"If I read this to you, and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags or some mad regime--Pol Pot or others--that had no concern for human beings,"

Vader: I've been waiting for you, Obi-Wan. We meet again, at last. The circle is now complete. When I left you I was but a learner, no I am the master.
Kenobi: Only a master of evil, Darth.

Vader: Your powers are weak, old man.
Kenobi: You can't win, Darth. If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.

Obi-Wan: That boy is our last hope.
Yoda: no, there is another

Chris:Most of the reviews so far have emphasized how, at long last, George Lucas has tied the many threads of his six movies together. But there's a whole lot of stuff that still doesn't make any sense. Which bits of remaining nonsense are your favorites?
BryanI'm still not sure why Yoda and the Jedi Fun Club don't realize that the most evil guy in the freakin' galaxy lives and works, like, 20 feet away. And yet, in Episode II, we learn that Yoda can sense the hurt feelings of his fellow Jedi millions of miles away—sorry, Mr. Jedi, I don't get it.

I'm unclear on what happened to "Sifo Diaz" (forgive the phonetic spelling), apparently the first Hispanic Jedi, who started the Clone Wars in Episode II.

And, finally, the eternal question, one Kevin Smith raised the other day: Why doesn't Darth Vader recognize C-3PO (the robot he built) and R2D2 (his frequent co-pilot) in episodes IV through VI?

Do you think Darth Vader chooses to freeze Han Solo in carbonite in The Empire Strikes Back because he's angry that Solo shot Greedo who, as we learned in The Phantom Menace, is his childhood friend?

Chris: See, you want to talk about acting, but then you bring it back to plot inconsistencies. Chewbacca—since he and Yoda are old pals, why don't they get a chance to reminisce and tell old war stories in episodes IV, V, and VI?

And while I'm on the subject, is there anything Obi-Wan Kenobi tells Luke Skywalker at the beginning of Star Wars that turns out to be true? The famous lie, of course, is Kenobi telling Luke that Darth Vader killed his father. But Obi-Wan appears to have decided to embroider that big lie with a host of little ones. He says Luke's father was a great pilot. These prequels give us no real evidence for that. He says Luke's father wanted him to have a particular light saber that he pulls out of a box. Guess not. He says that he fought with Luke's father in the Clone Wars. If that's true, it's sure hard to tell.

Oh, what the hell, here's one more quibble: In Star Wars, a member of the Empire tells Darth Vader that Vader is the only remaining believer in that hokey Force religion. Is Palpatine, delightfully campy as his performance may be, still keeping his Sithdom in the closet two decades hence?

Chris: You bring up what was actually the most disappointing thing about the movie to me. The implication, to me at least, of the film's conclusion is that Palpatine has been lying to Anakin/Vader all along, that Palpatine did not in fact possess a secret power that could save Padmé's life. Which means that, in one of the final frames, Lucas abandons, or at least softens, the fairly radical moral philosophy he's put forth. That love isn't all we need. That love can be selfish. That the attachments of marriage and family may be constructs that we sinners need to get through life, but if we were truly moral beings we'd view things from a broader, more just perspective. I thought that was where we were heading with all this talk about "attachment" and its dangers. Movie heroes are supposed to break the rules and get the girl. In Revenge of the Sith, it's the villain who flouts authority and gets the girl.
Bryan [stunned silence]
Bryan: Dude, that's so heavy. But as long as we're getting cosmic, I'd remind you that Anakin's attachment to the "girl" results in intergalactic disaster. He betrays his friends and mentors, exterminates Jedi, winds up waist-deep in lava—all for the sake of some girl. If Lucas is turning against his radical Jedi philosophy—which says attachments ("temptations") lead to weakness—then, well, he's got an odd way of showing it.
Chris: Yeah, but then we find out—or at least I think we find out—that he was lied to all along. So, he was deceived into his actions. That feels like a cop-out to me. I would have liked it better if his love for Padmé led him to evil directly, without any deception on the part of Palpatine. While I'm being heavy, I'd argue that attachments aren't the same as temptations. They lead to temptation, rather, because you end up elevating one person over everyone else.

When Palpatine is still a senator, he says, "The Republic is not what it once was. The Senate is full of greedy, squabbling delegates. There is no interest in the common good." At one point he laments that "the bureaucrats are in charge now."

Palpatine believes that the political order must be manipulated to produce peace and stability. When he mutters, "There is no civility, there is only politics," we see that at heart, he's an esoteric Straussian.

Make no mistake, as emperor, Palpatine is a dictator--but a relatively benign one, like Pinochet. It's a dictatorship people can do business with. They collect taxes and patrol the skies. They try to stop organized crime (in the form of the smuggling rings run by the Hutts). The Empire has virtually no effect on the daily life of the average, law-abiding citizen.

Also, unlike the divine-right Jedi, the Empire is a meritocracy. The Empire runs academies throughout the galaxy (Han Solo begins his career at an Imperial academy), and those who show promise are promoted, often rapidly. In "The Empire Strikes Back" Captain Piett is quickly promoted to admiral when his predecessor "falls down on the job."

But the most compelling evidence that the Empire isn't evil comes in "The Empire Strikes Back" when Darth Vader is battling Luke Skywalker. After an exhausting fight, Vader is poised to finish Luke off, but he stays his hand. He tries to convert Luke to the Dark Side with this simple plea: "There is no escape. Don't make me destroy you. . . . Join me, and I will complete your training. With our combined strength, we can end this destructive conflict and bring order to the galaxy." It is here we find the real controlling impulse for the Dark Side and the Empire. The Empire doesn't want slaves or destruction or "evil." It wants order.

None of which is to say that the Empire isn't sometimes brutal. In Episode IV, Imperial stormtroopers kill Luke's aunt and uncle and Grand Moff Tarkin orders the destruction of an entire planet, Alderaan. But viewed in context, these acts are less brutal than they initially appear. Poor Aunt Beru and Uncle Owen reach a grisly end, but only after they aid the rebellion by hiding Luke and harboring two fugitive droids. They aren't given due process, but they are traitors.

The destruction of Alderaan is often cited as ipso facto proof of the Empire's "evilness" because it seems like mass murder--planeticide, even. As Tarkin prepares to fire the Death Star, Princess Leia implores him to spare the planet, saying, "Alderaan is peaceful. We have no weapons." Her plea is important, if true.

But the audience has no reason to believe that Leia is telling the truth. In Episode IV, every bit of information she gives the Empire is willfully untrue. In the opening, she tells Darth Vader that she is on a diplomatic mission of mercy, when in fact she is on a spy mission, trying to deliver schematics of the Death Star to the Rebel Alliance. When asked where the Alliance is headquartered, she lies again.

The first encounter is when Leia befriends an Ewok hunter and is taken back to their home. Her actions appear friendly - although her attitude is somewhat contemptuous of the natives' intelligence - but we don't really know her intentions. Perhaps she didn't mean to be an infiltrator and a spy on the native people. We just don't know.

The next thing that happens is that Luke, Han, Chewie and the droids are captured by an Ewok hunting party when they stumble into a trap. The Ewoks believe that C3P0 is some kind of divine being to be honored (though not particularly to be obeyed or feared), and decide to turn the bounty of their hunt into a feast for their god.

When C3P0 and Leia's remonstrations are ineffective, Luke uses his Jedi power to trick the Ewoks into believing that C3P0 really is a god and really does have divine powers. The immediate motivation for this action - avoiding becoming lunch - is morally acceptable. However, the party does not stop with saving their own lives and proceeding with their own mission. Instead, they use C3P0's divine status to turn the Ewoks into their own private army. They demand food and equipment, guides, and the return of their own equipment, legitimately seized by the Ewoks when the Rebels trespassed on their territory.

What's worse, they enlist the Ewoks into their own futile rebellion against the legitimate authority. They take a largely helpless indigenous people who, by virtue of the humanity and decency of the local Imperial power, enjoy peaceful relations with the legitimate government, and turn them into doomed rebels. They convince them to mount a surprise attack against an overwhelmingly superior force, and the resulting battle results in the deaths of dozens of Ewok warriors - in exchange for a marginal shift in the tactical situation for the rebels.

In my world, there is a word for people who use trickery and deception to convince simple primitives of their own divinity, and then use that divine status to turn peaceful hunters into jihadists against a vastly superior foreign power that has never harmed them. That word is "evil".

Just a quick clarification based on a conversation I had with my dad re: Pussy-rock.

Pussy-rock: n. Music supposedly from the "Rock and Roll" genre that is especially enjoyed by women and some men. This type of music was popularized in the 1980's by men who either looked, dressed, or sang like women. Examples: Bon Jovi, Def Lepperd, Poison, White Snake. A current example of this genre would be the band Nickleback.

A quick way to tell if a band belongs to the Pussy-rock genre would be to listen to their catalog of songs. If the vast majority of the songs are about women, love, or emotions of any kind other than hate or being pissed-off, this is a good indication that the band is pussy-rock. Should not be confused with the "Chick-rock" genre, which consists of great bands such as Heart and...well, just Heart.