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 Overread wrote:
The prequels had the issue that they had no head-room. They had 3 films and no (at the time) idea that TV series and such could come along. So they had 3 films to squish everything into and then it hits A New Hope. So yeah everything feels on speed-up and they can't let any characters get too established unless they are going to appear in A New Hope - everyone else has to die off or vanish fairly fast.

JarJar is perhaps one of the few who survives, but who just vanishes into nothing in the story.

Then they shouldn't have made up so many new characters so the ones they did use had room to breathe.

I have said this before. Darth Maul should have been the Darth Vader of the prequels.

You have Maul kill Qui Gon in front of Obi Won and then instead of dying, simply escapes while Obi Won is stuck behind his video game energy door.

Obi decides to train Anakin. Yadda yadda. Second movie it's years later and Maul has been a monster in the shadows plaguing the clone wars. But specifically, always getting away. And often, killing people close to Anakin and Obi Won. Yoda's words are reflected here. Maul is a terror weapon. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate is the path to the dark side. Both Anakin and Obi Won are frustrated that they cannot seem to catch this guy and people around them keep dying because of it.

At movie 3 this comes to a head as Obi Wan lets go of his fear and anger while Anakin begins to fear for Padme. It's when Maul comes after her that Anakin lashes out truly in his anger and hate. Obi letting go becomes a better Jedi and Anakin succumbing to his fear/anger/hate slips farther and farther away. It's Anakin that ends up killing Maul and then turns on everyone else for failing to protect all the people that Maul has killed over the years. That the Jedi were too weak to do what was needed. So on and so forth.

Maul was the interesting villain through-line the prequels needed like Vader was. And his role as this horrible demon looking assassin is a great way to show Anakins fall to the dark side. Duku can get fethed.

The end result is you get Obi following the Jedi teachings and becoming greater. Anakin failing to and fulfilling Yoddas worries. And it reflects in 4/5/6 when Obi gets killed like Qui Gon did and then Luke sees his friends under threat in Empire and finally faces Vader in Jedi when his sister is threatened. But unlike his father he pulls back from the darkside and chooses Obi Wons path. Remember that conversation between yoda and ghost Obi? "Was I any different?" It actually happens this way.

 Overread wrote:
The prequels had the issue that they had no head-room. They had 3 films and no (at the time) idea that TV series and such could come along. So they had 3 films to squish everything into and then it hits A New Hope. So yeah everything feels on speed-up and they can't let any characters get too established unless they are going to appear in A New Hope - everyone else has to die off or vanish fairly fast.

Of course, part of the problem there is that they use an entire movie pretty much entirely to introduce Anakin. His origin as a slave could have been worked into the first 10 minutes of the movie, then skip forward 10 years or so to start of all the political intrigue and the formation of the Separatist Alliance.

I suspect that Lucas had always intended to fill in the gaps between the movies with other content, because otherwise just skipping entirely over the Clone Wars is a really weird choice... but they suffer from the lack of fleshing out as a result, particularly in the treatment of Anakin... (which the Clone Wars series doesn't actually fix... he's still a completely different character at the end of the Clone Wars to the Anakin we see in RotS, which is a problem because the finale of Clone Wars is happening during RotS...)

This is pretty much the exact same thing that happened with the Sequels, though... Disney always intended the Star Wars franchise to encompass movies, TV series, comics and books, and so the sequels included a lot of stuff that was intended to be explained elsewhere. Which is fine for those who follow the entirety of the multimedia catalogue, but leaves a lot of gaps for those who are just watching the movies.

I like Dooku as a character and his scene in Attack of the Clones where he lays out the entire plot to Obi-wan trying to recruit him is my favorite scene (and one of the few I recall) from the pre-quells.

Maul was just a blunt instrument. Dooku was actually interesting as a former Jedi himself, now turned Separatist.

He’s also not a creation of Palpatine. His disillusionment with the Order and the Republic are his own. Palpatine simply harnessed what was already there.

I think there's a few things at play with the prequels. The Phantom Menace was jarring in a lot of ways; some of which it was at fault with and some of which are a result of audience expectations. Star Wars at the point had always been kind of run down and despite repeatedly stating in the films that we were in the boonies, the EU rarely got across the idea that there was true opulence in the core worlds until we saw Naboo, which really ran afoul of audience expectations and felt more like an artifact of early CGI than an intentional choice. That's actually probably been the best element of Disney's TV push, as its really depicted life of the elite as something almost alien to the sands of Tantooine in a way that I think TPM wanted to say, but didn't quite have the time or chops to pull off.




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 Lance845 wrote:

Maul was the interesting villain through-line the prequels needed like Vader was. And his role as this horrible demon looking assassin is a great way to show Anakins fall to the dark side.

I think Maul is likely a character that got compromised as they realized that while an incredible stuntman, Ray Park just wasn't an actor who could deliver lines. Over the years he's had an incredible amount of dialogue cut from every film he's been in and while I bear the man no ill will at all, I think its just one of those calls you have to make while filming that something just isn't going to work.

Given Peter Serafonwicz did his lines for TPM, you might be right.

 insaniak wrote:

I suspect that Lucas had always intended to fill in the gaps between the movies with other content, because otherwise just skipping entirely over the Clone Wars is a really weird choice... but they suffer from the lack of fleshing out as a result, particularly in the treatment of Anakin... (which the Clone Wars series doesn't actually fix... he's still a completely different character at the end of the Clone Wars to the Anakin we see in RotS, which is a problem because the finale of Clone Wars is happening during RotS...)

My understanding is the TV show was always part of the plan, but its worth noting that the OT skips over huge chunks of content as well and benefits greatly for it. One of the best elements of those films is their ability to drop you into the middle of an ongoing adventure without setup beyond the title crawl and let you feel instantly reconnected with what's going on. I think the prequels try to pull that off again and I'd argue RotS does, but AotC definitely stumbles by requiring an entirely new Anakin.

Can someone familiar with the Old EU tell me when the Rule of Two first cropped up?

It is of course mentioned in TPM, making it officially canon at that point. But for the period when no films were coming out, it also explains why, Sith wise, there was just Palpatine and Vader, rather than hundreds of the evil buggers.

Pretty sure it’s old Republic fluff, but don’t know if TPM did it first.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Can someone familiar with the Old EU tell me when the Rule of Two first cropped up?

It is of course mentioned in TPM, making it officially canon at that point. But for the period when no films were coming out, it also explains why, Sith wise, there was just Palpatine and Vader, rather than hundreds of the evil buggers.

Pretty sure it’s old Republic fluff, but don’t know if TPM did it first.

It's first mentioned in TPM's "always two" line. It got built out further during the prequel era when they introduced Darth Bane.

I thought it was older than that, but it was more that prior to TPM learning the ways of the Force was always treated as a Master/Apprentice tradition that created a paired dynamic more than their being a hard line limit on Sith that we got with the Rule of Two and certainly a far cry from the institutionalized mandatory training we see from the prequels.

Honestly this makes me a little sad that we never really see Vader hunting Jedi. Both Maul and Dooku die to only a very few Jedi. It would have been really awesome to have had part where we saw Vader going after and beating actual Jedi after his transformation. Showing just how brutal and scary he is to other Jedi compared to others.

I partially agree. Certainly there’s room for such stuff in the still not massively explored time between Prequel and OT for that.

But the newly minted Vader being given relatively menial “but it’s definitely important, I promise” tasks, such as hunting down the Younglings is something I see as deliberate.

His actions in Palpatine’s office are rash, and done in the heat of the moment. He’d fallen far, but there was still room for him to come to his senses and take out Palpatine - and Palpatine knew he was capable, especially if going all Angry Dark Side.

So he’s kept off balance, given vile tasks to drive him ever further into guilt and despair, giving him a much longer road to walk to turn around. And importantly, keep him a tool. Something useful to Palpatine, and to be kept around and subservient, until such time as You’re Dead Or Palpatine Finds Someone Better, as happened to both Maul and Tyranus.

 Overread wrote:
Honestly this makes me a little sad that we never really see Vader hunting Jedi. Both Maul and Dooku die to only a very few Jedi. It would have been really awesome to have had part where we saw Vader going after and beating actual Jedi after his transformation. Showing just how brutal and scary he is to other Jedi compared to others.

Definitely something that's been covered well elsewhere (Rebels in particular) and something that was supposed to be part of the original prequel designs. Anakin at one point was going to start hunting down Jedi that had gone rogue for example. There's a lot that got crammed into RotS and there's tons of cut content that was filmed. There's a 4 hour rough cut that tries to wrap up all the ideas that mostly got cut to try and focus on Anakin's fall that test audiences felt was too weak.