Updated: 11 Nov 2015 1:01 am
Posted: 11 Nov 2015 1:00 am
The Offscreen Killing That Started Everything
The story of Star Wars begins with an offscreen murder, the assassination of Darth Plagueis the Wise at the hand of Darth Sidious. Though Plagueis is only referenced in a single scene in the films, his presence is the driving force behind the events of Star Wars. Plagueis’ tutelage set the stage for the ascension of Sheev Palpatine to Emperor. His legacy of dark instruction created Darth Sidious, Darth Maul, Darth Tyrannus and Darth Vader. Most especially, Plagueis’ quest to overcome death became the lever which swung the fate of Anakin Skywalker. Thanks to its inclusion in the recently-published Ultimate Star Wars, we also know Palpatine's role in Plagueis' murder is still canon.
The Noble Death of Qui-Gon Jinn
"Qui-Gon's Noble End" was a track name on the original Phantom Menace soundtrack, a fact I angrily observed when I picked up the CD a few days before the film’s feature release. I’ll always bear Liam Neeson a little bitterness for that story spoiler. Qui-Gon’s defeat at the hands of Darth Maul never quite struck me as right. After ten minutes of dueling, the calm, measured Jedi Master fouls up by getting punched in the face by a metal stick? And then the perfect stab through the stomach...what’s holding Qui-Gon's suddenly-limp body up? He’s pinned by a pulsing blade of razor-sharp energy. Shouldn’t he have dropped to the ground immediately with his upper torso, neck, and head splitting in half as he fell?Whether or not you agree with the choreography, Qui-Gon’s demise had huge repercussions for the Star Wars galaxy. His death left Anakin in the hands of Obi-Wan, whose subsequent tutelage between Episodes One and Two helped produce a sniveling, immature, self-absorbed and emotionally-unstable Padawan. It’s questionable whether the Jedi Council would have even allowed Anakin to be trained had Qui-Gon lived, owing to their obvious frustration with the maverick Master’s disregard for the rules.
Darth Maul’s Fake-Out Death That Kills Everyone He Loves
Mere minutes after Qui-Gon’s fall, a furious Obi-Wan Kenobi cuts his killer straight down the middle and sends his two halves careening down a shaft. Even with cauterized wounds, the angle at which he’s split makes his survival a ridiculous proposition. But in defiance of all anatomical laws, Maul lives. Dumped in a garbage heap, he’s eventually rescued by his brother, Savage Opress, and healed in mind and body by Mother Talzin.Maul’s fake-out demise ends up spelling doom for those few beings he still cares about. Obsessed with revenge, he eventually comes into conflict with Darth Sidious and enlists the family in his complex schemes of reciprocity. The result? His brother Opress falls in battle at Palpatine’s hand, and Talzin sacrifices herself to save Maul. The Sith Apprentice cryptically remains at large in the Star Wars canon, utterly alone and alienated from what little affection and fidelity he ever knew.
Deaths That Remind Us Anakin Is a Jerk
Death surrounded Darth Vader from the moment he reached adulthood. The off-camera torture and killing of his mother Shmi at the hands of Tusken Raiders severed what nominal commitment Anakin ever held to Jedi serenity. The furious Padawan exacted his revenge on the entire tribe, murdering both armed and unarmed Sandpeople until not one child in the camp remained alive, an act of genocidal revenge that ought to have alarmed Padme Amidala a bit more than it did.
Anakin would again turn his blade on a helpless foe in Revenge of the Sith. After Darth Tyrannus took his hand in Attack of the Clones, Anakin reciprocated by performing a literal disarming of his old enemy, chipping both of his hands off. But Anakin doesn’t stop with maiming his nemesis. At Palpatine’s order, he beheads the captured Dooku.
The strange thing about these acts is not that they don’t seem particularly significant in driving Anakin closer to the darkness. He actually deals with both issues rather nonchalantly, indicating that in his heart of hearts Anakin isn’t exactly given over to deep regrets after hacking up helpless victims. As depicted, these murders serve less to push Anakin down the path of the Sith as to confirm that deep inside he’s already a pretty terrible person.
A Failed Sith Finds Redemption
Asajj Ventress is one of Star Wars’ few genuinely tortured characters, a sympathetic villain who finds herself betrayed by the one person she ever truly trusted. Spurned by Count Dooku, Ventress eventually enters into a partnership with Jedi Master Quinlan Vos to kill her former lord. Things don’t go as planned.
Ventress and Vos become lovers, the assassination is botched, Quinlan is captured and comes to the Dark Side, and Ventress ultimately ends up sacrificing herself to save him, using her body to shield a consumed Vos from Dooku’s Force lightning. Dying in Quinlan’s arms, Ventress finds redemption as her passing brings Vos back from the Dark Side, at last touching on the balance in the Force that has eluded her for so long.
The arc of the Star Wars saga is ultimately a tale of fall and redemption. Asajj’s loss serves to redeem both herself in death and Vos’ in life, a parallel mirrored by the role Darth Vader would later play in saving himself from the Dark Side and his son from temptation.
A Surprise Killing
Star Wars created the single greatest plot twist in movie history: “No, I am your father” is a pop culture troupe now, but in 1980 it was an unthinkable shock. No other surprise is ever likely to come close, but Star Wars does pull off a few other unpredictable left turns:
- ”Now witness the firepower of this fully armed and operational battle station.”
- ”Luke, there is another Skywalker.”
- That part where R2 flies.
Dumbest Deaths
And then there were the two dumbest deaths in Star Wars. Both happen in Revenge of the Sith, and both make utterly no sense.
The first is the slaying of Mace Windu at the hand of a flailing Anakin Skywalker. Now, for three movies, Star Wars has pounded into us the idea that Mace Windu is a badass. He killed Boba Fett’s dad and made it look easy. He’s played by Samuel L. Jackson. He has the galaxy’s only purple lightsaber. And he’s just out-fenced Darth Sidious, the Dark Lord of the Sith, disarming him with relative ease.
Then Anakin shows up. After a strained argument made during a bombardment of parried Force Lightning, Anakin decides that the treacherous psychopath who threw a galaxy into an apocalyptic civil war is worth saving and cuts off Mace Windu’s arm. There are so many problems with this, the chief of which is that Mace Windu is a Jedi Master, which means that “he can see things before they happen. It’s a Jedi trait.” With all the power of the Force at his command, a hyper-alert Windu with weapon already drawn just stands there while an angry, emotionally-unstable brat telegraphs his intentions and then hacks off a limb. Windu then gets blasted out an open window by Force lightning. Of all the dumb events in the dumb conclusion to the dumb prequel trilogy, this is the dumbest.
Save one.
Because Revenge of the Sith also gives us the death of Padme Amidala, who dies of a broken heart because Anakin is a jerk. The same Anakin who slaughtered a village of unarmed children only a few years before, the Anakin who openly espouses fascism and lies to the Jedi for years to conceal an illicit affair, the impulsive Anakin who flies into emotional tantrums at a moment’s notice, this guy surprisingly turns out to be evil. And this shocking revelation somehow kills Padme.
Is it possible to die of stupidity?
Kenobi’s Strange Self-Sacrifice
At the opposite end of the deaths that matter continuum is the formative self-sacrifice of Obi-Wan Kenobi. Of all the deaths in Star Wars, Obi-Wan’s is the most mysterious. Why did he face Vader? Did he seek him out to kill him, or rather to die at his hand? Did he himself know for sure? Certainly Force-ghost Ben gets around and provides plenty of support to the young Jedi, but couldn’t a living, breathing Kenobi have accomplished as much? With Ben separated from the rest of the party by Stormtroopers, is the sacrifice necessary to assure his friends’ escape? Or, most disturbingly, did Obi-Wan allow Luke to see Vader killing him so that Luke would turn on Vader and his Emperor?
Boba Fett’s Comic Expiration
No matter how skilled you are, no matter how disciplined your kung fu, in war a random bullet may find you. Such is the case of Boba Fett, Star Wars’ most prominent victim of battlefield misfortune. The films work hard to establish Fett’s combat credibility. He’s the guy who figured out Han Solo’s garbage-dump trick, he’s heir to the legacy of Jango Fett, he sports the coolest armor in the Star Wars galaxy, and he wears a jetpack. But in the end, he falls to the accidentally-swung spear of a blind Han Solo, swallowed by the Sarlacc with an indignant burp.
It’s a strange comic-relief ending for a character who reflected more atmospheric competence than any villain outside Vader and the Emperor. But is Boba Fett truly dead? Lucasfilm Story Group’s Pablo Hidalgo recently stated that “Boba Fett is both simultaneously alive and dead in the Sarlacc,” an obvious allusion to Schrodinger’s Cat. With the EU rebooted, Fett’s final fate is now in question. Will he return?
The Most Livid Murders in Star Wars
Star Wars is occasionally gruesome. Rancors get stabbed in the neck, tauntauns are disemboweled, and aunts and uncles get burnt into skeletal crisps. And then there's the strangulation of Jabba the Hutt at the hands of Leia Organa aboard the gangster's sail barge. As Luke hacks away at the crews of two nearby skiffs, Leia smashes a panel, kills the lights, leaps behind the Hutt, and hurls her slave-chain around his throat. Then, throwing the full weight of her body back, she slowly chokes the gangster to death. The prolonged sequence features Jabba wriggling in agony as Leia struggles. The camera zooms in on the Hutt’s flapping tongue as he struggles for breath, and then finally gives up the ghost with a gross, heaving release as his eyes go dead.
Then there's that terrifying opening to A New Hope, where we actually hear the crushed tissue of this guy's throat as Darth Vader collapses his windpipe.
But the single most savage slaying in Star Wars comes at the hands of the adorable Ewoks, who convert these deceased Stormtroopers' heads into percussion instruments. Then again, what do you expect from tiny bear-people who try to eat Han, Chewie, and Luke?
A Peaceful Passing
Yoda’s passing is Star Wars’ lone peaceful death. In a galaxy perpetually at war, only Yoda manages to survive long enough to expire in bed at a ripe-old 900 years. Luke returns from a painful lesson at Cloud City to find his teacher sick and wasting away. Yoda uses his final moments to confirm Luke’s suspicions about his parentage, though he curiously tries to evade the truth. This feeds a bit into my “Yoda and Obi-Wan really want Luke to kill Vader and don’t much care about honesty” theory, though it’s hardly the only possible explanation. Yoda himself points out that Luke isn’t ready for the burden, so it may be the little green guy just learned his lesson with Anakin and doesn’t want to give Luke enough rope to hang himself.
Oh, and then he reveals that the girl Luke kissed twice is his sister. Thanks, Yoda. Maybe that knowledge should have just died with you.
That One Ewok
You know which one I’m talking about.
Darth Vader
The most significant casualty in Star Wars is its last. Torn between the power of the Dark Side and the long-dormant humanity still clinging within his withered heart, Vader saves his son from the Emperor’s Force lightning, absorbing the bolts into his own body so that Luke can live. It’s a classic moment of redemption worthy of A Tale of Two Cities, accented in a typical Star Wars violence by the poignant fact that Vader is saved not just by giving up his own life, but also by taking the Emperor’s. Vader doesn’t just metaphorically jump in front of the bullet...he grabs the gun and takes down his enemy by shooting through his own body.
There are plenty of other notable Star Wars deaths in the films, TV shows, and old Expanded Universe. Which ones affected you the most? Let us know in the comments, and for everything Star Wars, stay with your friends here at IGN.
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