Headscratchers / Darth Plagueis

• It's been repeatedly implied that Palpatine has no qualms about doing dirty work for Plagueis, and that he has no problems with all the stuff he's done. Yet how come in the end in his breakdown, he begins to relive and enumerates all the stuff he's been forced to do like he hates it?
  • Palpatine probably just hates being a servant to anyone.
  • This is most likely. He'll murder puppies for shits and giggles, but if someone tells him to do it, he'll probably bristle at it even if he was going to do it anyway.
  • He as much as says this, berating Plagueis for trying to turn him into "a mere messenger and intermediary" and saying that he's grateful to Plagueis as a teacher, but never as a Master.
  • The main thing he seemed angry at him about was the murder of his entire family, which Palpatine did partly because of encouragement from Plagueis, partly out of blind rage. Even from the chapter immediately following this crime, it is implied that Palpatine is genuinely unnerved by what he had just done- even if he truly hated his father, he may never have previously planned on killing him, and even if that didn't bother him, he may have regretted murdering his mother and siblings. Of course, he isn't really taking any responsibility for this (blaming Plagueis- semi-justifiably, but still) and if it counts as evidence that (and this is true in Real Life) even sociopaths like Palpatine often do have some sliver of conscience or familial affection (see Moral Sociopathy), it still means that he crosses his own personal Moral Event Horizon before the first act of the novel is over, and he certainly ends the novel as a monstrous psychopath. I'm guessing then that, despite what the rest of the Tropes page seems to believe, Luceno may not believe that Palpatine was born evil; rather, while he may have been a sociopath from the very start, that doesn't mean he was destined to be the Dark Lord of the Sith, or that he was pure evil from the very beginning.
  • Despite his own claims of wanting to join the Sith since before Plagueis arrived, and from what Luceno intended, we do get a few scenes that imply the argument that Palpatine wasn't born a monster holds a lot of water. First, his relationship with Vidar Kim seemed genuinely affable, despite their political differences, and while he didn't feel any remorse about killing Vidar later, he did show reluctance to go through with it, then consoled himself by noting it would be a Mercy Kill, since Vidar's family is gone (believe it or not, Palpatine had nothing to do with their deaths); second, during his final confrontation with his father, Palpatine genuinely complimented Plagueis— "He's powerful, influential, and brilliant. More so than any of my professors. Head and shoulder above you! Or any of your royal confederates." So, at the time, Palpatine had two father figures he felt he could cling to, and then everything came crashing down when Plagueis cheerfully revealed that he'd lied to and manipulated him. As mentioned above, Palpatine has no compunction about killing, but he doesn't like being used, even when he was going to kill that specific person anyway for the heck of it. Hell, the fact that Plagueis used him didn't bother him as much as the fact that Plagueis lied to him— remember, the whole reason Palpatine decided to become his agent in the first place was because Plagueis was honest about his intentions for Naboo and that Palpatine would be a pawn in that scheme, something that Palpatine didn't mind. And then Plagueis goes and lies to him. For Palpatine, that was when he crossed the Moral Event Horizon and the Despair Event Horizon, and because of the magnitude of what he did, there was no going back.

• When the forensic psychiatric hospital found out that the Nautolan, who had a serious mental illness that made him a danger to others and who was found by the authorities to be insane after committing numerous crimes, could use the Force, why didn't they notify the Jedi Order then? Why did they wait for him to escape? Did they foolishly believe they could keep tabs on a Force-user?
  • If I remember right, even during the heyday of the Jedi Order, not everyone in the galaxy believed in the Force. They likely just took it for granted that the Jedi were overrated and besides, the Nautolan didn't have any training, so how dangerous could he be?
  • They did have him pretty well locked down before the intervention of the Sith so probably justified in thinking so.

• Why did Plagueis, being from the Bane lineage as he was, think he could avert the Rule of Two and NOT have Palpatine murder him? What did he think would make him so special in his apprentice's eyes that together they could abandon a millennia of doctrine and that a new paradigm of Sith methods and relations could be set into place just like that?
  • Arrogance, most likely. Also, from what I read, a lot of Sith Lords down the line had grown tired of the Rule of Two, though their apprentices would ultimately kill them anyway out of paranoia, thus starting the cycle all over again.
  • That's part of why he wanted to be able to make himself immortal- the Rule of Two gets a lot less necessary when the current Two are immortal.
  • It's essentially how the Rule of Two safeguards itself: the apprentice kills the master, then decides "I'm going to rule forever with my apprentice as my minion," only for said apprentice to do the exact same thing. And so on. So, with that in mind, why take an apprentice at all? Because Sith Lords are arrogant people who have a compulsive need to be at the top of a pecking order, and who better than someone you can mold into a powerful enforcer?
  • The thing about the Rule of Two is that nobody really follows it. Just in this book Tenebrous had a secret backup apprentice and Maul was apprentice to the apprentice. Even Bane himself had two apprentices.
  • Bane only did that after he thought his first apprentice lacked the guts to confront him; she, in turn, thought he was setting a trap. Even Bane's attempt to cheat death made sense in Zannah's warped Social Darwinist mindset after she really thought about it.

• Why did the M2 probe droid continue drilling into the dangerous accumulation of lethane? Apparently part of its programming had been designed to override a critical fail safe command issued to it by its Sith owners. Who would have done such a thing? Before you say Plagueis, the opportunity to murder Tenebrous only presents itself a few minutes later when the cave is crashing down. We know this because we are privy to his train of thought. It seemed like a very opportunistic killing, rather than a premeditated plan. Who else would subvert the droid's programming, though?
  • It's mentioned that lethane pockets are pretty common around cortosis; if whoever programmed the droid knew it would be probing for cortosis, it wouldn't be too big a stretch to program it to blow up the biggest lethane pocket it saw.
  • It seems clear indeed that the droid's programming had been subverted. Otherwise it disobeyed a direct order and clearly isn't Three Laws-Compliant. But who did this? Surely nobody knew of Nome and Demask's true Sith identities. So what then? A starship designer competitor? How would they know Nome was interested in cortosis mining, if they didn't know he was a Sith (or even falsely assume he was a Jedi)?
  • Subtext Mining supplied the probe, and programmed it to malfunction, presumably to kill Rugess Nome for whatever reason. That's why Plagueis tracked them down, and they told him about Naboo's plasma to save their own hides. Tenebrous presumably made a few enemies in his life.
  • There is an idea that it could be Palpatine. It's said by the corporation that the customer was from Naboo. Of course, it is a big stretch... but in the Book of Sith Palpatine says that he collected Sith artifacts even before he met Plagueis. We know that his precognitive abilities are vast, but it's still unlikely that he was able to see so much. But who knows?
  • There's a few other supporting elements, although they admittedly boil down to conservation of detail and may be coincidences. Plagueis first senses the presence of a force user every bit his equal on that world. He eventually concludes it was Venamis, but Venamis isn't that powerful. The captain of the Woebegone was partying with an extremely young man the night Plagueis stowed away that her crew jokingly claim she seemed almost ready to hand the ship over to; this could be Palpatine trying to manipulate his way into a first meeting and failing because she was resistant to his influence (as Plagueis also found out to her sorrow).

• Plagueis travels to Saleucami to listen to the unidentified Iktotchi prophet's portents of the Sith Grand Plan's consequences, and assassinates her in part because she advocates a return to the pre-Rule Of Two Sith organisational structure. He does this by embracing her under the guise of what she's offering (to join the cult to survive the coming tribulations), chiding her that she has no place in his new order and cannot be allowed to make these divinations, and electrocuting her with direct Force Lightning contact. Then he makes his escape by Mind Tricking her Twi'lek entourage and then Strolling Through the Chaos. But why? The cult followers must have witnessed what happened, and there's no indication he was able (or even bothered) to confound them too. Wouldn't it have been safer for him to eliminate her away from the stone slab with a long-range force technique, Choke probably being the easiest and most discrete? By not doing that, isn't he risking exposure with dozens of witnesses? And when assassins pull Strolling Through the Chaos, the reason they're usually able to get away with it is because they killed their target with nobody to witness the crime.
  • He didn't leave witnesses. At the end of the scene it's stated that he was the only one who got back on the bus the pilgrims came on, everyone else being compelled to wander out into the desert to die of exposure.

• In "The Tenebrous Way" short story, thanks to the maxi-chlorians, Darth Tenebrous finds his own corpse years after his death, but it's specified that the corpse is mummified. How was Tenebrous' corpse mummified and who mummified him? Shouldn't his corpse have rotted over the years? And who would mummify a corpse if they were not going to bury it?
  • Mummification can occur naturally if the conditions are right to desiccate the corpse.

• If Darth Tenebrous had always meant to hijack Plagueis via the maxi-chlorians, what was the point of training Venamis, who soon went to try and kill Plagueis anyway?
  • As a backup?