Books The Official Darth Plagueis Discussion Thread (Spoilers Allowed)

when I read, Plagueis speaks in the voice of General Grievous from the first season of the Clone Wars cartoon not the CGI version that's on air now

 

I see what youre's saying here, but I think it's a long chain of events, things Vader did and or didn't do that caused the ultimate outcome in ROTJ...for instance Vader could have stopped the rebels aboard Shuttle tiberion from ever reaching Endor, but the force persuaded him to focus on Luke at the expense of the death star's security

 

hi

this book was awesome

bye

 

Not even gonna come in for tea?

 

Come on, NotAFanboy, I know you're not that shy.

 

Entering the thread tentatively and with blinders on...

I'm about halfway through Plagueis at the moment, and I just got my hands on the Insider issue with Tenebrous Way in it. Any thoughts on whether I should put the book on hold and read the short story? Is it better with the entire novel under your belt, or does it not really make a difference?

 

I don't think it makes a difference. The short story is focused on Tenebrous' death, from his point of view, and his master plan.

 

No it doesn't really effect anything after Plagueis offs Tenebrous. I was seriously considering reading it as soon as Tenebrous dies, but I just wanted to read the book.

You should totally read it. It's great.

 

On reread, I liked to read Tenebrous Way right after the prologue. Flows pretty well that way.

 

Finished reading the book this weekend.

JL does a fantastic job of making all the loose ends of the PT make sense, the book is almost an essential companion to the trilogy. At the same time he manages to sync the films, the existing EU and the Clone Wars TV series together.

One small detail I noticed - did he hint at some past relationship between Palpatine and Padme's mother?! In the scene they have together he states that she motioned to hug him in greeting but stopped and only smiled. What the significance of this is I don't know. Surely he's not hinting at Palps being Padme's real father??!!!

Did anyone else notice this?

 

The GFFA just shook.

 

OK, I'll finally try to talk about Plagueis in here... guess I'll be largely ignored, anyway

I can see how people see this as a great novel for SW EU, a novel that takes the entire idea of EU seriously and effortlessly sums up all the little sources into one huge tapestry. Whenever I think about the ideas that must have been in the minds of Luceno and any other creative forces that made have had input, I think it's great what they did.

But it doesn't add up to a particularly good book for me.

It took me an eternity to read it, and thanks to that, i guess i might have lost out on some of the political/socio-economic dynamics. I must admit that the pace took up for me when Palpatine was a greater focus of the novel than Plageuis, and by the time it hit episode one, i think there was enough familiar stuff in it to keep me going with less effort.

I don't even know where to begin...

- Introducing our great, never before seen Sith lords as they are supervising a mining probe and move into a trap isn't really a cool way to start such a story. Having them leave their sabers at the ship is out of character for a Sith lord. Plagueis running along the beach in full robes in the next scene was outright comedy, I couldn't help but imagine the CW cartoon version of the Muun.

- Palpatine just driving around with that business guy he just met is really strange and would only make sense to me if Palpatine revealed his masterplan as already having had started back then, getting close to the guy who he knew must be the Sith lord so he could learn from him.

- Lucas' mandate on having Plageuis as a Muun never made much sense to me, especially not since the little we saw of San Hill seems to indicate the race as similarly cowardly as the Neimoidians (we all know Lucas isn't that big on varied attributes for his aliens). Luceno showing how a Muun would create the web of business deception really struck me as making a lot of sense, so that was great. At the same time, it took away from Plagueis being that "wise" guy who experimented with life and death and conception, a more mythical figure whose name makes you think of lab experiments more than financial plotting.

- As for Lucas input, him saying that Plagueis should have a breath mask seems like a detail that Luceno put into the wrong place of the mosaic that is Plagueis. This is, of course, just my opinion, and I do not know how explicit Lucas was in that direction, but to me it would have been a better choice to have Plagueis start his quest for immortality because he needs that breath mask. Because he knows everyday how fragile his life is, and he doesn't want to give it all away. So somehow, I get this OOU idea of Luceno having the character the wrong way round, which explains a lot of difficulties I had with really finding that character interesting.

- Let alone the name Hego Damask, which I couldn't really embrace as a true SW name, balanced between catchy and silly. I actually prefer Jet Nebula to Hego Damask.

- I wonder how much input Lucas had in the making of this story. I especially wonder how much of the episode 1 retcons came from him. The prequels really drove home the idea that the Sith work in this master-apprentice pairing. That was one of the catchiest lines in Episode 1, actually. Seeing how Palaptine isn't raised in this spirit truly bombs this huge angle of the prequels out of the water. Maul not really being an apprentice but a pretty useless toy assassin really laughs into the face of his creation for Episode 1 to begin with. Palpatine only becoming the master at the end of Ep 1 really takes away from the movie. I can see how EU can rejoice at gaining the upper hand of the movies, but I see this as totally unnecessary rewriting of what we saw. But as I said, I wonder how much of this comes directly from Lucas, as the flannelled one already forced two similar changes on the movies: one, the prequel trilogy forging the simple Vader redemption plotline into something prophetical, giving a huge new layer to the OT; two, The Force Unleashed telling us that the R

 

Not really.

If Maul hadn't been "killed" on Naboo, he would have been the second Sith. This is implicit in part of Palpatine's rant, and in his ruminations later after learning of Maul's "death". And the book doesn't shy away from Maul's Darth title, something the assassin Ventress never received.

These things don't have to be mutually exclusive.

Palpatine was into immortality, and he didn't have a breath mask. The same goes for a lot of other characters in fiction.

It should have been Meetra Damasksurik.

 

That hodge-podge name reminds me of Jabba.

IMO, they should have made a some sort of play off of Don Corleone.

 

I had occasion to leaf through the Book of Sith this weekend, and I noticed a little detail that may add yet another layer of complexity to the events laid out in Darth Plagueis. Specifically, the opening passages of the book, written by Sidious, state outright that the young Palpatine did in fact have access to, and enthusiastically studied, Sith texts and artifacts that could be brought to Naboo on the down-low, and that this was before - possibly years before - he ever came into contact with Plagueis.

Exactly how does this fit into the tapestry Luceno wove of Palpatine's young pre-Sith life? Does it fit in? When Hego Damask finally came out of the closet and confessed that he was a Sith, Palpatine claimed not to know too much about them, other than they were a Jedi splinter sect, an arcane cult, considered to be evil. But I think we can safely assume by now that he's good at lying, so I'll give them a mulligan on that one. But if he was indeed into artifacts before, then it would explain his apparent interest in seeing the old Sith planets and shrines and holocrons, as described in the novel, a desire that Plagueis kinda frowns on.

What would be helpful is if someone who has the Book of Sith can post the relevant passages, just to make sure I didn't completely misread things (not like I could afford to have taken it home with me, sorry to say), because this implies a great deal about Palpatine as a young man. The Plagueis novel paints him as a man with a host of grudges, and definitely the potential to become what he became, but if Damask had never shown up? Maybe he'd be a bad-boy competitive racer, or maybe he'd finally take one step too far and end up in jail, but Darth Sidious? No way. But if I'm right about what Book of Sith says, then Palpatine was already deep into the Sith and their lore, which to me increases the odds that he would have ended up a Sith anyway, whether Plagueis discovered him on Naboo at that time or not.

 

It's definetly years before (I'll post the relevant passage below). This reinforces what was hinted in the novel: Palpatine lured Plagueis to Naboo. It also presents Palpatine as a collector above anything else.

Reading the teenaged Palpatine scenes, and indeed all the pre-"Taking the Future from the Now" scenes in their proper context, which is of course the same context one is to view Palpatine in the first two and a half episodes of the saga, takes away the awkwardness that could be mistakenly attributed to bad writing. Because, an initiated reader would think, "If Palpatine is the Beast of the Apocalypse, why is he nothing more than a mildly threatening sociopath throughout the book, even when we get his POV?" An initiated reader, especially one who has read Cloak of Deception by the same author, and now Book of Sith, will see through the act. That "I thought the Sith were evil" line is particularly delicious (you have to imagine a wide eyed expression).

 

On Palpatine and Jobal... I just interpreted that as meaning Jobal is a very loving, caring, person who's first impulse when she recognizes someone she knows is to hug them. She just stopped herself because it might not be proper to hug a Senator, even an old friend like Palpatine. I just saw it as a look into Jobal's character, that she is who Padme and Luke got their idealism and compassion from.

 

It's quite clear that both Palpatine and Cosinga knew about Palpatine being force sensitive long before he started to shove his father with the force in that starship. Thus I conclude Cosinga took the necessary steps to prevent that his son would be discovered by the Jedi Order, just as he cleared his name again and again to prevent a family scandal.

It is quite unlikely that Palpatine of all people should not have realized very early on what powers were hidden deep within himself. And to realize that there were once Sith would have been easy to find out, after he realized that he had the potential to become a Jedi. So I see no problem with Dan's indication that Palpatine already knew about the Dark Side, the Sith, and their artifacts when Plagueis found him on Naboo.

However, I'm quite sure Palpatine did not exactly lure Plagueis to Naboo. That is, I very much doubt he figured out that both Hego Damask and Rugus Nome were Sith Lords and was involved in this whole Subtext Mining thing with the droid (although the company's name may actually indicate that).

But Palpatine may have decided to release the information that brought him to Plagueis's attention to make contact with Hego Damask. Considering Palpatine's powers, and his confession to Plagueis on Chandrila about his visions of the future, it's quite likely that Palpatine did already know/suspect that Damask was much more than a mere influential and wealthy Muun when he first met him. He could very well have had dreams about himself as apprentice to Damask.

 

Didn't Luceno suggest on Facebook that the droid thing may have been the work of Santhe? I don't think either Palpatine was involved in that.

 

He said he left it intentionally vague, but would "take a hard look at Santhe." Calling it "Subtext Mining," though, I think doesn't help Santhe's case. If Palpatine foresaw that releasing information to the Tapalists would case a Sith to drop out of the sky, couldn't he have foreseen that the company hired to survey the plasma reserves of Theed was the key to his Sith-hood? I'm of the opinion that it was his father, not Palpatine himself, who did the deed, but still, calling the company "Subtext Mining" is an insidious move by Mr. Luceno.