

I wondered twenty-some years ago why they didn’t just go back to Tatooine with Coruscant pocket change and buy Shmi’s freedom and set her up with a pleasant little retirement cottage or a condo in a senior-friendly complex in that Dinotopia-ripoff capitol city on Naboo. Yeah, yeah, Jedi code against attachments or whatever—but it’s not an “attachment” if she’s just not a slave anymore and living somewhere else that is not misery desert.
Anakin’s massacre of the Tusken raiders is also the wrong kind of step into evil, from a character perspective. We’re supposed to see Anakin becoming Darth Vader, and Vader is in the main a cold-blooded villain: implacable, determined, even a bit grusomely sardonic. (“Apology accepted, Captain Needa.”) An explosion of blind rage doesn’t fit. Anakin should have been a cop using excessive force, like maybe killing the alien who attempted to assassinate Amidala while trying to Jack Bauer information out of them.




Yeah, they don’t strike me as the reading type.