failed to teach Qui-Gon detachment, he was witness to and an active participant in the Jedi-led slaughter on Galidran, Komari Vosa failed him as a Padawan on nearly all accounts, he watched the Republic he had sworn to safeguard grow rotten and corrupt, the Jedi Order of which he was a part became increasingly blind to the problems of the galaxy, then Qui-Gon died and that was enough for him. Everyone betrayed him: his best friend, his Padawan, the Republic, the Jedi Council, the peoples of the galaxy.

When he was a child, he stopped believing in friendship. He grew old, discovered what he came to think of as the true nature of the galaxy, and by the time of Revenge of the Sith, he had deluded himself into believing that Lorian was right: he'd never really known what true friendship was at all.

I think it's a tragic, beautiful arc.

 

I liked Dooku in Stover's "Revenge of The Sith" novelization. I love the way that Stover dove inside each (main) character and analyzed what they were doing and why they were doing it. Dooku really believed that Palpatine wanted him (Dooku) to be his left-hand man. It's this aspect that's in the book that makes the movie worth watching. The look that Dooku gives Palpatine when he gives Anakin the order to kill Dooku is priceless.

 

I think _ViE_AcheRoN_ hits it on the head.

I also think sabarte is missing the point. I think the darker aspects of Dooku's character were always present, but were deeply suppressed while he was with the Jedi Order. I think a lot of his much-vaunted discipline was developed forcing himself to act the way the Jedi expected him to rather than how he would have acted were he not a Jedi.

It's like he spent 70 years secretly thinking he was better than everyone else, secretly hating the weird appearances and strange languages and whatnot of the aliens around him, then with great determination pushing them down into the darkest parts of his brain and forcing himself to do what a Jedi is supposed to do and say what a Jedi is supposed to say, and then (and this is key, I think) quietly patting himself on the back for being such a good Jedi, for resisting his darker urges so well. This, of course, feeds his contempt of anyone less disciplined than he himself was.

Then, of course, after Galidraan, he distances himself further from the Jedi, and has a long, hard think about his life. He's already started wondering whether or not the Jedi Order is really all it's supposed to be. He's stopped trying to work for their approval and started thinking about whether or not they deserve his.

Then, after Qui-Gon's death, and after they bring in this miserable little brat from Tatooine and start talking about him being the Chosen One (preposterous!), he's pretty much done with them, and he's very receptive to the advances of Sidious. When he finally cuts his last ties to the Jedi Order (publicly renouncing his membership, renewing his ties to his family, and of course secretly murdering Sifo-Dyas and ordering the clones), it's like he's finally free to say what he really meant to say the whole time, to feel the way he really meant to feel the whole time, etc.

It's like having your sister marry someone you think she's too good for. You patiently sit through family events with him, you feel guilty for thinking he's an idiot, you try to force yourself to like him. Then, one weekend, he gets drunk, beats your sister, sleeps with a hooker, and crashes his car, and it's like opening the floodgates. You're finally vindicated. You never had any reason to feel guilty for thinking he's a boor and an idiot: he really is a boor and an idiot, and now you resent the social pressures keeping you from speaking the obvious truth before all this unpleasantness happened. You were never wrong to begin with - they're the ones who were wrong and who owe you an apology.

It's the same thing here. Dooku secretly feels that the Jedi are deeply misguided on many issues, but in his competitive drive to become the Best Jedi Evar, he plays along and works very, very hard to repress those aspects of his personality that conflict with the dictates of the Jedi Council. He is a racist, for example, but he doesn't want to be, because he defers to the judgment of the Jedi Council on that issue. Then, once a few things start piling up that make him re-evaluate the wisdom of the Council, he starts to trust his own initial instincts more and to hold the Council in lower and lower esteem.

 

My main take on these facts is that we all have a Dark Side to ourselves that is the exact opposite of whom we are in many respects. A religious man has that voice in the back of his head that talks about there being no god or he's wasting his life or whatnot. A atheist has the reverse.

Dark Nest handled it in macrochasm with the Unconcious, Conscious, and the Gorogs.

Dooku had these urges inside him but he successfully resisted them for most of his adult life. It's difficult to imagine WHERE he picked up his racism and the like (unlike his inability to make true friends) but its entirely possible there.

 

I look at ROTS Dooku and I see a man that is fundamentally immature, naive, loudmouthed, crude, undisciplined, and bigoted, and who gets publicly weepy in front of his Sith Master. There's no hook to the character where I can look at him and say "that was a logical progression from what was once a Jedi Master for 40 years". And they don't let just any idiot become a Jedi Master (there's no indication Dooku was self-declared like Jorus), or else Anakin would be one. He's not written his age. He's written like any of the kids that fall to the Dark Side in their 20s and 30s. Stover said he had the most trouble writing Dooku, and I can tell. Dark Rendezvous at least gives you that sense of age and experience to the character. He's developed a humanocentricity that has never shown up elsewhere in the EU. In fact, there's little to no basis in the existing EU for a lot of his characterization - Watson's Dooku would be far more paranoid about betrayal, for instance.

I think the arc could work, if the final keystone was written better and with less lazy characterization. As somebody who read ROTS after the rest of Dooku's appearances, it was a profoundly unsatisfying wrap-up. You could almost hear the "well, he's old and ugly and not obviously badass, we don't have to make his character arc make sense" .

C19/dizfactor: Your version, believe it or not, is in many ways similar to the way I actually write Dooku, though I tend towards what I described the LoE version as also. It raises some interesting questions about whether good deeds performed without the biological/psychological human motivations for altruism are more or less admirable than the normal sort.

 

This thread is making me realize how useful a Dooku TPM-AOTC bridge novel could be. It could really show how he went from Jedi Master to Sith Lord, and the subesquent personality changes that went along with it.

 

A sad waste of interesting potential. Imminent ROTS inhibited his development.

 

I have always been intrested in the story of The Great Count Dooku. I will keep my response short on this one, I think one of Dooku's greatest flaws was though he believed trusting someone was not the way to go, he still ended up trusting. To me Dooku wanted someone to trust, someone whom he could share his ideals together with. The only person who he trusted and did not fail him (in his eyes) was Qui-Gon. It's like when females give the whole hard shell appearance because they don't want to trust anyone for reasons of being scarred in the past, but deep down inside the majority of them really want to, they just want you to work hard to earn their trust. To me Dooku was the same way. However he just trusted the wrong people all of his life, my only question for Dooku is, was he really that foolish to think he could trust Sidious. I mean maybe it's just me, however if your a Sith Apprentice and you start hearing your Master speak about other Jedi being strong, and you hear him say " All in good time", I'm sorry but something would trigger in my mind saying " ok I have to do something quickly because I can see where this is going". Dooku for some reason didn't think " TREACHERY IS THE WAY OF THE SITH" would apply to him until his hands were cut off, and him kneeling to Skywalker about to become beheaded. Trust has always been a Flaw for Dooku.

 

I sometimes wonder if the Revenge of the Sith novellization is deliberately written as a novellization, from the POV of someone in the GFFA with access to the "sources", especially the footage edited into the movie...

When I'm being more frivilous, I might be inclined to argue instead that the Dooku in RotS is a clone...

But, issues of exact emphasis aside, I don't see a problem with Dooku having the sort of heretical private thoughts and issues that he does while still being the star of the Jedi Order.

I think the key to Jedi Dooku is actually the key to the entire Jedi Order: Dooku was essentially brainwashed in early childhood, socially conditioned into acting in a certain way, raised according to a certain pattern of behaviour. It doesn't matter what he believes, what he thinks. Being a Jedi is just muscle-memory, physical and linguistic.

Unlike most Jedi, though, Count Dooku of Serenno asked enough questions to realise the fundamental hypocrisy of the Jedi Order.

The true irony of Dark Rendezvous isn't that Anakin's arrival stopped Yoda's attempts to infantilize him and wrap him up in a cocoon of hypocrisy - it's that Yoda's arrival prevented Ventress from persuading him to finally be the man he'd always pretended to be, free from Sidious, Yoda, and everyone else...

Then again, considering the way Anakin described his own wife when he didn't realise it was her he was talking about, maybe the author did that deliberately...

- The Imperial Ewok

 

Right on.

Oh? Care to elaborate?

 

Dooku is the perfect #2 Sith - in some ways. He seems to be the most cooperative Bane-line Sith ever, perfectly willing to train Anakin as a replacement/colleague despite not liking him very much (oddly for a Sith, he doesn't' seem to overtly fear death, he just doesn't foresee it happening as fast as it does). He has a lot of dark side acolytes that he doesn't seem to have much trouble with, except for Vos, who didn't betray him so much as fail a final test. The less senior (or constantly failing - hi Asajj) acolytes he throws at each other, but that doesn't seem to happen with the more seasoned and loyal servants like Sora Bulq, Sev'rance Tann, that Anzat Nejaa killed, etc - those don't seem to have infighting problems. It's a culture clash between him and Sidious, who as of Dark Lord very much believes in the Rule of Two. But as we can see from Legacy, Dooku's way seems to work pretty well too.

Dooku isn't at all an untalented Jedi or Sith. Considering the challenges that were thrown his way, and the fact that he had the entire PT Jedi Order out for his blood for three years, there's few that could have done so well. A man who can have thousands of systems secede from the Republic on his bare word must have been a very respected Jedi. And it did take an arranged backstab by Palpatine, Anakin Skywalker, and Obi-Wan Kenobi to kill him.

He's intelligent and resourceful enough to handle almost anything thrown at him - Geonosis was beautifully done, considering 3/4 of the Council including Yoda and Mace were thrown at him. He wiped out 80 or so Jedi with battle droids alone, and about another hundred Jedi elsewhere without losing any of the major players in the Sep leadership or getting a scratch on himself personally. When you think of all the ways that could have gone wrong, it shows an awesome trust in Dooku by Sidious, and Dooku succeeds in pretty much every way. If you buy New Droid Army, he's able to compromise the security of the Jedi Temple personally and get out alive. He gets half the Council thrown at him again on Boz Pity and outmaneuvers them again, including outmaneuvering Mace Windu personally. The Seps must be a nightmare to keep in line, but he does and maneuvers them into losing the war without them realizing the Sith aren't actually on their side. He's really a completely irreplacable asset to Sidious's plans through most of the Clone Wars. Dooku was the shatterpoint, there.

He also could have, if not overthrown Sidious, become a serious, serious threat to him. Just walking into the Temple one day and saying "Hey, Mace, old buddy" would probably been enough to kill Sidious or at least destroy his power base. He doesn't seem to really consider anything of the sort, though.

But why is someone who has embraced the Dark Side so apparently unambitious? Well, that's fairly easy. It's because all of his overthrowing-your-master energies are directed at Yoda. Dooku fights emotionally against Yoda, and he doesn't seem to do that with anyone else.

Dooku's the earliest born of the human figures of the Clone Wars, and it's interesting to consider a comment attributed to Yoda by Car'das in the context of his training. For the first thirty years of Dooku's life, he was almost certainly the second most powerful Jedi in the Order and knew it. He is stated to be the most powerful Padawan of his generation (and probably for hundreds of years), carefully watched, and may to have been taken as a Padawan by Thame Cereulean to avoid the appearance of favoritism. While ambitious, he considered himself the 'heir apparent' to Yoda, and hoped to one day surpass him.

The first problem is that Dooku's total lifespan is probably less than Yoda's remaining lifespan. Dooku's put in the position of a "child" whose "parent" will outlive him. He'll never be able to get out of the shadow of Yoda. I suspect this was a problem for many powerful Jedi under Yoda's "reign" - they never get a chance to prove what they can do with Yoda patiently shaping the Order over the years.

Joining the Council