CT ESB dark side cave. Provenance? Origins? Yoda strategy?

Pebble in your shoe motivation: I can glimpse ways to effect a number of ST ideas. Which lead to the musing that the dark side cave on Dagobah was, unbeknownst to Yoda, unbeknownst to the Emperor, the unresting place of the dark, shredded, shade of Darth Plagious, his body brought there by some dark Jedi yet to be revealed. That phenomenon is discovered, that is followed to certain logical conclusions, and it paves the way for the dark, slightly less shredded shade of Emperor, clinging to our mortal frame, to have tortured gasps of Voldemortean / grudge-like revenge through Darth Maul, the legitimately elected villain of George Lucas' legitimate sequel trilogy. End of pebble-in-your-shoe motivation.

There are no definitive statements in Lucas cinematic corpus establishing where, what, when, how and who the dark cave is. Besides Chancellor Palpatine's statements to Anakin, it is the only place in Lucas cinematic corpus where anything associated with the dark side is given any form of location, duration, or longevity. The Force is configured with geospatial presence when Obi-Wan talks to Luke about the Force binding the galaxy together, and, when any of Obi-Wan, Vader, Luke, the Emperor speak about feeling the presence of another Force user (or millions of lives on Alderaan).

What defensible ideas are proposed by any SW diaspora literature, particularly Clone Wars under Lucas and Filoni prior to October 2012, and, material from ""Legends"" EU, prior to October 2012?

 

As anyone who's read my previous posts will know, I tend to speak outside the universe. As a result I'll say that Darth Plagious hadn't been invented when ESB was made. He was an invention of the PT. As a matter of fact, there's some confusion about whether it was a true cave. In the Marvel adaptation and I believe the novel, it was a huge gnarly tree with roots forming a cave like shape. The tree itself was the living organism that was strong with the dark side.

 

I do not identify how there can be confusion from the cinematic final product. Luke goes down a hole. Yoda says your failure at the cave. Sounds to me, from what you're saying, that early scripts may be channeling some Yggdrasil. I have no depth in that area. Trees that carry intent, good or bad, goes back as recently as Shakespeare (Be brave like the lion and proud. Don’t even worry about who hates you, who resents you, and who conspires against you. Macbeth will never be defeated until Birnam Wood marches to fight you at Dunsinane Hill.) and the Ents.

I don't know if a Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Bad can be squeezed in there with a shoe horn. That's also asking for some outside knowledge on the influences of Avatar. That analogy was not extended further than tree = mother earth.

I know Lucas was not above or beyond atavism in any early stage of any of his work. His early ideas for Kyber crystals were atavistic. An evil tree certainly is Arthurean.

 

What I was meaning is that it's not certain if the "cave" was literally a cave made out of rock or an organic cave made out of tree roots. From what Yoda and the rest of the movies (yes, even in the PT) say it would have to be living to be connected with the Force in anyway and not just a cave made of rock and earth, And I believe it was Kurtz who was behind that part of the movie, because he was Buddhist. As a matter of fact, he was the one who suggested the whole concept of the spiritual Force as we see it in the OT. It was Lucas who thought up the DNA crap we see in the PT.

 

Uh. That is not said. A cave made of rock and earth that close to the surface will have all manner of surface microbes. There's a lizard or snake or some reptile that's near the entrance. There's vines. In the absence of a dedicated tree, there is enough biomass on evidence in the film to satisfy Obi-Wan's and Yoda's statements that the Force is given rise to by living things.

Didn't know that about Kurtz.

 

Are you saying that loads of tiny things in that area are the cause of the strong vibes Luke was getting? I don't think vines, small lizards and microbes on their own would create that much of an aura. On the other hand a giant tree would. It'd also be enough to attract all other creatures with evil energy living in the vicinity.

 

I don't believe the cave was natural at all. At one point the entrance shows up clearly as an artificial, manufactured doorframe. It was either an ancient darksider's castle that sank into the swamp (without burning or falling over ), or a spaceship that crashed/landed on Dagobah, IMO.

 

I've been checking and there's no conclusive evidence what the cave is, at least in canon, especially OT canon which I always go by. It says that it's part earth and part organic, with one of the entrances being made of the roots of the giant "gnarltree" that stands above it and makes up part of the cave's structure. There's no explanation for what that doorway structure is all about. But there is some evidence that the power comes from the tree itself, because Williams' name for the music at that part of the movie is "The Magic Tree".

 

Legends followed this rule that some places have strong presence of the dark side. The Yavin 4 temple also had a dark side presence.

I think it's origins is due to a powerful Sith Lord dying there.

 

Um, no he wasn't. That's just revisionist history.
It was Lucas who came up with the force and its spiritual parts, and it already included the biological part back then as well. In fact, the storyline of the OT only makes sense if said biological part does exist. The Emperor fearing Anakin's children requires strength in the force to be hereditary, at least to some extend. Otherwise there would be no reason to fear Anakin's children. This, in turn, requires biology, because that's how passing something on from one generation to another works. The prequels didn't turn the force into anything it hadn't already been before.

This is basically the argument about the oh so evil PT de-mystifying the force:
old: "It's raining", "the ground is wet now"
new: "the rain must have caused the ground to be wet"
reaction: "How dare you take the mystery out of this?"

Speaking out what was already blindingly obvious in the first place doesn't remove the mystery. Nor does it change anything, because the very thing that was mentioned now already had to be part of the equation back then.

 

I tend to avoid taking anyt

Then why weren't midichlorians mentioned once in the OT? Surely, if they were what the PT said they were then both Obi-Wan and Yoda should've mentioned them. But no, not one single word. Not only did they not mention them but why wasn't a blood test done on Luke?

 

Luke didn't need any test since he is the son of a strong force user and being a son of somebody means that he has the similar blood like his father.

 

It's the monolith from 2001

 

If a fantasy movie said the the children of wizards also made strong wizards, one would assume that a strong connection to magic is hereditary.

One would not assume that there were microscopic organisms in a wizards blood that told them the will of magic.

So no, Luke being powerful in the force because his father was also powerful does not automatically lead to medichlorians.

 

I see a LOT of mental gymnastics here just to excuse tons of loathsome continuity busting retcons created by lousy writing. I think you've been watching the PT way too much. I mean, you talk as if kids are exact clones of their parents just as Lucas obviously thinks! Humans aren't just a bunch of little Boba Fetts you know!

 

So what ? Children always inherit some of their parent force anilities in Star Wars. That's why Luke's sister was always going to be strong in the force like Luke himself. That's why Luke's father was stablished as being a Jedi from the first movie.

Also, Obi Wan didn't need blood test to sense Luke's force potential. Similar to the way that Qui Gon sensed Anakin's force sensitibility before testing his blood.

You are just nit picking for the sake of nit picking. With nit picking you can find 1000 inconsistency by just watching OT movies.

 

Has anyone read Orson Scott Card Speaker for the Dead? Has a section where someone dies, per some cultural rite, and a tree is planted in his torso, and that tree somehow pulls certain of his essence up into it as it grows. And a friend later communes with that tree, and it's meaningful.

I scraped some files. I hadn't noticed this before but ESB has three major referenced caves: Ice cave (Echo Base), asteroid cave, Dagobah cave.

2/23/1978 Leigh Bracket:
The analog scene occurs between Luke and Vader, but it is a conversation, not a vision of Luke’s.
“The clearing in the swamp, wreathed by with the ever-present mist. Artoo stands at one side of the house. Abruptly, his metal housing begins to twitch with a kind of eerie brush discharge. Beeping, he looks around, and falls silent. A tall shape of darkness, much taller than a man and having no visible features, yet still giving an impression of Darth Vader’s shape and form, towers in the clearing, outlined in little flickering tongues of force flames darts of energy. Phantom-like, there seems to be an echo of heavy breathing. Presently, much smaller, a second form manifests itself. This too is featureless but suggests Luke; it is light in color, almost white, but the flickering flames energy that outline it are much less strong is weaker than Vader’s. Strange ghostly voices speak now.”

Donald Glut == 10/24/1978 Fourth Draft == 7/23/1979 Fifth Draft :
“This tree is strong with the dark side of the Force. A servant of evil it is. Into it you must go.” TESB10:141

Final Script:
“ YODA
That place... is strong with the
dark side of the Force. A domain
of evil it is. In you must go.
”

It doesn't scan that Lucas intended a tree to have somehow grown up a light side tree and then something bad happened and it turned to the dark side. Did it miss its parent? Did it lose a limb? The tree can very well mean a suite of things from the configuration that the Dagobah experience is a dream within a dream, a stage of The Tempest, a magical experience outside of time, an Arthurian Romance. That can host atavism.

But if Lucas is not suggesting atavism - that legit trees in GFFA can be dark side Force Users - what remains is that physical objects can be receptacles of some form or another of something that transports dark side molecules. Taking an approach of Lucretius, I can leave it at 'dark side molecules'. Going lower, down to 'dark side atoms', threatens atavism that I do not believe Lucas was proposing. And I can avoid going up the hierarchy of chemical formation by stopping well short of any particular _cellular members_.

If the dark side tree, in the original script, was a receptacle of evil molecules, it begs the question whether the dark side tree was a practitioner of evil by using its evil molecules. That's what Yoda's tenor would indicate at first blush with 'a servant of evil it is'. In the final product, it is not anymore explicitly a tree, and it is not anymore explicitly a "servant of evil", but now a "domain of evil".

Is there any evidence in the Lucas corpus - any direct statements by Lucas himself - that Yavin had anything resembling an atavistic presence of Force power that was tied to a location? The closest thing to any of this I can recall is Qui-Gon and Mace talking about a vergence in the Force. But that was about a person. Lucas corpus means "Did Lucas say it. Don't quote wookiepedia and its type if Lucas did not say it."

Here is TPM script:

To be fair, Mace Windu's request to clarify that the vergence occurred around a person does imply that he knew or suspected that a vergence might not occur around a person. The lack of shock by either Yoda or Mace indicate that this is the kind of thing that could happen inside ordinary lifetimes.

Oh dear. I see now that I just quoted the parts of the script that cause trouble. Except that's the part of the script I need to see what Lucas was thinking with respect to atavism. To be fair, a first blush reading of Mace Windu's words suggest that Lucas was not afraid of atavism - that places can have their own Force vergences without respect to, without regard to, without being sourced from, any particular person who released 'evil molecules' upon death.

 

I didn't see much if any inconsistencies in ANH and ESB, where most of the rules were set out. However, ROTJ had loads of continuity errors due to retcons and huge changes in plot.

 

It's less "the tree is planted in him" and more "the tree is him, in a different form". From the way it's described, it's like a butterfly growing from a pupa.

 

Also, the gnarltree in ESB isn't just an ordinary tree. It's a part of the lifecycle of the species of giant spider that lives on Dagobah, hence why it's probably got a consciousness.

 

Source? This is EU? Wookiepedia?

 

Don't know how canon it is, whether it's EU or not. What if it is from the old canon? Is it any less canon than suggesting a Sith Lord from some Disney fan fiction made it? If we're going by solid OT movie canon here then no one knows what it is or where it's from, because neither ESB nor any of its scripts explain it.

 

So... I'm suspecting "gnarltree" and "lifecycle of the species of giant spider" exceed the mandate provided by Lucas corpus. So I google... And I find:

https://screenrant.com/mandalorian-season-2-spiders-empire-strikes-back-explained/

So. Not Lucas. Doesn't have the canonicity of Lucas. Doesn't have the canonicity of cinematic Lucas. If Lucas was authoring his own sequel trilogy, this would be no barrier to other uses of the Dagobah dark side cave.

Now, if I'm not mistaken, someone was recently complaining about the numinous being reduced to physically explicable phenomenon. This here noble intent by Master Hobbit Kevin J. Anderson to flesh out the universe is innovative, interesting. But it also does to the spiritual dimension of Yoda and Luke's relationship to the cave what midichlorians do to the living beings' relationship to the Force. Just commenting.

I cannot personally square it with Yoda's statement that "it is a place of evil", and without having read that EU volume, I do not know if there is any evil component to that life form. But it raises a further calibrating question - is there any such thing as an "evil" creature in Lucas corpus? I don't recall any, from the Dianoga to the Exogorth? to the Sarlaac to the Naboo sea life to the AOTC arena beasts. Lucas cinematic corpus gives no such thing as 'animals' being evil. Lucas cinematic corpus only gives animals, which are life forms, the characteristic that they give rise to the force qua living beings.

 

It leads to the fact that the ability to use the Force is somewhat connected to biology (=hereditary).
It's a common trope in fantasy.

Midichlorians are just a way to measure that.

 

The tree is a place of evil because it is the first time we see the Dark Side personified. Consider the Garden of Eden. It was paradise before the evil dark side serpent came and brought sin into the world. This same serpent aka Satan was obviously influencing the cave. I really think Satan aka a part of the Dark Side is the big bad of Star Wars. The way Dark Side users tempt people to join them is the same way Satan tempts.