By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
In Star Wars, Emperor Palpatine serves as the scary Big Bad in a galaxy far, far away, with his malign influence spreading across three different trilogies. Because of this and because of the persistent myth that George Lucas planned every character and story beat far in advance, most fans assume that Palpatine was always meant to be the ultimate foe for our heroes to face. However, the official novelization of the first Star Wars film confirms that in the beginning, the Emperor was more of a figurehead puppet being controlled by other people.
The Original Emperor
The Star Wars prequels did a great job of portraying Emperor Palpatine as a master manipulator who managed to pit two halves of the galaxy against each other in a successful bid to take control of the Old Republic. However, a long, long time before the Prequel Trilogy came out, Alan Dean Foster’s novelization of the first Star Wars gave us a very different description of this man. According to that book, Palpatine was actually “controlled by the very assistants and boot-lickers he had appointed to high office.”
That book describes a very different Emperor Palpatine, one who was more in line with the original vision of George Lucas. In the 1974 early draft of Star Wars, the Emperor was a young human named Cos Dashit. He was actually just the latest in a long line of emperors in this draft and had no Force powers, which made it easier for Darth Vader to try to bully him and otherwise undercut his legal authority.
By the time Star Wars came out in 1977, Vader was written as more of a flunkie. Not only does Grand Moff Tarkin successfully boss him around, but other Imperial officials weren’t afraid to mock the Sith Lord’s religious beliefs during work meetings (let’s hope the Death Star has a not-so-human resources department). Still, Tarkin and the other officers seem appropriately deferential to the Emperor in this movie as they discuss Palpatine quietly dissolving the Senate. Interestingly, this brief scene in A New Hope paints a very different picture than the novelization’s concept of Palpatine as a weak-willed sycophant.
It’s not entirely clear when George Lucas decided to make Emperor Palpatine into a scary threat on his own terms, but the director more prominently featured the Big Bad in The Empire Strikes Back and firmly established that Darth Vader–the scariest guy in the galaxy–is scared of his boss. By the time Return of the Jedi came out, Lucas had decided to make Palpatine a powerful Dark Side Force user, and everything from his ability to defeat Luke Skywalker to his ability to terrify everyone on the Death Star cemented his supreme authority. The figurehead was gone forever, replaced by an ultimate evil that our heroes had to defeat.
The tale of Emperor Palpatine going from low-level flunkie of his own Empire to being the Big Bad of sci-fi’s most influential franchise shows just how much Star Wars evolved over time. No matter what he may have said or hinted at in previous interviews, George Lucas never had the clairvoyance to perfectly see the future of his franchise. Instead, he discovered what Yoda would later teach Luke Skywalker: that the future is always in motion, and even the smallest decisions can have major ramifications for this beloved fictional world.
