Darth Sidious

Star Wars: Return of the Jedi introduced the character of the Emperor, who seems like a feeble old man at first glance. But when Luke Skywalker firmly rejects his offer to join the Dark Side and become his new apprentice, the Emperor stops pretending and suddenly unleashes bolts of electricity from his fingertips to painfully cook Luke alive. All Luke can do is scream in pain and beg Darth Vader for help as he watches his own flesh steam. Vader grabs the Emperor from behind and throws him down a chasm, killing him but briefly exposing himself to his master’s deadly energy in the process. But even these few seconds of touching him wreak a terrible toll on his body, and he dies not long afterwards. Clearly, Yoda meant it when he told Luke not to underestimate the powers of the Emperor.

Based solely on Return of the Jedi, one would think that Force Lightning was an extremely high-level dark ability with no easy counter perhaps unique to the Emperor alone. But later movies painted a decidedly different picture. The next time we see it is Star Wars: Attack of the Clones in which Count Dooku briefly uses in his duel against Anakin Skywalker and Yoda. On Anakin, it works more or less the same as it did previously on Luke, but when he tries it on Yoda, Yoda absorbs the electricity into his hand and redirects it elsewhere with no harm coming to himself. At one point, he even sends a bolt back at Dooku! Clearly, Force Lightning was no longer the dark’s trump card exclusive to its highest master. It was still a powerful ability though, but this would not be the end of its degradation.

We see Force Lightning once again in Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith, this time used once again by Palpatine. But yet another counter is introduced to undermine it: Lightsabers. When Palpatine attempts to kill Mace Windu with his vicious volts, he raises his purple lightsaber and not only defends himself from the attack, but actually reflects it back on Palpatine! Palpatine is reduced to begging Anakin for help to save him from his own attack, an attack which was once shown as his way to make others powerless to do anything but beg for their lives! Granted, he does use Force Lightning to kill Windu shortly after, but the fact that it can now be countered by a weapon carried by pretty much every force-using character forever reduces it to “just another force ability exclusive to Sith”.

Force Lightning next appears in Star Wars: The Last Jedi where Supreme Leader Snoke briefly uses it to punish Kylo Ren. This appearance is honestly fine beyond the fact that yet another character who is not Palpatine can use it now, but that bridge was already crossed with Dooku.

And then there is Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. This movie could have been Force Lightning’s grand comeback. This movie SHOULD have been Force Lightning’s grand comeback! In it, Emperor Palpatine is back and bringing his favorite force ability with him. With the power of Rey and Kylo Ren’s force dyad, he is able to produce a display of electricity across the sky of Exegol that would make a maelstrom blush to destroy the Resistance fleet once and for all. He manages to destroy more than a few enemy ships with it, and would have likely earned this ability its respect and prestige back if were not for what happened next. Palpatine is approached by Rey, now holding a pair of lightsabers. So naturally, he turns his massive electrical powers against her. But then, she raises her lightsabers in front of her in an X shape and proceeds to block what must be billions if not trillions of volts worth of Dark Side electricity and send it back at Palpatine. There is nothing he can do about this, and he proceeds to messily combust while screaming in agony, probably wishing he had instead invested in some proper Jedi-killer bodyguards.

So all in all, Force Lightning has gone from the Dark Side’s ultimate trump card requiring a grave sacrifice to stop, to a serious, potentially deadly liability to anyone trying to use it against any target with a lightsaber. Lightsabers being probably the second most common weapon type for major characters to use behind blasters. I do not think that one single creative behind the movies can be blamed for this degradation, but I do wish someone had noticed it and stopped it before it got this bad. Thanks for reading through my thoughts, and do share what you think about this ability’s fate.

Recently, I made a massive tier list ranking many villains from various movies and tv series. Naturally, the template I used included many villains from Star Wars, so I thought it would be worth sharing the list here to get a better idea of how I feel about them compared to other fictional villains:

For the sake of not having to strain your eyes looking for every single Star Wars villain, here are the placements for all of the Star Wars villains:

GOAT: Darth Vader, Emperor Palpatine

Amazing: Count Dooku

Great: Cad Bane, Darth Maul, General Grievous, The Grand Inquisitor, Grand Admiral Thrawn, Grand Moff Tarkin, Jabba the Hutt, Director Krennic, Moff Gideon, Stormtroopers

Good: Assaj Ventress, Crosshair, Dryden Vos, Durge

Meh: General Pryde, Nute Gunray

Bad: Battle Droids, General Hux, Kylo Ren, Syril Karn

Terrible: Captain Phasma, Third Sister/Reva Sevander

Worst Of All Time: Supreme Leader Snoke

Not A True Villain: Boba Fett, Jango Fett, The Rancor

If you are here on Wookieepedia, you probably know about Contingency Order 66, the executive order for the Clone Army to execute the Jedi if they betray the Republic, used by Palpatine to wipe out the Jedi as the culmination of the Sith Grand Plan. What you might not know is that there were 149 other contingency orders designed for other scenarios. For instance, Order 37 called for the Clone Army to arrest civilians en masse and threaten to execute them if a specific fugitive did not surrender, and Order 65 called for the Clone Army to arrest (and if necessary kill) the Chancellor if they were declared unfit to rule by the Senate or Security Council.

However, out of the 150 Contingency Orders, we only know seven of them (4, 5, 6, 37, 65, 66, and 67), two of which are non-Canon joke orders. We also know an order with an unknown number calls for the orbital bombardment of a traitorous planet. This of course leaves us with the obvious question: What do the rest of them do? This is where we must do some speculation.

Given that Orders 65 and 66 deal with removing key legs of the Republic’s command structure in the event they go rogue, it seems reasonable to assume that some of the other orders in the 60s range are similar but applied to other branches of the Republic. I will hazard a guess that Orders 61-64 call for the arrest/execution of the Senate, the Courts, Republic Intelligence, and non-Jedi officers.

I also think that it is likely that in addition to the unknown orbital bombardment order, there are also other orders for dealing with traitorous planets to a less extreme degree such as occupation of cities, forced disarmament, and planetary blockades.

Speaking of planetary blockades, I imagine that there are also contingencies for dealing with natural disasters such as outbreaks of disease. If something like the life-assimilating Mnggal-Mnggal were to be unleashed on a populated planet, stopping it would require the immediacy and moral ambiguity of the Contingency Orders.

Finally, I also think it would make sense for there to be a Contingency Order for a Clone or group of Clones to commit suicide to stop them from being compromised by the enemy, likely either Order 1 or Order 150. But of course, this is all just speculation. What other orders do you think might exist?

It might sound a little unusual for me to say this, but... did Palaptine (Darth Sidious) died like a coward when he fell into the Death Star II's reactor shaft?

While I was online I found this image of 2D Palpatine in Revenge of the Sith. What do you guys think? Personally, I wish I had never seen it.