Palpatine

Palpatine is both the Sith Master who helps draw Anakin toward the dark side and the political figure through whom the Galactic Republic’s transformation into the Galactic Empire becomes visible. The book treats his influence as part of a larger parallel: Anakin’s change into Darth Vader and the Republic’s change into Empire are not simply separate stories of a good order defeated by an outside evil. The danger takes shape within the person and the political order that had seemed to oppose it.

Identity and Political Position

During the events of Revenge of the Sith, Palpatine is Chancellor of the Republic and, as he reveals to Anakin, also the Sith Master. That double position lets him address Anakin both as a political authority and as a figure who offers an alternative account of the Jedi. He tells Anakin that the Jedi are corrupt and ineffective, and presents them as responsible for Anakin’s suffering. The account emphasizes this as a way of exploiting the young Jedi’s fear, ego, and arrogance rather than as a neutral assessment of the Jedi Order.

Palpatine’s political significance extends beyond his personal contest with Anakin. In the book’s interpretation of the saga, the Galactic Empire does not simply conquer the Galactic Republic from outside: the Empire emerges from corruption within the Republic itself. Palpatine’s combination of Chancellor and Sith Master makes him central to that reversal, although the broader point is structural: the political order can produce the danger it claims to resist.

Influence on Anakin

Palpatine takes advantage of Anakin’s vulnerabilities and offers him a story in which the Jedi are the source of his suffering. This manipulation gives Anakin a path toward rejecting the order he belongs to, while the book’s criticism of the film is that it does not fully develop the tragic logic of that fall. Rather than showing Anakin becoming evil through an excessive attachment to doing good and protecting those he loves, the film presents him as an indecisive warrior who gradually yields to the temptation of power and to the Emperor’s influence.

That distinction matters to the book’s reading of Palpatine’s role. He is an active exploiter of Anakin’s weaknesses, but the interpretation argues that the deeper tragedy should have lain in Anakin’s own attachment to the good becoming destructive. The film instead makes the reversal appear as a slide toward evil encouraged by Palpatine, leaving less room for the disturbing possibility that the desire to fight evil can itself help produce it.

Padmé and the Turning Point

Anakin’s relationship with Padmé becomes a decisive point in the film’s account of his fall. When Anakin learns that Padmé has helped Obi-Wan find him, he attacks her. After Anakin’s duel with Obi-Wan, Palpatine tells him that he has killed Padmé. Anakin’s furious response is followed by remorse and love for her, but the book sees the two episodes as parallel outbursts: first destructive anger toward Padmé, then destructive grief at the belief that she is dead.

The author argues that this sequence does not adequately show how Anakin’s excessive love for Padmé and his inability to relinquish his attachment lead him toward evil. Instead, Anakin seems to oscillate between a bad position of anger and a good one of remorse. Palpatine’s place in this sequence is consequential: he is present at the disclosure that precipitates Anakin’s second outburst, and he remains the political and personal authority alongside whom Anakin’s transformation is completed.

Transformation and Ending

After the duel with Obi-Wan, Anakin is gravely injured and rescued by Palpatine’s followers. At a medical facility, he is kept alive and fitted with the armor that makes him Darth Vader. When he leaves the facility, he walks across the bridge of a star destroyer and joins Palpatine, now the Emperor of the galaxy. They look out toward the Death Star, whose construction has begun. The ending binds Anakin’s bodily transformation into Vader to the consolidation of the new imperial order: the former Jedi joins the ruler whose political ascent has accompanied the Republic’s collapse.

Immediately before the transformation is complete, Obi-Wan makes a final appeal for Anakin to return to goodness. Anakin rejects it and, though already badly wounded, makes a final attempt to strike back. The book reads this refusal as formally consistent even while its content appears to choose evil: Anakin remains committed to his choice despite the lack of practical gain. Palpatine’s victory is therefore not presented only as the defeat of Anakin by an external tempter; it is also the setting in which Anakin persists in a choice that the book regards as ethically consistent in form but destructive in substance.

Political and Narrative Significance

The book places Palpatine within the saga’s unstable political myth, whose meanings include the defense of a free world against an Evil Empire and the warning that the fight against an enemy can transform the defenders themselves. The Republic-to-Empire reversal is read alongside Anakin’s transformation: in both cases, the apparent opposition between good and evil is unsettled by the possibility that the new evil grows from within the order or person claiming to resist it.

This parallel also informs the book’s criticism of the film. It argues that Anakin should have become a monster through an excessive, misguided attachment to the good, rather than simply by giving in to the temptation of power. Palpatine’s manipulation is part of the plot as presented, but the unfulfilled dramatic possibility lies in a closer link between his political rise and Anakin’s own desire to oppose evil. Together, those transformations would have made the Galactic Empire not merely the Republic’s successor, but the political expression of the same reversal that turns Anakin into Darth Vader.