While Palaptine has attempted to steal force sensitive children from their parents during the clone wars and later in Rebels through that Inquisitor duo, both tries failed and nothing so far has come of it. Still their is always the chance the Empire has attempted it more then once during the dark times and found success. Is it time for a NU version of the Emperors Hand to take the stage? While the Empire has got the Inquisitors during the dark times, the originization so far doesn’t seem to exist in the OT era and afterwards. If one was still kicking, I could see him not being associated with the Empire anymore. Personally I think adding another group of lesser darksiders to the Empire would be a bonus. See what Palpatine envisioned in TCW become reality. Clearly he had a different mission for those children on Mustafar then hunting Jedi (to young anyways). Unlike the Empires dark Jedi, they could basically be raised into Imperial society, becoming young adults by the time of the OT. Also different from Inquisitors by possibly not even trained to wield a saber, relying on other weapons. With the new live action show also being set just a few years after RoTJ, it’s another way for a few force users to show up. What’s your view on the idea of adding more dark siders to the Galactic Empire?
A villainous dictator separating kids from their families and locking them in cages? No thanks, I don't like unrealistic cartoonish evil in my Star Wars.
I think it was implied that Palpatine was kidnapping the children to use them for Force experiments to enhance his Force vision, not to train them. But I think this topic is too heavy for SW and won't be explored in much detail, as its basically a creepy old man torturing little babies to death...
I just assumed they where to be trained into more inquisitors or other dark Jedi with the ones that proved useless disposed of.
Andi: In Future of the Force, we learn that the Inquisitors have a secondary mission to collect Force sensitive children. What happens to these kids after they're abducted? Filoni: Nothing I can show on Disney XD! This whole story is very familiar to me because it was a lot like one we did on Clone Wars called Children of the Force, and there's been this idea that Palpatine has kids abducted. On some level, in the Clone Wars, we were trying to hint at that Palpatine plugs these kids all in to a big system he has, and their ability to use the Force is kind of connected to his ability to see the future. Pablo: There's nothing good in store for these kids. I mean there's, there's a limit to how specific we want to get, or even what we want to imply. Someone like the Emperor is not into sharing power. The Inquisitors represents what he allows to exist, and he keeps them on a fairly tight leash.
I wonder how literal he intends "plug them into a big system" means. If it's something like "Palpatine can see the future because he has kids wired into The Force Matrix and he jacks in like Neo" that seems a bit mechanistic for the generally more mystical portrayal of the Force that Filoni and the Disney era have been portraying. But if it's something kind of like... I don't know, a bit more like the Zerg psychic hivemind (or even like the old Emperor's Hands in reverse, with him drawing on their strength) that seems a bit more like the MO. Actually that's kind of like Palpatine's eventual plan for the galaxy fro Dark Empire. I felt like in retrospect it's a shame that no one tied in the kidnapping kids plot to the whole First Order child soldier concept.
One could say Ezra plugging himself into the World Between Worlds gave Palpatine a window to seeing the future, just one he couldn't squeeze his butt through in time. That was a more mystical approach, and possibly more along the lines of what Filoni was talking about there.
Jason Fry's Servants of the Empire series did tie the two together somewhat. We see Brendol Hux's first pass at the child-soldier program that he later implemented in the First Order, and how incoming Force sensitives were identified by Inquisitors and siphoned off into something called Project Harvester (which I don't recall ever detailing exactly what they did with the children who were so identified).
I don't believe Palpatine was one who cared about replacing dead Inquisitors or increasing their ranks, which is why they don't seem to be active during the Empire in the OT era. If their were no new Inquisitors in the dark times of 19 years, I could see the origination eventually being wiped out by opposition towards the Empire (mostly by surviving Jedi) and the Empire choosing to "retire" any survivors. Also by the time of late dark times, majority of jedi survivors from order 66 are practically extinct. Inquisitors have done their job, helped to bring the jedi further into extinction. Why then train babies from the TCW into Inquisitors when by the time they are of age to wield a saber to hunt Jedi, the Jedi threat is practically gone and their are still original Inquisitors left in service? So NU "Emperors Hand" makes more sense over new Inquisitors. A few children raised to be even more loyal to the Emperor then the Inquisitors were and also intended to have a purpose that would last longer then those dark jedi. Dark side agents designed for a new age to deal with threats that arn't Jedi. If NU Mara Jade ever came to be, having her be a child taken close to RoTS by Inquisitors could work.
