Lit The (Im)Possible Survival of Mace Windu

I've been thinking about this a lot lately. Now, it's possible for him to survive his fall even if he was missing a hand and was electrocuted. However, would that just make his death scene and Anakin's fall less impactful? Maybe he could come back and then Vader kills him, ending the Purge. Is there a way to bring him back without tarnishing anything that has already been made? Maul returned and used the dark side to survive, perhaps Windu did the same. Thoughts?

 

In my humble opinion, enough people have come back from the dead, thank you very much. I know some people would like to see this happen, just on that off chance that Sam Jackson gets to play Windu again, but I think it would be utterly gratuitous.

 

It's not impossible but I would be utterly and am utterly opposed to the idea.

Windu lost his hand, was in shock and then was blasted with Palpatine's force lighting and sent probably to the surface of coruscant.

Sure he could have survived but I would be furious if they were to bring him back.

 

It's improbable but dangit it's Samuel L. Jackson. They could give him a chance to go full Samuel L. Jackson if he's basically had his hand chopped off and electrocuted and thrown out of a building. Seriously, the fact to get Jackson to play Windu again, in hopefully full crazy Cornell Kurtz in Apocalypse Now as some Courscant sublevel warlord or something, totally outweighs the "plausibility" of it in a spaceman wizard magic sci-fi robot war opera. Keep thinking it'll be a Boba Fett story, really have him prove his bona fides if he has to take Windu out.

Seriously, have you seen the Glass trailers?





That but crazy Windu! C'mon!

 

We're lucky as hell he didn't come back in Rebels.

Seriously, try to argue that that's not totally something Filoni and co. would do.

 

They didn't, so I guess it's not. Maul came back because Old Wounds is incredible and Obi-Wan needed an antagonist, not because FIloni is somehow creatively bankrupt.

 

No. Enough powerful Jedi survived and are unaccounted for (according to the Darth Vader Charles Soule comics)

 

Legends had something like 200 Jedi purge survivors(that were named) and for that was unfairly criticized(it never bothered me-as that number was probably halved and then fourthed by ANH). This seems like it's very unnecessary.

 

Indeed. 200 out of 10,000 is not that much. The survivors only amount to 2% of the entire Jedi Order.

 

Yeah and it's important to remember order 66 continued in effect until basically the beginning of the OT. Vader was still hunting Jedi remnants a few years prior and killing Jedi whenever they were found very close to the timeframe of 0 ABY.

There were probably 50-100 Jedi left by the time of ANH. And not all of them lived the following decade, much less all joined Luke's new order. K'kruhk and T'ra Saa apparently remained in hiding until after Luke's passing or at least until after crucible at some point.

So legends had a very successful purge-but a realistic one.

And if Windu had somehow survived-I honestly don't see how palpatine and Vader would not have become aware of it and then spared no expense to hunt him down.

 

It's rather easy to argue that point - they had more than sufficient opportunity to do so and never did.

Meanwhile, I was sure for a little while there that Ferren Barr from the Darth Vader comic was going to turn out to be Mace back when Soule was concealing the character's identity. Ah, well. Still a good story, and Barr turned out to be a rather interesting character in his own right.

 

Windu's survival has been conjectured on some very solid grounds since Episode 3 came into theaters. And there's been threads about it before:

https://boards.theforce.net/threads...-jackson-anyway.50041272/page-4#post-53675032

...and yes, there's a convincing case to be made that Windu and Empatojayos Brand are one and the same! Consider the following points:

• Windu is not actually explicitly shown as dead- merely partially dismembered, electrocuted, and defenestrated. There are plenty of examples of less powerful Jedi surviving worse, and Mace was possibly the single toughest Jedi alive at the time of Order 66.
• The injuries of Brand and Windu match up- particularly the limb damage.
• 
• "Brand" was already injured prior to having his ship destroyed and being rescued by the isolated Ganathans- he explicitly says so!

...read it clearly- his "ruined body" was already in a pressure suit prior to him floating in empty space. Why would that even be necessary unless he was already badly injured enough to require such specialized treatment?

• Note also that Vader made a point about pursuing the ship he was on. And knowing that Ganathan space is in the neighborhood of Nar Shadaa, Windu/Brand was either trying to reach safety there, and/or trying to link up with other Jedi who might have fled there. Beyond being the perfect world to try and get lost in, Nar Shadaa was also not in Republic space at the time of Order 66. There's no other reason for Windu/Brand to have been anywhere near Ganathan space in the first place.

• Windu and Brand have never been seen in the same place at the same time. The one possible exception, the Battle of Geonosis, does not actually show Brand- only his fighter craft. If anything, Windu and the starfighter belonging to "Empatojayos Brand" (with "Brand" not actually being seen) being in the same place is a hint that the two might be the same after all.
• Still doubt that the two could be the same? Then how is it that even the dying and insane final Palps clone recognizes "Brand" immediately, after presumably not having seen him in 30 years, and immediately resorts to the same Sith Lightning that he used during their last encounter in his office:
• 

I think there's an unusually good overlap between the two that they could be the same. Empatojayos Brand is Mace Windu's tribal name from Haruun Kal, and was used by him as a cover/undercover name for various missions in the course of the Clone Wars. It always seemed somewhat unfitting that a "mere" Knight was the one who took out Palps for good in Empire's End- and once the PT was finished it really did seem as if Mace should have managed to survive and finally help end Palps on Onderon. It would also be one hell of a great plot twist, and a very fitting end to the Emperor. Mace is certainly powerful enough to hold the spirit of Palps within him and take it into the Netherworld of the Force for all time, something that a fairly ordinary Knight should not have been capable of accomplishing. The only detail left is to explain how Mace managed to book passage off of Coruscant, or if he was helped off by sympathetic allies. However he did, he eventually ended up governing the Ganathans, and despite his Dark tendencies he remained a true Jedi by ruling justly and never actually giving in to the Dark Side even after all that had happened to him.

 

I'm sorry, but... this theory is completely off the wall. First, Brand is Legends, and thus has no bearing on whether Windu could resurface in canon. Second, this theory conveniently overlooks known facts about Brand's life that don't fit: we know that he was apprenticed to Yaddle and only became a Knight after the Battle of Naboo (per The New Essential Guide to Characters), when Windu was already a Master at the time and was the Padawan of either T'ra Saa (in Legends) or Cyslin Myr (in canon).

Or perhaps you were not being serious and I'm (once again) taking an elaborate joke seriously?

 

His fate is transparent. He fell out the Windu.

 

Who cares if Windu does come back in the new DisnEU? A lot of us are still on the real EU and have nothing to do with the newer stuff. That's what happens when there's a schism in any fan community. A lot of us also still debate various things from the EU, particularly on this board. Focusing only on the "Legends" stuff, it does become apparent that there are enough similarities between Windu and Brand, particularly their injuries and Palps' familiarity with both of them, that it isn't too much of a stretch to imagine them being the same. We've never actually seen Brand before his injuries- there's only been text descriptions. If his was actually an identity used by Windu from time to time for practical reasons, nothing actually prevents the two from being the same. And Mace being Brand really, really enhances Empire's End.

Is it absurd? Yes, it is. Would it be anywhere near the most absurd thing from Legends if it were to have been retconned as having happened? Absolutely not. Can it fairly easily be incorporated into ones head-canon, or just ignored as ridiculousness? Sure can!

 

@SheaHublin About your retort to my first point: granted. But that doesn't change anything to the fact that the theory doesn't account for all the... facts.

 

Actually, with (nu) Canon's Worlds Between Worlds it's perfectly possible. The only question is whether it's a good idea and whether they're willing to do it.

 

I've always liked the idea of Mace coming back, myself. I want an obi-wan/mace buddy cop movie of them on tattooine which ends in Obi-wan having to kill him. Maybe because mace finds out obi-wan is protecting anakin's son or something. Like a parallel to what happened to Maul. I can see why many would be against the idea of him coming back though

 

Personally, I don't think there's any evidence that Han is dead. We never actually saw him die. He simply got stabbed straight through the chest and fell down a shaft. It's actually more believable that Han survived than Maul.

 

Wasn't empatajayos brand in space during the Geonosis rescue? Piloting a Jedi star fighter and breaking the separatist hold on the orbit?

I seem to recall he and A'Sharad Hett among a few others were in space above the planet for that mission.

 

Besides which, it wasn't Filoni or his co. who brought Maul back, it was GL. And over the years Filoni's been increasingly casually frank about not being too into it, but what the boss says goes. If anything you gotta credit the team with actually pulling anything interesting out of such a terrible, terrible idea!

 

Has Filoni actually made statements over the years at about not having wanted to bring Maul back?

One thing I do think is a bit odd are the claims I see about how Maul wasn't popular at all until TCW brought him back to life. This is separate from the claims that Maul wasn't a fleshed-out character or had a good story until TCW (which I also disagree with) but that Maul as a fictional character didn't have a good reception until 2011. I'm guessing these come from people who weren't around in 1999 when he was held up as one of the few widely-acknowledged positives of TPM, and was also literally the face of the new era of Star Wars.

 

I feel like I offer this opinion almost every time the subject comes up, but I've never quite followed why Maul's improbable survival is so frequently singled out for scorn in a universe where characters like Empatojayos Brand, Grievous, Vader, Count Vidian, Trachta, and even the resurrected Emperor are running around. I mean, Brand suffered damage so severe that he was apparently reduced to nothing but the top half of his head, for heaven's sake. Vader survived losing three limbs, severe burns over his entire body, and lung damage from inhaling superheated air. To me, Maul surviving delegification and falling down the Naboo shaft seems entirely in line with other "improbable survivals" from both continuities - and given the high quality of Maul's subsequent character arc, it surprises me that fans aren't more forgiving of it either way.

 

Anyone care to wonder what if they revealed Ezra used the bridge between worlds to witness that fight and managed to grab Mace as he fell out of sight of the two Sith?

 

Did Filoni not want to bring him back?