Posted 26 March 2007 - 01:01 AM
Bit busy to post now, but bringing back this thread reminds me how the twist at the end of "Empire Strikes Back" really messes up any attempt at the prequels.
Luke comes from Tatooine. He meets an old hermit named Obi Wan, who starts training him to be a Jedi. Obi Wan tells Luke that his father, "a good man", was a Jedi but was killed by Darth Vader. Luke lives with his uncle, Owen, who objected to Luke's father leaving Tatooine and becoming a Jedi.
Meanwhile, Darth Vader is orbiting Tatooine as they speak. Since he knows that two droids with the plans to the Death Star, the empire's superweapon, have escaped to Tatooine, he sends stormtroopers to track down the droids. Being stormtroopers, they kill everyone in their way, including Luke's uncle. But the droids make it to Obi Wan, who convinces Luke, who has no other option, to leave Tatooine with him and take the plans to the rebel leaders.
However, Obi Wan's craft gets captured by the Death Star, and Obi Wan winds up fighting Vader, who seems somewhat surprised that the latter is still around. Vader kills Obi Wan. Luke escapes and later destroys the Death Star.
So far, this is all very straightforward. Then, in "Empire Strikes Back", Vader tracks down Luke and tells Luke that Vader is Luke's father.
Presumably, either Obi Wan is lying or Vader is lying. If Vader is lying, the plot still makes sense, though if that is revealed in the next movie it would be a bit of a letdown after the buildup in ESB. If Obi Wan is lying, this raises a number of questions. Such as, why did Obi Wan lie? Why did he "hide" Luke on Vader's home planet? Why didn't Vader try to track down Luke earlier, or return to his home planet? And why did he turn against the jedi in the first place, despite being a "good man"? The next movie, "Return of the Jedi", deals with these questions by confirming that Obi Wan was lying but otherwise ignoring them. For ROTJ, this is fine since the movie concentrates on wrapping up the trilogy and telling about the end of the rebelling. For the prequels, this is not good. The prequels, if they are to feature Vader's and Obi Wan's earlier lives at all, must answer these questions.
Lucas pretty much as tabula rasa in everything else in the prequels. He can even make the Emperor and the empire sympathetic and the jedi the bad guys and not contradict the actual story in the original trilogy too much (though he would contradict the mood). But he must answer the questions steming from the contradiction between the story told at the end of ESB (and confirmed in ROTJ), and the story in "Star Wars: a New Hope". Otherwise the plot is a mess.
As it turns out the answers are, well the question of why Obi Wan lied isn't answered at all; why he "hid" Luke on Vader's home planet isn't answered at all; Vader didn't know he had a son; and he turned against the Jedi because he was a moron. This really isn't good enough.
I think if you start answering the four questions, you have a good start to a decent background story to the prequels, that you can build on. And I did come up with a good, consistent answer recently when thinking about this. Its too bad Lucas couldn't.