Lucas maintains that it’s like it’s stated in the movies: the midichlorians did it.

“As for the vaunted Jedi detachment: notice how the only time anything ever gets done in the films, despite all Lucas’ protestations in favor of detachment….”

I think it’s possible you may be committing the classic fallacy of confusing the characters’ statements with the authors here.

“Hrm. Looks like righteous anger is okay in the SW-verse after all; the key is to not let it blind you.”

Indeed, which is where Luke wound up. Kinda the point, as I understand it, so you’re right. Bottom line of the films is that Lucas is saying that the Jedi were arrogant and out of balance, and that led to their fall; it took Luke and Anakin (which is chicken, which is egg?) to bring “balance.” I’m bemused that so many folks don’t see this as obvious, but I guess Lucas overdid the Jedi propaganda. (ProfPTJ gets it.)

Is anybody else old enough to remember a column — was it in Starlog? — published between Empire and ROJ? It built up an amazing redemptive storyline, using a list of clues and cues as long as your arm, to explain how Boba Fett must in fact be Luke’s real father, and Vader merely lying. Things like “Notice how Fett intentionally misses shooting them all the time?” and so forth.

Somewhere, even now, in a parallel universe….

But I have to disagree with you, Tim, about Luke in RotJ. What Luke figures out — what eluded Obi-Wan and Yoda and the rest of the old-school Jedi with their decaying, doctrinaire, disenchanted notion of the Force — is that arrogating to yourself the right to judge good and evil is itself the Dark Side. The pursuit of absolute ends is what damns Anakin, almost damns Mace Windu (but he is prevented from killing Palpatine and becoming Emperor in his stead because of Anakin’s intervention), and would have damned Luke if he had gone ahead and done what Palpatine wanted him to do: kill his father and become Palpatine’s new apprentice. The temptation of the Dark Side is the temptation of a “just war” and similar notions, the sort of thing that political realists like Weber and Morgenthau and Thucydides have been warning against for millennia — the temptation to exonerate all manner of evil means in pursuit of good and noble ends.

Luke ends up, IMHO, doing what Obi-Wan almost figures out by sacrificing himself on the Death Star in Episode IV: fight to a standstill, then stop and bear witness, and let the Force do what it will. Call it Zen Christianity, perhaps: it’s not the Jedi’s responsibility to save the world, but to fight the powers holding it back in order that new posibilities may be opened. But trying to control those possibilities puts you back at square one.

To put it another way: Luke has (Kierkegaardian) faith. The Jedi in the Old Republic have become too cynical and rationalized for faith. Palpatine, if he ever had faith, has sacrificed it for the pursuit of unlimited power; Anakin loses faith because he is afraid that Padme is going to die and that he won’t be able to stop it (and that somehow he will be to blame if she dies, as he blames himself for his mother’s death), so he makes the classic tragic mistake of bargaining with the devil for the power to prevent tragedy — which always, always backfires horribly.

Luke’s solution is commitment — “I am a Jedi, like my father before me” — which is very Martin Luther-esque, and hence more like Weber’s “science as a vocation” than it is like “politics as a vocation.” I read the Star Wars saga as in part about the dangers of an effete, feckless academy refusing to assume its proper role in the public sphere, which is not to govern directly but to challenge government with “uncomfortable facts” and in so doing to hep create the conditions of possibility for the ceaseless play of social action (to mix religions for a moment, what the Vulcans call IDIC — Infiinte Diversity in Infinite Combinations). Of course that’s not all of what the films are about, but it’s part of what I read there.

That’s part of the pleasure of the text, after all, and what can make religion so darn enjoyable!

I guess getting all pissy at me in the previous thread was all part of the silly fun, too. I should have realized.

So again, a lot of the silly things in Episode I can be explained by Palpatine engineering coincidences to land Padme’s ship on Tatooine and getting Qui-Gon to bring Anakin back. Even that ludicrous pod race makes sense if you think of it in terms of showing off Anakin’s best potential to the people most likely to want to take advantage of it. The virgin birth, of course, seals the deal; they HAVE to get this kid into the Jedi order now!

As for the vaunted Jedi detachment: notice how the only time anything ever gets done in the films, despite all Lucas’ protestations in favor of detachment, is when somebody gets angry and/or attached? Let’s see: Obi-Wan vs. Darth Maul. Anakin vs. Dooku. Obi-Wan vs. Darth Vader. Luke vs. Yoda’s warnings of dire eeeevil. Luke vs. Darth Vader (though admittedly the second instantiation of that particular conflict didn’t really accomplish anything; it was all Chewie’s fault the Rebels won that war). Hrm. Looks like righteous anger is okay in the SW-verse after all; the key is to not let it blind you.

I can’t remember if this was mentioned earlier, but if it wasn’t, or you missed it, check out David Brin’s take on Episode I:

http://davidbrin.com/starwarsarticle1.html

His opinion hasn’t exactly improved since then, and it’s not entirely surprising as to why.

I’ve now added a bunch of excerpts from the yet earlier Lucas-written (apparently) scene summary, by the way, giving yet more variations on Lucas’s thinking at a somewhat earlier point, as well as various other addenda to each post. Only those truly interested will be interested, of course.

“How early does Darth Vader begin to hatch his own plots to overthrow the Emperor, as long as we’re at it?”

In the script I quoted, Anakin proposes to Padme that they’ll kill Palpatine and “rule the galaxy together!” This was probably, at the time, simply chaotic flailing about, but it establishes the thought in Anakin’s head at that point. What he does or doesn’t try subsequently, I have no idea, but presumably you must be pretty sure you’ll succeed if you strike at the king, so either he was slapped down really well at some point, or never really tried. Palpy, of course knows that Stih apprentices always try to kill masters, and vice versa (replacing them with new, better ones); it’s tradition!

“Fans of course much prefer heroic efforts to reconcile clashing plot and character elements within the confines of the SW world.”

Kieran, it’s a game, and everyone playing but a few loons knows that; it’s not serious. And, of course, Lucas changed his mind over the years, came up with new ideas, etc.; no one denies that, or has the delusion it was some sort of fully formed Grand Plan at any point. (Reading the early drafts of the early films, particularly the first, which I gave a link for in my last post, makes this particularly clear, but it’s also perfectly common knowledge to anyone paying attention [which you have no obligation to do, of course].)

“But the decision to pop the droids….” It’s probably just me who has no idea what that means.

“It’s kind of sad to see so many devoted fans searching for a way to preserve the belief that The Story Works and Lucas Has It All Figured Out. It’s like a case of “When Prophecy Fails.””

[eyeroll]

Game. Silly fun. That’s all.