PT Darth Plagueis the Wise

But later:


Ignoring the reactions of apprehensive residents and wary security personnel, Plagueis hastened along a plush corridor in 500 Republica toward Palpatine's suite of crimson rooms. He had planned to be at the Senate Building to hear Amidala's call for a vote of no-confidence in Valorum, which would strike the first death knell for the Republic. At the last moment, however, Palpatine had contacted him to recount a conversation he had had with Dooku. The fact that Qui-Gon Jinn had identified Maul as a Sith was to be expected; but Dooku's news about a human boy at the center of a vergence in the Force had come as a shock. More, Qui-Gon saw the boy as the Jedi's Chosen One!
He had to see this Anakin Skywalker for himself; had to sense him for himself. He had to know if the Force had struck back again, nine years earlier, by conceiving a human being to restore balance to the galaxy.


That chapter in the book is called "The Force Strikes Back".

 

@Iron Lord,
I thought Plagueis' concerns were about, that the Jedi had found Anakin before the Sith did.

 

He's certainly worried about what the Jedi will do with Anakin.

There was still a chance that the Council would decide that Anakin was too old to be trained as a Jedi. That way, assuming he was returned to Tatooine ...
But if not ... if Qui-Gon managed to sway the Council Masters, and they reneged on their own dictates ...
Plagueis ran a hand over his forehead. Are we undone? he thought. Have you undone us?

 

No, you have done that yourself. And I will train the boy.

 

Does anyone remember whether Lucas ever gave any explanation for Darth Plagueis’s name? I vaguely remember an official source saying it was a reference to him unleashing the plague that was Sidious on the galaxy. But I haven’t been able to find that reference. Of course, outside of more metaphorical interpretations, we know Plagueis was deeply interested in the microbiotic world.

 

Just after the Maladian assassin attempt in ch 21 Investiture:

And Anakin much later.

In the short story "The Tenebrous Way" by Matthew Stover in Star Wars Insider 130 (2011) it is told that Darth Tenebrous did infect his young apprentice with some Maxi-Chlorians which would enable him to transfer his mind after his physical death into the Muun's body. As Muuns are a very long living species, Tenebrous calculated to see the taking over of the Sith in the galaxy in due time then. For he infected his apprentice with those Maxi-Chlorians, he gave him the name Plagueis, which also can mean, the infected one.

So how do you like the new cover for the Darth Plagueis novel in The Essential Legends Collection?

 

From Chapter 24:

Drunk on newfound power, then, he had attempted an even more unthinkable act: to bring into being a creation of his own. Not merely the impregnation of some hapless, mindless creature, but the birth of a Forceful being. The ability to dominate death had been a step in the right direction, but it wasn’t equivalent to pure creation. And so he had stretched out—indeed, as if invisible, transubstantiated—to inform every being of his existence, and impact all of them: Muunoid or insectoid, secure or dispossessed, free or enslaved. A warrior waving a banner in triumph on a battlefield. A ghost infiltrating a dream.
But ultimately to no end.
The Force grew silent, as if in flight from him, and many of the animals in his laboratory succumbed to horrifying diseases.
Regardless, eight long years later, Plagueis remained convinced that he was on the verge of absolute success.

I lean to the view that it was in that moment, that the Force Struck Back at him by conceiving Anakin and keeping him from knowing.

His "tipping of the balance" right before that:

The question of whether he and Sidious had discovered something new or rediscovered something ancient was beside the point. All that mattered was that, almost a decade earlier, they had succeeded in willing the Force to shift and tip irrevocably to the dark side. Not a mere paradigm shift, but a tangible alteration that could be felt by anyone strong in the Force, and whether or not trained in the Sith or Jedi arts.
The shift had been the outcome of months of intense meditation, during which Plagueis and Sidious had sought to challenge the Force for sovereignty and suffuse the galaxy with the power of the dark side. Brazen and shameless, and at their own mortal peril, they had waged etheric war, anticipating that their own midi-chlorians, the Force’s proxy army, might marshal to boil their blood or stop the beating of their hearts. Risen out of themselves, discorporate and as a single entity, they had brought the power of their will to bear, asserting their sovereignty over the Force. No counterforce had risen against them. In what amounted to a state of rapture they knew that the Force had yielded, as if some deity had been tipped from its throne. On the fulcrum they had fashioned, the light side had dipped and the dark side had ascended.

may also have been a contributing factor in the Force's response. Tip the balance, and a Chosen One will be born to un-tip it.

 

So you mean, that was really Da Force and its will, like described in the Dark Nest Trilogy, and not some forgotten experiment of Plagueis? That the Force created Anakin to make at Plagueis?

 

It would fit with the way the Prophesy of the Chosen One is described.

"Hijacking his failed attempt at creating Forceful life and turning it into a success that will destroy everything he has worked for" would be very economical - using the power that is already there.

 

There are two separate powers there though, creating life and stopping death. The only relatively confirmed lie is Sidious learning the stopping death power (I say "relative" because there're also the remote possibility that he did learn it but just didn't want to tell Anakin), but we don't know about the creating life one.

 

This is unrelated to most things discussed, but I’ve thought for a while that in some alternate universe where he’d still been alive, Vincent Price could’ve been a great Darth Plagueis.



That way we’d have the trinity of British horror playing villains on Star Wars. And it would be a very different take on a Sith Lord.

 

"From the brain that brought you the big Muun caper.
The Sith that made headlines in every Sith paper..."

 

I remember reading in the Plagueis portion of The Book of Sith that he was able to create beings with midi-chlorian counts of around 20,000.

 

In The Rise of Skywalker Palpatine demonstrates he could cheat death as he claimed Plagueis could do.

 

[QUOTE="Kato Sai, post: 58106180, member: 1382832"
In The Rise of Skywalker Palpatine demonstrates he could cheat death as he claimed Plagueis could do.[/QUOTE]It should have been Plagueis in the ST cheating death, just like Ep. III pointed at and like anticipated by many fans as soon as Ep. VII came out.

 

It should have been Plagueis in the ST cheating death, just like Ep. III pointed at and like anticipated by many fans as soon as Ep. VII came out.[/QUOTE]

Some fans theorize Plagueis is Palpatine, that he made up his Master to better make Anakin buy the “cheat death” package. However, the novel and the

Spoiler

fact Plagueis is in The Acolyte, refutes this view.

 

Would Lucas’s sequels have explored the power of Darth Plagueis? His power involved controlling the midi-chlorians to keep people from dying. This isn’t too different from what Qui-Gon learned to do from the Shaman of the Whills.

By surrendering to the will of the Cosmic Force, to the Whills, Qui-Gon’s Jedi followers learned to retain their persona and physical body after death. The Whills controlled the midi-chlorians to some extent, so if Plagueis did the same with his power, then he was essentially usurping the power of the Whills.

But the Sith power was unnatural, grounded on the physical world. The Sith would not have become the luminous, spiritual beings we see the Jedi become in the OT. Instead they would’ve simply endured in the physical realm. Perhaps that is what the Emperor and Vader are implied to be in the OT, enduring physical beings who simply do not die despite injury and age. Maybe they did learn Plagueis’s power at some point before the OT, and thus would have remained in power indefinitely had Luke not trained as a Jedi.

What was implicit in the OT (not really developed yet, out-of-universe) was revealed to audiences more explicitly in the PT, so the sequels may have explored the fruition of those powers more fully as a follow-up. We could’ve seen the power of the Whills explored by Luke and his Jedi. And the power of Plagueis could’ve been explored by the reborn Sith, Darth Maul and Darth Talon.

In discussing this I’m mainly interested in what Lucas planned, not what was done with the stories after he sold them to Disney. That’s a different topic in my mind and probably different from what Lucas himself was thinking about.

 

That implies, that everything earthly, if I can use that geographically restricted terme here, is unnatural, because it is just physical - just mundane? While being luminous spiritual without a body is quite so much more elevated celestial - pure? That is a very religious concept and I wouldn't judge a force ghost to be better than a being with a prolonged life wherever. And also force-ghosts are not meant to be eternal. In the Thrawn Trilogy Obi-Wan Kenobi's force ghost said farewell to Luke and thus the luminousity was gone likewise.

 

What I meant was that the Sith method of survival involved cheating death rather than accepting it. It's like the Elves of Middle-earth crafting rings to preserve things for as long as possible. There's nothing wrong with the physical world per se, but it is by its nature perishable. And to force perishable things to remain in stasis beyond their time, even when done out of good intentions (as with the Elves), is futile and more painful than having accepted their passing to begin with.

In Star Wars, when things die they become part of the Force. Jedi who learn the way of the Whills are able to retain their mind and form even while being part of the Force. But a Sith who learned to cheat death would not return to the Force. He is still a part of the living Force, of course, but he is interrupting the flow that feeds the Cosmic Force. The Jedi spirits do not do this, their process of survival is in tune with the will of the Force. If the Sith ever did find a way to survive, which we don't know for sure was ever possible, then it would likely be done against the will of the Force and could potentially only serve to threaten its balance. Sidious himself refers to it as unnatural.

But it's only my speculation that the Sith power to cheat death entails their maintaining a physical body. For all I know we would've eventually seen a Sith retain some kind of existence in the Force, perhaps as part of the dark side. Or perhaps the Sith do not retain their individuality, but the dark side nonetheless absorbs them and is able to become more conscious over time, giving the appearance of Sith survival after death. Who knows? But I'm fairly sure the point would've been that whatever the Sith did, it would not be good.

Like I said, we only got the beginnings of what Lucas was going to explore with the more mystical side of the Force. The notion that Force ghosts disappear is from the EU, though, so I don't really consider it particularly illuminating on the subject. But it's possible that even in Lucas's stories the ultimate destiny of immortal Jedi was also in another plane. I know he made some comments on this subject during story conferences for TESB and ROTJ, so I'll take a look there in case there's any insight.

 

Sidious in RotS said, that other, means ordinary or even Jedi, would consider such powers to be unnatural. That doesn't mean, that he is sharing that view. He said it to coax Anakin into the Dark Side, to let Anakin believe, that he (Anakin) is surely such an extraordinary person who is capable to learn those exclusive powers.

Yes, the ideal of Force ghosts disappearing at a certain point, is from the EU, but there is also not said, that they have to be eternal in the new kanon, so that is up to speculation.

 

Force ghosts moving on has to do with two reasons. One was to avoid helping Luke all the time and two, Lucas intended for being a ghost to be temporary. Johnson either didn't know that or ignored it.

 

ROTS explored the dark side manipulation of midichlorians subtlety, especially with regard to the death of Padme, whose “losing the will (whill) to live” being likely, purposely ambiguous.

Much of it begins with Yoda on Polis Massa communing with Qui-Gon among its floating rocks; harkening back to Luke’s training on Dagobah. Whereas someone, somewhere is draining life-force from Padme “for reasons we cannot explain”.

Additionally, that film spends time not only concluding the PT but setting up thematic story threads meant left open as potential new, concluding stories relating to the nature of the Force in the ST. It’s possible that the ST would have spent time developing the Cosmic Force concept whereas the PT laid out the Living Force conception; leaving the OT as an ode to balance.

It’s entirely possible that Plagueis’s powers would feature in the ST and perhaps even the Magister himself as the ultimate problem in the Skywalker Saga. It certainly follows the pattern and design evident in the narrative structure regarding the elevation of powerful Jedi and Sith and Master/Apprentice relations.

 

Wanting to cheat death is very normal. The Fountain of Youth, Eternal Life religions, and etc. i agree, its a sensibile goal to preserve one’s life and consciousness forever. That’s why I despise the Jedi becoming One with The Force and ceasing to have a unique consciousness and being; although “ironically” the Jedi rebel against this to become Force Ghosts which is telling that they like the Sith want to cheat death.

 

Even more than that: Johnson misread and distorted the concept of a force ghost in the point that a dead Luke Skywalker was able to heave up an X-Wing out of the sea. What a character development! Just imagine the vibrant paradise and interspace parties, good ol' Luke will attend, searing baby force ghosts with some likewise deceased female Jedi.

Actually I still couldn't grasp a clear concept about what the ST wants us to know about a deeper understanding or a higher concept of life or death. @ColeFardreamer told me once in his head canon, that he expected the ST to build a bridge between the dead and the living, but I don't see this in the ST beside Rey's and Palpatine's exclamation: "I'm all ..." whatever. A gruesome body hopping from one Sith or Jedi generation to the coming one - not a message I would cherish for a whole trilogy.

In the Re-reading NJO-thread, there was an interesting interview with Walter Jon Williams posted recently about Vergere's force concept outlined in Destiny's Way, the forteenth volume of the book series New Jedi Order, I want to share herewith.

Vergere also did become a force ghost after her death, but she transformed herself like this only to say farewell to Jacen Solo and to give him some last words. I think to become a force ghost, a Jedi doesn't so to entertain himself during some hereafter parties, but to complete a mission he wasn't able to do during life time. And when the mission is done, he or she can dissolve and become truly one with the force. But I'm sure Palpatine in his quest for prolonging life was convinced that his presence in da flesh was also necessary for the galaxy.

 

We see Obi-Wan walk and sit in ROTJ. Plus, Lucas originally had Yoda spar with Obi-Wan in TESB. So Johnson wasn't too far off on that one.