Why wasn't Vader more like Grievous?

Why didn't Palpatine make Vader more robotically powerful like General Greivous?

 

I would think because Sidious didn't want just another "droid leader..."

Plus, Grievous's mechanical parts were built specifically to enhance his fighting power...

He knew that Vader's power with the force-which he still had-would be much more valuable...so he was placed with a suit sufficient only to help him survive. Besides, there were still a few aspects that were better for Vader-his mechanical limbs were stronger than a normal arm or leg...Plus the helmet had some additional visual features...

 

You can't really compare the two. Vader has the Force and Grevious doesn't. Plus, I kind of doubt your hypothesis because Luke hit Vader with a lightsaber on Bespin and all it did was get Vader more angery. Vader did have to change his lightsaber style but he looks pretty graceful in the Bespin duel.

 

The more mechanical parts and less flesh Vader has, the less Force potential he has, the less worthy he is of being a Sith Apprentice. Completely disregarding the obvious "why didn't they just clone him new body parts" answer, Vader got only the mechanical components needed to keep him alive. Palpatine needed to save as much of Anakin's human body as he could, so that he still had a worthy Apprentice. The fact that Vader still managed to survive another 23 years as Palpatine's Apprentice tells me that what was done to him was adequate for Palpatine's needs for him, and given Anakin's talent with fixing things, its quite likely that he upgraded his components as well, so that by the time we see him in the OT, Darth Vader is significantly more powerful than he was at the close of ROTS. You gotta remember, even when he was in the Vader suit for all of a minute, he still managed to use the Force to totally trash the medical center and crush the droids that operated on him. Vader wasn't just the Emperor's henchman, like General Grievous was (even if he didn't know it), Vader was a Dark Lord of the Sith. He needed to have as much flesh as possible.

 

Grevious was a non force user who had his ship down at Dooku's(Palp's) request. He was basically left with a few functioning organs and his brain, so they gave him a fancy droid body that was fast and agile enough to fight Jedi.

Vader's cyborg limbs are plenty powerful and as said before, the more organic Vader was, the more effective he is in touching the force.

 

I don't believe it has anything to necessarily do with how much flesh you need to be a powerful jedi.. Given that size doesn't matter - and yoda has much less flesh then most jedi yet retains great power, I would say the reason was because the suit was used to prolong his life and not to make him kick butt.

Sideous isn't thinking "oh good, he's messed up, let's make him the ultimate fighting machine!!" Instead he's just saying to the medical droids, "do what you can to save my new apprentice."

Part of modern medicine is saving as much of the flesh as you can. I would say that would describe the medical droids putting Anakin back together. They saved as much as they could, which was actually quite a bit. You can't be uber agile and strong if you want to keep so much of the torso, neck and spine.

 

Inconsistent writing on the part of Lucas is really the only sensical answer one can give.

 

The thought that 'force potential' is tied to the amount of 'flesh' that a particular lifeform has is quite simply erred from its conception.

The entire midichlorian issue is an uncovered debate by which the demise of the Jedi Order was indirectly fueled.

The force is larger than something scientifically quanitifiable. However in the times of the PT, the Jedi Order did not believe this. Because of this blindness to their true surroundings, for their limitation, the Jedi Order was made to pay a heavy price.

For it not for a rogue Jedi Master, in QGJ, the Order itself would have ceased for eternity. Through his teachings, a solitary Yoda finally understood what he had never seen.

But make no mistake, Yoda wasn't the only one with such a limited thought process.

After Mustafar, Anakin/Vader believed himself too weak, too limited, to realize his destiny. Trapped. Perpetual 'life' at a previously unthinkable price. Such a thought process only further solidified Sidious' control over Anakin and his growth and understanding.

But as we see in RotJ, without QGJ's teachings, without the bounds of the Sith Order, Anakin learned what he had always believed...that there are things about the 'force' that are truly beyond comprehension, things that no other Jedi or Sith truly knew, things that Anakin is capable of doing, things that make him different but somehow better.

It took the love of a son and the love for one's children to make Anakin truly see what could be seen.

That vision and level of understanding was in NO way limited by the amount of flesh/number of midichlorians/type of artficial limbs that Anakin possessed.

 

Great answers! Thanks!

 

I don't believe it has anything to necessarily do with how much flesh you need to be a powerful jedi.. Given that size doesn't matter - and yoda has much less flesh then most jedi yet retains great power,

Ahh, but we dont know what Yoda is like on the inside. Its possible that his species may be more cell dense than humanoids.

 

If Yoda is made of denser stuff then I have new found respect for Luke carrying him around in the jungle on his back!

I think it is just very human to want to keep your fleshy bits. Especially for Vader. Consider the line "don't be so proud of this technological terror you've constructed."

 

Of course it is.

Or maybe Lucas thought it out in detail.

OT = Intuition
PT = Intellect

(IMO)

 

Or maybe Lucas just wanted to have a cool spider-cyborg that could flip around and do crazy four-saber fighting but didn't really pay much attention to the fact that it makes no logical sense considering that Anakin for some reason gets the Frankenstein treatment as a lumbering oaf. If thats the case then it would seem that it is actually the PT that is more "intuitive" (ie based on writing just whatever you feel is effective for the current moment) rather than intellectual (ie based on thinking things through so that it progresses as a chronological narrative in the following three films).

 

There has to be a reason why we never see Force users with organic brain matter encased in completely mechanized bodies.

 

In my opinion, Vader is designed to terrorise people with his ambiguous man-machine nature, unlike the overt and ultimately cowardly "super cyborg" of Grievous. In my opinion, Vader is also designed to terrorise Anakin, who feels perpetual hate and fear because of his scarred emotions and body, both of which have been hastily reanimated in this "unnatural" monstrous form. To me, Grievous doesn't live in the same sort of purgatory. Vader is a more holisitic entity. He is a more effective and galvanising "Force".

Strilo edit: No baiting.

 

Vader could have later elected to slice himself down to nothing but a brain and a gutsack, and could probably have the Empire build him a suit that was faster, stronger and even more agile than Grievous. But Vader wasn't a fighter anymore, he was a leader, and something of a bureaucrat/politician. Besides, Anakin wouldn't want to lose even more of his humanity, just so that he could take on the occassional rogue post-Order 66 Jedi every few years. He had millions of soldiers and unlimited bounty hunters to take care of that stuff.

 

Good points. I think Vader also liked the illusion that he was still in control of his life and it was "business as usual". So he ambled on in vaguely human form, like some death black apparition of the Anakin that once was. Sidious was a genius in constructing the perfect amalgam: someone with enough strength of ambition to want to carry on, someone just weak enough to never dissent or walk away.

 

Who would want to live that way? I think there is a good reason why the ONLY time we see bionics in the star wars universe is to deal with injury. We don't have examples of people cutting off a hand because they want a bionic hand and we don't have any examples of people losing a hand and then deciding to go ahead and replace the whole arm...

This isn't a cyberpunk universe where you've got robocops or full cyborgs running around because they want to be cool.. Or is that Grievous's back story? I never got that impression.

 

Cryo,

If the Emperor wanted Anakin to be powerful, and expressed excitement that he would even be more powerful than himself right before the "accident"--"Soon Lord Vader will be more powerful than either of us!"--then why would he want to limit his potential? If a sack of organs can turn into a deadly spider-cyborg that can do acrobats, kill Jedi effectively and weild four lightsabers (and who knows what potential upgrades could have wrought), it doesn't really impress well that all of a sudden he would make a clanking Franenstein that can barely hold his own against a feeble old man twenty years later. But of course it had to be a clanking Frankenstein because Lucas had already committed to this portrayal in 1977.
Its just far more realistic to simply see the practical terms that Lucas liked the idea of foreshadowing Anakin's transformation but couldn't restrain his own imagination from overriding the logic of continuity.

 

Sidious is talking about Anakin's POWER with the DARK SIDE. Not physical ability, dexterity, strength etc.

But for ALL his ability, Grievous isn't actually THAT strong, anyway. He gets others to do his dirty work, as evidenced when a lowly droid hands him Anakin and Obi-Wan's lightsabers. He wasn't honourable enough to try and take them himself. He only fights as a last resort. And, in the middle of battle, he is unable to stop Obi-Wan blasting him and destroying his internal organs. By contrast, Vader could easily deflect the bolts, as he does when Han tries shooting him in TESB.

So, for all this "lumbering oaf" that you see in Vader, and this "deadly spider-cyborg" you see in Grievous, Vader is actually more able. However, in other ways, his suit is limiting, reminding him of his failure on Mustafar, his failures in life. Vader is a towering contradiction: tough, yet weak; resolved, yet broken; driven, yet disbelieving. That's why he is ultimately more formidable for the Emperor than any Swiss-Army-Knife, Double-Back-Flipping, Super-Articulated Spiderbot. The Emperor can keep him under his heel, while Vader still has enough autonomy and lethality of his own to instil appropriate levels of fear -- the Emperor's ultimate weapon -- in others.

Well, I'm sure Lucas was letting his imagination run wild in ROTS; it was the last of the six films, afterall. But I don't think his imagination actually overrides "the logic of continuity". We shouldn't be too proud of that technological terror that Lucas constructed. The ability to design a cyborg is insignificant next to the power of the Force.

 

You are spot-on Zombie. Looking at the saga as a whole, it makes no sense that Vader was re-built like a protocol droid, and GG was remade into a better fighting machine. Strictly looking at the Prequel Trilogy; Force users or not, Vader as a lumbering lackey looks really dumbed-down when compared to the mechno-whirling-dervish that preceeded him. Looking to the future, maybe they'll retcon it someday, so that Vader's crappy-rebuild was an intentional act on Sidious' part. IIRC, Dark Lord already hinted at it, from Vader's POV.

 

I'm sure that Vader has rebuilt his body over the years to be more comfortable, agile, etc. At least he still has most of body, unlike Grevious. Before Rots, I was expecting Vader to be in far worse shape after his fight with Obi Wan. I'm thinking that Vader should be faster and more badass than he was shown in the OT.

 

Greivous was the prototype, Vader was an improvement. Plus Vader had more living tissue that survived. Greivous was mostly mechanical.

 

The droid general was as nimble as a Nexxu, and Vader walked around like a drunken Rancor that wears sunglasses at nite. I don't see HOW less upward mobility, less lateral maneuverability, and far less articulation in the artificial joints is called an improvement.

When held to the same light as GG, suited Vader got absolutely hosed.

 

Physically, I agree. Grievous was stronger physically than Vader was. But, again, Vader has the Force, Grievous does not...There is no doubt that Vader would have mopped the floor with Grievous in a 1 on 1 confrontation, so my argument would be that Vader doesn't need the same physical skills as Grievous to be vastly superior. There are very few things in the galaxy that can withstand a Sith Lord trying to kill them. Grievous might have been physically stronger, but he wasn't even qualified to clean Vader's boots.