The "Mysterious" Count Dooku

I have a couple questions on Dooku.

First of all, why doesn't the most powerful Jedi ever, Vader (midichlorian count higher than Yoda), wield force lightning while some marginal Jedi, Dooku, whom nobody ever heard of before AOTC, does? You'd think Vader would at least know how to block it yet he doesn't in neither AOTC or ROTJ (admittedly he's still a little young in AOTC).

Second, the opening crawl describes Dooku as "mysterious" yet within the first 10 minutes of the movie we learn he was a former Jedi master. Doesn't sound too mysterious to me, they just told me exactly who he is. Anyone else not mystified by this?

Can someone please explain these to me?

Sorry if anyone went over this before, I'm new to this forum.

 

Well, I still think COunt Dooku is mysterious. I have no idea why he left the order, how he hooked up with Sidious, what his real intentions are, etc.

Besides, what we learn from Mace and Ki Adi MUndi at the beginning of the movie turns out to be useless information anyway. Their logic: Dooku was once a Jedi, so murder is not in his nature. But they're dead wrong on that point.

Again, the Jedi are arrogant. They claim to have a monopoly on knowledge, but since they are proved wrong over an over again, we have to ask: who *really* knows what's going on here, and who is just *pretending* to know?

Clearly there are things about Dooku's past that the Jedi aren't telling us.

He's still very much a mystery at the end of ep. 2.

 

Annie's power is in the darkside.

And Dooku is there because Lucas wanted Christopher Lee in the film as a bad guy.

 

Anakin may not learn Force Lightning because it might scramble up his life-support unit?

 

Maybe force choke is a harder force power to learn then force lightning. the only people that have used force choke are Vader and Luke. And we know that these 2 (including leia) have much higher midiclorians (sp?) then the normal jedi/sith.

Maybe you need to be at a certain midiclorian number to be able to use force choke.

 

"First of all, why doesn't the most powerful Jedi ever, Vader (midichlorian count higher than Yoda), wield force lightning while some marginal Jedi, Dooku, whom nobody ever heard of before AOTC, does?"

He would fry his mother board.

And I doubt the choke would be harder to learn than lightning. The choke is just like using the force any other way.

 

We don't know that Vader can't use Force lightning, he just didn't. That's like asking why the Emperor can't Force Choke someone. He obviously is strong enough, he just chooses not to. Also, consider the fact that perhaps Vader never learned how, despite being moer than powerful enough to do it.

You have a point about Dooku not being mysterious at all.

As for having "never heard of him" before AOTC, consider where time was spent in TPM. For the most part, it was on a backwater world called Naboo, running around through swamps an in-hiding, on an even more backwater world that was outside of the Republic called Tatooine, where they spent time running around with slaves trying to figure out the exchange rate, and had a brief stint at the Senate.

Why would we have heard about any Jedi in any of these places? We wouldn't.

And besides, you could also complain "we never heard of": Mace Windu in the OT, the Prophecy, the Emperor in ANH, Yoda before ESB, etc etc. I hope you see my point.

 

the opening crawl describes Dooku as "mysterious" yet within the first 10 minutes of the movie we learn he was a former Jedi master. Doesn't sound too mysterious to me, they just told me exactly who he is.

There was a LOT more about Dooku than we learned in the opening crawl or any dialogue.
You say he's a "former Jedi Master." as if thats all there is to know.


They did NOT just tell you exactly who he is.

We find out lots about him later in the film.
Sith. Murderer. Liar. Traitor. Conspirator.....


"mysterious" doesnt even scratch the surface.

 

I think one of the PT's greatest weaknesses is the lack of a coherent villain we can boo and hiss at. Palpatine/Sidious is The Phantom Menace, so obviously is not at the forefront, but Dooku should have at least been in TPM and we should have seen and heard more about his leaving the order and why he did it.

As of now, we have the cool-looking but barely-speaking and barely-involved Darth Maul in the first one, who dies, and then Dooku in the second one who doesn't even show up until the end of the film.

The PT would be much more solid if Dooku had been a stronger presence in all 3 films. As of now, it looks like only Episode III will feature him heavily, which is a shame. Great actor, potentially interesting character, being somewhat wasted.

BTW, I HATE how Dooku absolutely SPANKS Anakin in their brief fight. Anakin should have given Dooku a harder time than that, he's supposed to be the most powerful of all the Jedi! Can you imagine if he'd manifested his own force lightning or used the choke on Dooku in that scene, cementing his slide towards the dark side?

 

Arrowhead, it's true that Count Dooku is involved with all of those things you cite. But that still doesn't answer the fundamental question: To whom, exactly, was Count Dooku mysterious?

To the Jedi? Surely not, they worked with him for over half a century. They were his close friends and colleagues. Arguably, they know him better than anyone else in the Galaxy.

To the Sith with whom he is allied? I shouldn't think so. The suggestion is that they've been working together for over a decade, and at the end of the film they interact quite warmly with one another. Besides that, Sidious knows exaclt what Dooku is doing throughout the film.

To the CIS? I should hope not. You usually don't make a person that you don't have much idea about into your leader.

To the audience? No. We find out some things that we didn't knwo about him (like you mentioned), but he was never mysterious. We always knew him as leader of the CIS and former Jedi Master, which is exactly what he was throughout the film.

So to whom was Dooku mysterious?

The point is that "mysterious" is the wrong word. While Dooku might have had some unexpected traits or connections, he was never mysterious. Perhaps an analogy would help here. Enron is an American corporation that was engaged in many shady accounting practices, and whose downfall is the most infmaous in recent years within the US. The scandal involved with Enron was unexpected. But Enron the company was never mysterious. People always knew and still know exactly what it was. In the same way, Dooku's treachery may have been unexpected, but there's nothing mysterious about him as a person. Everyone knows him quite well, audience included.

4LOM, I'm not sure I agree. It certainl doesn't explain the faults of TPM and AOTC as stand alone films. I don't see how Dooku's presence would've improved TPM at all.

As for the fight with Anakin, I would point out that Anakin will only eventually become the strongest of the Jedi. He hasn't reached that point by AOTC. It's only appropriate that a seasoned Master beat a Padawan, prodigy or not. And as for Anakin using Force Choke or something, I think it would've looked over the top.

 

I guess I agree that even though we never saw him use the Force Lightning doesn't mean he didn't know how. Would have been cool though at some point. I guess it's just not his style.

I was going to say Luke never used Force Choke but it just dawned on me that may be what he did to the Gamorrean Guard at Jabba's Palace or are you talking EU? If the former, that never sunk in with me that he used that. It's kind of cool that Luke has that slightly darker side.

As for the mysterious Dooku, I think the discussions have confirmed what I thought: sloppy writing.

 

Luke uses Force choke at Jabba's palace, albeit much less nastily than Vader does. Luke just uses it as a kind of warning: "Back off, or else." Vader uses it to kill, obviously.

I'm guessing the average Galactic citizen doesn't know much about Count Dooku. Heck, he's a phantom even to the CIS people-they think he's a Jedi who's on their side. In reality, he's anything but. The Geonosians may know who he is who he really works for, but that seems to be it.

 

4LOM, I think one of the points to the prequel trilogy is that the villains aren't out in the open.

Darth Maul is the most clear-cut villain, but even he casts a rather uncertain shadow on the whole affair. He attacked Qui-Gon out of nowhere, for seemingly no reason, and it is only Qui-Gon's intuition (and perhaps his connection with the living Force) that clues him in on the idea that the mysterious attacker is a Sith Lord. Only at the end do the Jedi know with certainty he's a Sith, but they don't even know if he was the master or the apprentice.

Dooku? At the beginning, he's simply on the other side of the fence, a Separatist, sure, but respected by the Jedi. At the end, he's clearly a murderer who's turned to the Dark Side, but the Jedi still don't know he's a Sith and they have no clue about his involvement with the clone army.

And let's not forget the two big villains of the Original Trilogy, hidden from our heroes' view here:

There's Anakin, whose arrogance is troubling, but who has not yet turned.

And there's Palpatine, the mild mannered politician who's secretly concocting plots of blockades, insurrection, and assassination, pitting the Jedi against the guilds and corporate alliances in order to usurp power.

The villains, though, are supposed to be shadowy at this point: Sidious hasn't seized and consolidated power.

In the Original Trilogy, evil was in full bloom and was flexing all its muscles (to mix metaphors). Hence, the excessive force of the Star Destroyer, the AT-AT, and the Death Star.

Here, though, evil has not yet matured: it's trying to insinuate itself into the organism that is the Republic so it can destroy it from the inside:

It's not the Imperial walker out in the open; it's the quiet Sith apprentice lurking in the shadows.

It's not the arrogant and sadistic Moff; it's the suave and decietful aristocrat.

It's not the evil emperor on his dark throne, but the seemingly kind chancellor in his dignified office.

And, with Anakin, it's not the evil outside. It's the evil within.


And if you ever doubt that Star Wars is really about such complicated, nearly Shakespearean concepts of good and evil, think back to Return of the Jedi, the supposedly too-happy teddy-bear movie.

The hero almost became the villain.

And the villain became the hero.

 

lots of wiring and electronics + force lightning = one smokey life support system...

I think vader throwing sidious down the shaft proved that well enough...

 

Well stated Bubba, and it is like what Pacino said in The Devil's Advocate: "Underestimated from day one. You'd never think I was a master of the universe, now would ya?"

 

Whoa. I'm impressed, Bubba. Very well put.