You Have Failed Me / Star Wars

"Apology accepted, Captain Needa."

— Darth Vader being very much NOT accepting of Needa's apology, The Empire Strikes Back

Instances of You Have Failed Me in Star Wars.

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Canon:

• The trope name originates from The Empire Strikes Back, and possibly the most famous instance: Darth Vader's Pre-Mortem One-Liner "You have failed me for the last time" before choking Admiral Ozzel to death for botching the fleet's approach to Hoth. If you listen, it's possible he says it through clenched teeth behind his mask. Ozzel had brought the Imperial fleet out of hyperspace too close to Hoth, which gave the Rebels enough advance warning to activate their shield generator and begin evacuating before the fleet was in position to attack. Ozzel's death deserves special mention, as Vader wasn't even in the same room and killed him over the viewscreen, promoting Ozzel's subordinate Captain Piett to Admiral before Ozzel's body hits the floor.
  • While the scene in the film makes no bones about Vader's displeasure, the radio drama accompanied it with an epic "The Reason You Suck" Speech.
    Vader: Ozzel, the power closing about your throat is the Force. It is my anger reaching out to end your life. It would be pointless to merely punish someone so useless.
• He does it again to the hapless Captain Needa before the film's even halfway done, despite the man having the foresight and backbone to personally apologize to Vader for losing track of the Millennium Falcon (hence Vader's line "Apology accepted, Captain Needa"). Needa's expression when he tells his men that he's going to apologize personally to Vader tells the whole story; he knows that Vader will kill him— but if he takes the blame, none of his underlings will.
• Ultimately subverted by the end of the film when the Falcon escapes to lightspeed. Piett visibly braces himself as Vader strides toward him, only to brush right past, either because he knew it wasn't Piett's fault or because he was too depressed about losing his son to kill any more underlings that day, possibly both. Piett instead winds up dying in the final battle over the second Death Star in the following film.
• Despite his reputation, Vader's preference for using this trope is something of a Flanderization. While he's certainly not someone you would want to work under, as evidenced by how he ordered his fleet into an Asteroid Thicket that resulted in at least one Star Destroyer losing its bridge tower to a flying rock, he only kills Ozzel and Needa for screwing up, and spares Piett even when everyone in-universe and out expected him to go three for three. As far as Expanded Universe materials are concerned, it really depends on who's writing him:
  • In some works, he's a madman who will kill anyone at the drop of a hat; even if you did nothing wrong, being the guy standing nearest to him when something goes wrong or even when he's just in a worse mood than usual could mean an early grave. Very competent, very irreplaceable high-ranking Imperials lost forever for things that they could have done nothing about? Very much a thing. People trying to avoid promotion because you stay beneath his notice if you value your life? Ditto. Only dumb luck decided whether or not you will be one of the few who actually survives working for him, and as far as the Rebels are concerned, Vader becoming the leading cause of death for high-ranking Imperials is the best thing ever. This is one explanation for why the TIE fighters didn't hesitate to chase the Falcon into that Asteroid Thicket; the pilots knew damn well that simply breaking off pursuit would be an instant death sentence from Vader. Tatooine Ghost at one point noted that Vader's reputation was so bad that the only people in the galaxy more scared of him than the Rebels were the Imperial officers serving directly under him.
  • In others, he's evil, not stupid— while he's brutal to those whom he's decided are useless, "the last time" was never the first time; you had to screw up habitually, badly, or in Ozzel's case, both. According to Star Wars Legends, Ozzel was a Neidermeyer who loved to blame subordinates for his own mistakes and kept his job mainly through family connections, meaning that Vader was looking for any excuse to get rid of him. Indeed, in Allegiance, Mara Jade asks Vader to keep an eye on then-Captain Ozzel, with the implication that his promotion to Vader's flagship is Vader's way of doing exactly that. Vader was certainly harsh, but he wasn't completely unreasonable; if your failure was the result of something that you had control over (e.g. you didn't utilize resources properly, you gave up too quickly, you had poor judgement, you were Admiral Ozzel), then you said goodbye to your trachea. However, if the failure was a result of something that you had no control over (you lost a battle because of unexpected enemy reinforcements), he'd let you live, but you damn well better learn from that mistake, or suffer the consequences. This would seem to be the intended characterization from the films, as seen when Vader didn't kill Piett when the Falcon escaped. In this case his trap failed because R2 arrived with Luke and repaired the sabotage to the Falcon— something that Piett couldn't have expected, and was in fact partially Vader's fault because he'd drawn Luke there in the first place, and just locked R2 out and let the droid go instead of destroying him. He was also in telepathic contact with Luke so knew that it WAS working but R2 fixed it just in time.
  • It's noted in one of the novels that the fastest way to promotion in the Imperial Navy was to get yourself assigned to Vader's flagship, the Executor. The flip side of that coin is, as Captain Pellaeon says, this meant that the Executor was entirely staffed by people who were either hypercompetent or very lucky (Vader was known for strangling people who delivered messages to his quarters while he was in a bad mood, so the crew drew lots whenever someone had to do that, with the honor going to the loser), since they were the only ones who survived, which meant that when it was destroyed at Endor, the Empire lost the best of the officer corps along with it.
  • Played for Laughs (somewhat) in the new EU novel Lords of the Sith, where Palpatine's advisor Mas Amedda expresses utter frustration with Vader's habit of applying this trope to every underling within reach.
  • Subverted in the new EU novel Star Wars: Tarkin, when Vader tells a stormtrooper that he has failed for the last time, but doesn't kill him. Immediately afterward, Sergeant Crest captures the warehouse of a crime lord and Vader promotes him. It's implied that for the rest of his life, Lieutenant Crest never fails Vader again, so it really was "for the last time."
  • Subverted again in Rogue One when Vader summons Director Krennic to his residence and the director clearly expects to be killed, but Vader instead just threatens him and tells him to go clean up his mess. Then Krennic gets mouthy and Vader Force-chokes him to shut him up, but leaves him alive.
  • Lampshaded in The Force Unleashed where there is an achievement for killing a certain number of your own men while playing as Vader in the prologue. Bonus points for it being an Actor Allusion as well (Matt Sloane, the voice of Vader in that game, also voiced Chad Vader, with the achievement being a direct reference to that series).
  • Justified for once in Rebel Assault II: The Hidden Empire. Vader Force Chokes an officer, telling him "You have failed me for the last time— you will not have the opportunity to do so again." Note that this officer A) lets a Rebel sabotage team onto Vader's command ship, B) is unable to capture them when the alarm is raised, C) still fails to capture them after Vader orders the internal security doubled and the ship locked down, and D) lets the Rebels jack a TIE Phantom prototype that blasts its way out of the ship, sending the main reactor into meltdown as they leave. And even THEN, Vader only snaps his neck when he orders the ship disengaged from the space station that it is docked with, and the Captain can only blubber that they can't. At that point, Vader looks almost saintly for the sheer amount of patience that he has for the incompetent idiot.
  • Hilariously, Darth Vader: Dark Lord of the Sith has a scene where Palpatine of all people feels the need to tell Vader to chill out and stop killing people over every little slight. “I do not wish to rule over a galaxy of the dead.” It’s a reasonable complaint, but also delightfully hypocritical given what's mentioned below.
  • In Obi-Wan Kenobi, Darth Vader spends much of his screentime trying to rein in the Third Sister by not-so-politely reminding her that if she keeps up with the renegade behavior and fails once too many times, he will kill her. And he nearly does after one particularly colossal screw-up (letting Obi-Wan and a Rebel spy infiltrate the Nur Fortress itself and rescue a prisoner), practically charging into the Fortress meeting room to throttle her in an entirely uncharacteristic display of emotion and only relenting when she reveals she managed to plant a tracker on the escaping heroes. That being said, it's notable that Vader also explicitly and genuinely states that he'll reward success at the same time he's threatening punishment for failure; his standards are utterly insane by most definitions, but he does try to incentivize his underlings to work harder and succeed with more then just death threats.
  • In Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, Darth Vader executes the Second Sister for failing to guard the holocron from the hands of Cal and Cere, and sensing her turn to the Light Side.
  • In Star Wars Armada, Vader's officer card can sacrifice other Officer cards to let their ships reroll some dice, presumably punishing them for their ship rolling badly and inspiring the rest of the crew to try harder and avoid being next on the pile. A significant number of Imperial officer cards are designed with limited use windows, so you can make use of their effects for as long as they work, then have Vader kill them once their utility runs out. Notably, Admiral Ozzel and Captain Needa both have abilities that apply before the game even starts, meaning that once turn 1 kicks off, the only thing keeping either of them alive in a Vader-centric list is whether the player is expecting to get more out of the reroll next turn than they would this turn.
  • Star Wars Jedi: Survivor: Vader kills Commander Denvik, a particularly ambitious ISB officer who was keeping a Fallen Jedi under his thumb to use as a personal spy and assassin rather than dealing with them. He actively tries to goad Cal into killing him once Bode sells him out to Vader in return because he's well aware that Vader is on the way and he'd rather die by a Jedi blade than be at the mercy of a righteously furious Vader or Palpatine. Sure enough, if you return to his office in the post-game, you find his abandoned hat on his desk and a force echo of Vader silently (besides his Vader Breath) force-choking him to death.
• While Vader had a reputation for this, Emperor Palpatine was far, far worse. It isn't explicitly shown in Return of the Jedi, but Vader heavily implies ("The Emperor is not as forgiving as I am.") that if the officer and the crew working on the second Death Star don't make sure that the station is fully operational by the time of the Emperor's arrival, the crew will end up suffering a punishment so horrific that Vader's use of the trope will seem like a sympathy-induced pat on the back in comparison. Star Wars Legends went into more detail, and reveals that he wasn't fucking kidding:
  • Bevel Lemelisk, lead designer of the Death Star, was executed by Sidious having him Eaten Alive by piranha beetles as punishment for overlooking such a massive design flaw... and then brought back to life with a clone body and Sith Alchemy because, despite this mistake, Lemelisk was too much of an asset to throw away. Sidious proceeded to make a point of executing and resurrecting Lemelisk every time something went wrong with the Death Star II's construction, with a new and unique method of execution every time. The punishments that we learn about are the aforementioned piranha beetles, getting Thrown Out the Airlock, lowered inch by inch into a vat of molten copper ("It was what the smelter used that day."), and being chained in a drive tube while the engine was slowly powered up. This happened six times, meaning that there were two more punishments that we never learned the details about. When the New Republic finally got ahold of Lemelisk and sentenced him to death, his request to the firing squad was that they "do it right this time." At least Vader is business-like about killing you; Sidious will make sure that you suffer.
  • It gets even worse when you read various stories from the old Expanded Universe which showed that Vader would kill you for failing him, but the Emperor would not only kill you in any number of agonizing ways — as Lemelisk could attest — he would also kill your entire family. One story from Tales of the Bounty Hunters took it even further by implying that even if Vader would off underlings for many reasons, he always had a definite reason for killing them, but the Emperor... he would straight-up kill for pleasure, something that Vader never did.
  • The new Star Wars Expanded Universe has this in the form of Operation Cinder, a "contingency plan" ordered by Palpatine in the event of his death. Far from being some form of retribution against the Rebellion, instead it's one final act of spite against the entire galaxy and the Empire, using special climate satellites to devastate hundreds of worlds, ranging from Rebel-held systems to loyal Imperial planets, all for the simple "crime" of being unable to protect him and, in Palpatine's twisted, self-absorbed mind, proving itself unworthy of existence. The only extenuating circumstance that would prevent Operation Cinder was if Vader usurping his throne was the cause of his death, as it meant Vader had obtained the power to kill him and followed through fully on Sith philosophy and the Rule of Two, something he could die content with.
• Return of the Jedi reveals that Jabba the Hutt got angry with one of his protocol droids. The camera then shows what's left of said droid.
• Star Wars: The Clone Wars:
  • This is what Count Dooku tells Ventress when he "fires" her from the services of the Separatists. The truth is that Sidious suspected that Ventress was being trained to help depose him, and ordered Dooku to get rid of her as a show of loyalty.
  • Grievous has a habit of executing his droids whenever they fail him, or just when they happen to be standing nearby while he's angry. In one episode, he does this so much that eventually he's the only one left on his ship's bridge.
  • Pre Vizla's Establishing Character Moment has him casually blow a mook's brains out for losing a fight to Obi-Wan.
• In Star Wars: The Bad Batch, a mook for the nascent Empire, ES-01, refuses to murder helpless civilians, causing his CO Crosshair to summarily execute him. The other Elite Squad Troopers get the message.
• Star Wars Rebels:
  • Aresko and Grint repeatedly fail to deal with rebel operations on Lothal. In response, Governor Tarkin has the Grand Inquisitor execute them in front of Agent Kallus and Minister Tua, making it clear that they're next if they screw up as well.
  • Later in the series, the Grand Inquisitor himself chooses to let himself die after failing to defeat Kanan rather than live and report his failure to Vader.
  • In Season 4's "In the Name of the Rebellion", this is brought up by Commander DT-F16 as neither she nor the freighter's captain want to tell Krennic the Rebels have absconded with the kyber crystal.
    Commander DT-F16: We've retaken Hold 6, Captain. The cargo is gone.
    Imperial Captain: Gone? Commander, if anything happens to that crystal-
    DT-F16: It's both our heads!
  • Towards the end of the series, this is strongly implied by Thrawn towards Governor Pryce after she ends up destroying most of the planet's fuel supply in an attempt to kill the escaping rebels, which had the effect of indefinitely stalling production of the game-changing TIE Defender. This is a blunder so colossal that unlike the sole example of him doing this in The Thrawn Trilogy, he is visibly seething with so much rage that he can't even use full sentences.
    Thrawn: I. Will deal with you. When I return. Governor.
  • Pryce herself acknowledges this soon after, while threatening one of her own subordinates with the same.
    Pryce: Thrawn will return soon, and if I do not have the Rebels, I will be executed. But before that happens to me, do you know what I will do to you for failing?
• The Mandalorian:
  • Moff Gideon makes his big entrance by ordering his Death Troopers to shoot through the Client and his men as punishment for being fooled by a particularly obvious trick by Mando and his allies. Shortly afterwards, we learn that Gideon may just rival Darth Vader in terms of this trope, as he casually executes an officer for interrupting his speech.
  • In the second season, when a cargo transport radios for backup as the heroes have captured all but the bridge, Gideon's response is to calmly state that there is no reason to send reinforcements at this point, and that he instead suggests the surviving crew kill themselves and the enemy by purposely crashing the transport as penance for failing. The unspoken implication being that if they don't do so, then Gideon will make them wish they were dead. The ship's captain certainly believes Gideon can make good on that threat, as he immediately shoots his helmsmen and tries to dive the ship into the ocean, and when he is stopped from doing so, he kills himself with a Suicide Pill rather than live to report his total failure to Gideon.
  • Operation Cinder is mentioned by name; it was Mayfeld's last mission with the Empire. Most of the men he served with (somewhere in the neighborhood of ten thousand) died, in addition to countless civilians. It's not explicitly mentioned that it was just Palpatine's last act of spite, and the officer who was in charge of that portion of the operation claims it was all for the greater good. Mayfeld soon snaps and shoots him, and tells Mando that he had to do it in order to be able to sleep at night.
• The Force Awakens: Despite worshiping the Empire's legacy to an almost cult-like degree, the First Order actually averts this trope. This could simply be Pragmatic Villainy, as the First Order's numbers are much smaller than the Empire's and they need everyone they can get.
  • First, a terrified officer, Lieutenant Mitaka, reports to Kylo Ren on how BB-8 and Finn have escaped aboard the Millennium Falcon, the man fully expecting to be killed. When Ren ignites his lightsaber, he instead slashes a computer wall to pieces. When he's finished, he quite calmly asks "anything else?" as if nothing had happened. He does Force-choke the lieutenant when he starts to explain that BB-8 and Finn had the help of a girl (Rey), but Mitaka is seen later, shaken but still alive.
  • Later, when Ren finds out that Rey has escaped, he howls with rage and slashes a chair apart with his saber. Two stormtroopers walking down the hallway hear Ren's outraged roars and see pieces of the chair flying out of the room; they promptly decide to quietly walk back the way they came.
  • Finally, when Starkiller Base is about to collapse, Supreme Leader Snoke orders Hux to return to him, and gives no indication he's going to be punished for the loss of this weapon. Indeed, Hux is still in command of the First Order's military come The Last Jedi, even if he's on a shorter leash as Snoke has arrived to personally oversee the destruction of the Resistance.
  • However, while Snoke will not go out of his way to kill you, he will still humiliate in front of your subordinates and Force slam you, as Hux found out after the Resistance destroyed Fulminatrix and escaped.
• Star Wars Resistance:
  • In "No Place Safe", after the Colossus escapes yet again, Agent Tierny berates Commander Pyre for it, saying that General Hux will not be pleased. Pyre simply states, "It's not General Hux I'm concerned about," before walking away.
  • In the finale episode, this proves to be true, as Kylo Ren runs out of patience for Tierny and Pyre's repeated failures to re-capture the Colossus. He holocalls them and uses the Force to make them almost shoot each other to prove his point... before he lets them go. At the end of the episode, after Team Fireball gets away, Kylo makes good on his threat and Force-chokes Tierny to death over the holocall for messing up one too many times.

Legends

• The Ur-Example of Vader doing this actually pre-dates The Empire Strikes Back: in Splinter of the Mind's Eye, published in 1978, Vader kills Captain-Supervisor Grammel after Grammel fails him twice: allowing Luke and Leia to escape, and then Grammel's troops bungled an attempt to recapture the fugitives. However, Vader kills Grammel with his lightsaber, not a Force choke.
• In direct contrast to Vader was Grand Admiral Thrawn, Pellaeon's superior, who deconstructs the whole idea of this trope. Throughout the Thrawn Trilogy we are shown just how widespread the practice of killing people for failure was, not just for for Vader but the Empire in general, with Pellaeon still expecting it to happen even long after Vader was dead. The poor captain was so thoroughly conditioned by this treatment that he kept expecting Thrawn to go ballistic and kill him or anyone every time something went wrong, but with the sole exception of the tractor beam operator mentioned below he never did, which results in Pellaeon intellectually realizing Thrawn won't do it but still instinctively bracing himself for an eruption every time something goes wrong. The result of Thrawn's refusal to kill underlings wantonly for failures beyond their control and rewarding them if they showed initiative and cleverness meant that his crew followed Thrawn out of genuine respect and loyalty rather than fear. Thrawn's entry on Wookieepedia says he was appalled at the "Vader style" of command, and a large part of this is that Thrawn, unlike many Imperial officers and leaders, knew how to admit defeat. In the Thrawn Trilogy, after the New Republic bested him in battle, Thrawn outright said (not in so many words), "Okay, we've been beaten this time. Let's shake it off and have another go."
  • The best examples of Thrawn's management style can be seen after Luke Skywalker manages to escape being caught in the Chimeara's tractor beam on two separate occasions. In the aftermath of Luke's first escape he had the crewman manning the tractor beam station executed, but only after he quizzed said crewman about his performance and the man's answers confirmed Thrawn's initial hunch that the man was impossible to salvage due to his incompetent and insubordinate nature. When Luke escaped again, Thrawn grilled the replacement officer in the same way, but this officer's description of how the trick was pulled off and how he almost managed to counter it even though there wasn't anything in the manual about how to defeat the trick. Even though he couldn't hold Luke in place, his thinking fast on his feet and showing creativity in dealing with the situation resulted in Thrawn deciding the officer acted to the best of his abilities, promoting him from ensign to lieutenant, and telling him to keep looking for a way to counter the maneuver. And in a later story, when Lando tries a similar maneuver it is quickly countered, suggesting that Lieutenant eventually succeeded.
    • Basically, the first crewman failed to counter Luke's maneuver and then tried to blame the training his superiors gave him. The second one saw the heroes' maneuver, made a conscious decision to deviate from standard protocols in an attempt to counter it, and took responsibility for his actions despite knowing that Thrawn had the previous operator executed.
• As Star Wars: Legacy shows, the Sith are pretty big fans of this in general, at least in the Legends continuity. It’s made clear they tend see anyone who’s not a fellow Sith or related to them as expendable and interchangeable, so their attitude is pretty much “if I kill this dude who’s failing, a new dude will replace him and maybe won’t screw up”. The result, of course, is that most of the stormtroopers and imperial officers hate them, with most only serving out of fear or loyalty to the Fel Empire, which the Sith forcibly took control of. Special mention has to go to Darth Azard, who seems to brutally kill subordinates for failure in every single scene he’s in. At one point we see him chop one poor guy in half just for getting mind-tricked.
• Averted (amazingly enough) by Darth Malak in Knights of the Old Republic, after a bounty hunter hired by Saul Karath fails to kill the heroes. "The penalty for failure is death, Admiral Karath... but the failure was Calo's, not yours. You may rise."
  • By contrast, Malak's apprentice Darth Bandon blasts away a random underling just for crossing his path.
  • While taking the "test" of the insane ex-master of the Sith Academy, one of the hypothetical situations involves a loyal and capable subordinate embarrassing you in front of your superiors. The proper answer to the question is to execute the underling rather than take the chance of him screwing up again.
  • Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords also has a "You have failed me" moment directed at the player, when Kreia loses her patience with a dark-side Exile's psychopathic comments after the Exile has killed all the Jedi Masters and the party returns to Dantooine. Unusually, Kreia's not concerned with what the Exile has done, but with why they do it. When she realizes that the Exile favours brute force and vengeance over manipulation or advancing an ideology, she embarks on an idiosyncratic philosophical rant, starting with the very words "You have failed me. Completely and utterly." Marking the beginning of the endgame, she does then proceed to almost kill the Exile, but then the Exile mysteriously wakes up again.
• The Sith Empire in Star Wars: The Old Republic has numerous people fail for the last time as well.
  • Notably, in the first Imperial flashpoint, the player character can execute a starship captain for refusing orders to attack a superior Republic ship and then assume command of his vessel. Since you're operating under Grand Moff Kilran's authority, you can even do this as a Bounty Hunter. However, doing this will cause the crew to eventually panic and kill each other by the end of the mission.
  • It's totally possible to play as one of these, especially when playing as a Sith character. Nothing's stopping you from wantonly choking/electrocuting anyone that so much as sasses at you.
  • Played for Laughs in the Sith Warrior storyline, where Darth Baras Force chokes Commander Lanklyn in a send-up of the trope-naming scene, promoting Ensign Slynt to fill the position. The joke being, he's doing it because Lanklyn couldn't stop Baras's enemy Jedi Knight Xerender from breaking into their comm system just to annoy him, and the Warrior themself can join in on the fun.
• Star Wars (Marvel 1977)
  • Subverted in one issue where an Admiral Giel meets with Vader to dissect the result important mission, in which a Rebel infiltration squad led by Luke Skywalker destroys the Empire's latest superweapon. Giel, noting that no amount of preparation could have anticipated the Rebels' successful infiltration gambit, refuses to be blamed for the catastrophe, but nevertheless accepts the responsibility for the loss and stands prepared to receive his punishment. Unlike with Needa, Vader is impressed with this display of frankness and integrity and lets Giel live — though he still demotes him down to Lieutenant as punishment.
  • Deconstructed in the "Tarkin" story arc. After Vader kills several Imperials while overseeing the titular superweapon, the surviving officers fear that they could be next and conspire to kill Vader. (They don't succeed.)
• Legacy of the Force: After Jacen Solo falls to the dark side and becomes Darth Caedus, he follows in his grandfather's dark footsteps by killing Lieutenant Patra Tebut in a fit of anger after she unwittingly allowed a Jedi team to board his star destroyer and retrieve his and Tenal Ka's daughter Allana. Admiral Niathal informed Luke Skywalker of the murder but was unwilling to oppose Caedus openly at that point. Skywalker was not particularly surprised that the murder happened. Caedus actually regretted killing Tebut because it did nothing but deprive him of a good officer and hurt his standing among the rank and file, and led other good officers to defect to Niathal's faction. The regret doesn't stop him from snapping other peoples necks, and Caedus's sister Jaina later finds out that medical officers and droids always know when Caedus had killed someone as their necks are invariably broken.
• The Illustrated Star Wars Universe: Jabba isn't the only Hutt to indulge in lethal punishments for failing subordinates, as is revealed in the Hoth chapter. Here, in a supplementary file on the surrounding asteroid field compiled by the Orko SkyMine Asteroid Processing Corporation, the official responsible for the report confesses to a horribly expensive Epic Fail in which the automated droids that should have been harvesting valuable minerals from the asteroids ended up harvesting each other. The report ends with the official throwing themself at the mercy of the chairman, Durga the Hutt... and then the editor notes that said official has not only vanished, but all traces of their identity have been erased from company records.

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