General Star Wars Animated Series

Actually in A New Hope Tarkin seemed to be the only person on the Death Star who could keep Vader in line. Remember when Vader was force choking that guy and Tarkin told him to stop? How many people do you think could have done that?

There's a lot of Early-Installment Weirdness in A New Hope.

In Clone Wars Tarkin and Anakin met and hit it off. Maybe Tarkin could tell Vader to stop choking random people because he was one of the few people Vader wouldn't kill for no good reason.

Specifically, a lot of what would become Vader's character in the Original Trilogy simply didn't exist. Before Empire was written, the story was working under the assumption that the Emperor had long since become little more than a figurehead, and the Empire was being run on a series of internal power struggles between high-ranking Imperials. It's an exaggerated, but not wholly inaccurate take on Nazi Germany, with Vader as the head of the SS, and Tarkin as the head of the military. Tarkin can bring Vader to heel, because as far as the original movie is concerned, Vader is not an official part of the chain of command.

The Emperor actually being personally in charge, and Vader having an official place in the Imperial hierarchy as his second in command were both introduced in Episode V.

I don't know about figurehead, because just before Vader chokes that guy Tarkin walks into the room and says that the Emperor has dissolved the Senate. One guy asks "How will the Emperor maintain control?" and Tarkin says that the regional Governors now have direct control over their territories.

Also, fun fact, that guy in the white outfit with the mustache is the same guy who captained Anakin's Star Destroyer, the Resolute.

edited 20th Jul '16 2:15:03 PM by WillKeaton

Simple: The local governors convinced the Emperor to dissolve the Senate. Again comparing to Nazi Germany, Hitler was nominally in complete control of absolutely everything until the very end, but there was lots of jockeying for position and convincing him of one thing or another.

That really only proves my point.

That scene is written with the understanding that when the Emperor "does something" it's because he's the puppet of men like Tarkin. Tarkin is one of the regional governors. What he does there is the stuffy bureaucratic equivalent of saying "Step in line, because you answer to me now."

EDIT: I just realized that straight-up, Tarkin is Reinhard Heydrich.

edited 20th Jul '16 2:20:01 PM by BadWolf21

There is a way to reconcile all this with a simple explanation: Palpatine maintains the façade of a weak figurehead in order to have the Joint Chiefs and the Governors thinking they are in control, which would allow him to weed out those of them that felt too comfortble. In that scheme, he has Vader play along. At the same time, by seemingly trusting Vader with that scheme, he lets Vader have the illusion that he's in control of everything, lulling him into a false sense of security and making him forget that he could face an Order 66 2.0 at the hands of his men should he try to usurp the throne. The Empire's secularism and the widespread dismissal of Force users as nothing more than tricksters only plays into Palpy's scheme of all the Muggles underestimating him.

No, it was Palpy himself that had the idea of dissolving the Senate because he had completed the process of shifting power from it to the regional governors, and possibly because he saw it as too infiltrated by rebels. As I said above, it's entirely possible he let the Governors think that it's their idea.

edited 20th Jul '16 3:22:06 PM by NhazUl

You're trying to explain away something that no longer exists in the first place. The scene can be taken at face value (as it was when it was posted). The point we're making is that when it was made it was supposed to also be taken at face value, but eventually be revealed to mean something very different, and this resulted in some oddities in the way Darth Vader is portrayed in Episode IV versus literally anything else he's in.

Also, you have an odd definition of "simple," because I didn't follow that at all, or understand why it was necessary.

edited 20th Jul '16 4:12:17 PM by BadWolf21

Has Palpatine and Vader being perceived as weak been officially retconned out of canon? If so, then yes, what I said is indeed redundant, but I know of no such thing.

I get the impression that Disney wants to avoid retcons and rather strives to reconcile as many plot elements as possible, even when they seem to clash at first glance - look at the Order 66 arc, the inhibitor biochips and Rex and co. having found a way to remove them. So if they decided to keep the situation where the Governors (think they can) order Vader around, I'd imagine Disney explaining that away with Palpatine playing divide and conquer and promoting everyone's Chronic Backstabbing Disorder by appearing too weak before the military and too trusting before Vader.

No, it's just quietly ignored because it clashes with everything else we see of them. Same as it always was.

And Palpatine doesn't seem weak in front of the military. He used his power to abolish the senate and give power to the governors. You don't have to explain away why that's not them manipulating him, because that's never implied. It was intended.

As far as I know, the idea that Tarkin and Vader simply had comparable levels of authority in the Empire was never retconned away - the sequels don't dispute or contradict it in any way, rather they show a different situation after a Time Skip. The hierarchy of the Empire was reevaluated in the sequels, but the entirety of A New Hope is still completely and equally canon with everything else - Early-Installment Weirdness or not. It falls on us to reconcile the two, not to claim parts of the movie shouldn't be taken as shown simply because later movies were different.

At least, not until someone whose word matters comes out and says "no, it's not the way it looks, it was actually different," or writes it in a current piece of canon, which nobody has actually done.

Or in short, it's odd in comparison to Empire Strikes Back, but it's also just as canon, so we have no reason to claim its anything else.

If anything, given that the Vader comic establishes Palpatine as giving different officials absolute authority over certain aspects of the empire, and then putting Vader under the authority of a different official after the Death Star goes up (Tagge), that there was a time where Vader wasn't the undisputed Number Two in the entire empire isn't very disputable.

edited 20th Jul '16 6:22:00 PM by KnownUnknown

What are the odds of Thrawn surviving to the end of Rebels? Do you think he'll ever get the chance to become the de facto leader of a post-Palpatine Empire like he originally was in the EU?

Survive the season: absolutely. He's on par with Tarkin and Vader in how he's being treated by the show.

Lead the Empire: highly unlikely. That situation is already being dealt with in the Aftermath novels.

I'd be amused if Thrawn ends up like an evil version of the main character from Star Control: disappears on a mission into deep space, comes back years later grizzled and badass and finds out that everyone's fucked up the galaxy while he was gone.

Oh my goodness. I feel slow. I just realized that Ezra's last name is "Bridger" because he's the main character of a series meant to "bridge" the PT with the OT.

I really hoped Ahsoka survived the events on Malachor. She's my favorite character from TCW. I would also like to see those Ahsoka-print clone troopers that Dave Filoni mentioned at the Star Wars Celebration in Europe.

It's confirmed that she survived but she's not going to be in Rebels anymore.

To be precise, that Rebels isn't going to be where her stories are told any more. Even if she does appear, she's unlikely to have a significant plot driving role.

edited 23rd Jul '16 10:04:42 AM by KnownUnknown

To the comics with her then.

I'm wondering what her role is going to be then. It's unlikely she'll show up in the movies. I guess they could do comics.

At least she survived.

September 24th, Start will Season 3.

Good things coming in September.

It's a bit of a shame that Greg Weisman isn't on the show anymore and helping with Thrawn, because writing cunning villains with Machiavellian plots is right up his alley.