Giant wall of texts aside, there are quite a few decent points there. I mean, most of it is pointless bashing, but there are a lot of valid points.
- Failing so bad with the gas is just sloppy. When you launch an ambush and trap the enemy in a chamber of poison gas, you should not be the side struck by the element of surprise. "Not knowing the capabilities of the Jedi" is not a reasonable thing... the Jedi are the prime peacekeeping force in the galaxy. Not knowing their capabilities is idiocy of itself.
- 1: The Queen made it pretty clear that she's not signing the treaty. They sent her away to be among her suffering people to break her resolve!... which was stupid. But it had to be done to advance the plot.
- Since Sideous' actions work out perfectly for him, I'm inclined not to include them.
- Doomed by Canon is no excuse for Idiot Plot. In fact, they often go hand in hand, because Idiot Ball and Idiot Plot are "people do stupid stuff for the sake of moving the plot forward" which tends to be especially common when we know what has to eventually happen.
... okay, this is just too damn much for me to go through point by point in this format. I might trim some things later, if you don't mind.
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"Failing so bad with the gas is just sloppy"
There're hundreds of other examples of badguys being sloppy, yet I don't see this kind of complaining about it being tolerated on this site. These guys also had a perfect excuse for being sloppy, since they literally have no experiences either in assasinations, nor in dealing with Jedi.
"which was stupid. But it had to be done to advance the plot."
Same as above.
"Doomed by Canon is no excuse for Idiot Plot."
I gave a number of other reasons as well.
Okay, Phediuc's additions to Idiot Plot on 20th Jun, are about as blatant examples of Opinion Myopia and Complaining About Shows You Dont Like as it gets. These examples are utterly full of inaccurate and distorted informations, repeadly ignore explanations stated in-universe, and they're worded in an extremely subjective and rather offensive tone.
The Trade Federation: After locking two Jedi in a chamber filled with poison gas, they decide to open the doors and send in the oh-so-defeatable battle droids to try to kill them, rather than waiting an hour or two for the Jedi to choke to death.
1: Gunray admitted that he never had to deal with Jedi before. How was he supposed to know that the poison gas wouldn't kill them in a few minutes? Also we don't even know exactly how many minutes have passed, since the amount of screen-time spent on one event/line of events, is not necessarly equal to the time that have passed in-universe.
2: Since they never had to deal with Jedi before how were they supposed to know that the standard battle droids are inadequate to deal with them?
3: The Jedi had the breathing-devices they used later when they swam to Ottoh Gunga, so no matter how long Gunray had tried to keep them locked inside they would've made it out alive.
Then they land their forces on the other side of the planet from their objective, a largely undefended, pacifist city.
It's an invasion of a whole planet! They landed troops everywhere on the surface! The transports lauched from the capital ship where the Jedi were, landed on the other side of the planet, because obviously there were other targets to capture in that area as well! No one said the troops that captured the capital are the same that landed with the Jedi!
After capturing the queen, they decide to send her out of the secure, occupied palace for "processing" rather than making her sign the damn treaty. And once the queen escapes, they send away their entire fleet save for a single droid control ship to hold down the planet.
1: The Queen made it pretty clear that she's not signing the treaty. They sent her away to be among her suffering people to break her resolve!
2: These guys are merchants! Keeping up a blockade consumes a huge amount of money by itself, not mention it also resorts in a loss of profit since ships that usually carry cargo are stuck in one place doing nothing. Why would they keep up the blockade when they control the spaceports, the cities practically everything considered part of civilisation?
Darth Sidious has his own set of critical mistakes extending beyond merely the stupid things his Trade Federation minions do. Secretly, the whole reason he's orchestrating the crisis on Naboo in the first place is so he can use it to his advantage in his secret identity as Senator Palpatine to get himself elected Supreme Chancellor, meaning that the more public and drawn-out the situation gets, the better things work out for him. Yet he repeatedly acts as if he wants the Trade Federation to win efficiently and decisively; he orders the two Jedi killed (and their arrival covered up) rather than sending them back to relay the details of the blockade and impending invasion, disrupts all of Naboo's communications instead of leaving them free to make a fuss to the rest of the galaxy about their predicament, is determined to see Queen Amidala captured so she can sign a treaty declaring the invasion legal, and so on. He also sends Darth Maul to Naboo even though the two Jedi he knows are returning to the planet are doing so for the express purpose of tracking Maul down and getting as much information as they can out of him about the Sith and their plans, and at the same time doesn't send the Trade Federation any advance notice that the Queen or the Jedi are on their way there.
1: Sidious had to pretend in front of the Trade Federation guys that he's on their side. Otherwise they wouldn't have cooparated with.
2: Same goes for his Senator alterego: it would've been suspicious if everything obviously looked like it was happening to put him in the Chancellor's seat.
3: He was constantly adjusting his plans to a constantly changing situation. He said it himself at the start of the movie that the Jedi getting involved (or at least their involvement arriving so soon) was unexpected. In other words his original plans got screwed over, and we never learn what they were!
Qui-Gon Jinn should be expelled from the Jedi Order. His plan on exfiltrating from a Trade Federation starship involves him and his apprentice splitting up and hitchhiking on separate troop transports, without any idea of where they're headed, much less whether they're going to land within a thousand miles of each other.
1: Okay whatelse should they have done? Take on an entire army, when three droidekas were perfectly capable of forcing them to retreat?
2: If they stayed together the risk of the droids discovering them would've been higher.
3: Even if they did get separated by a large distance, both of them were perfectly capable of defending himself on his own. Also doubles the chances of at least one of them getting close enough to someplace from where they could riot the locals. Which is exactly what happened, since they were able to warn the gungans. It's most likely because of this that they were able to evacuate their cities in the first place.
On Tatooine he tries to Jedi Mind Trick a vendor into giving him the spaceship parts he needs, and when that fails, hatches a convoluted scheme to bet on a slave boy to win a race to win the parts (a gamble he uses the Force to cheat on)
He didn't use the Force to cheat on the bet! He used the Force to decide which slave gets freed if he wins the bet. Also the dice was obviously loaded, so he cheated a cheater. Yes it wasn't stated outrigh, but it was heavily implied, and implication is a story-telling tool! I remember picking up on that when I first saw the movie in the theater as a ten-year-old, so it probably was well-executed as well. Yes, this as well as trying to mind trick Watto were both morally questionable, but not stupid, so what do they even do here?
rather than trying a second vendor, hiring passage on an independent vessel, finding a money changer,
Just because it's not shown to us, doesn't meant he didn't try any or even all of those.
trading his broken luxury ship in for a less ostentatious but functional one
1: Wouldn't it be suspicious if someone wanted to get out of there so badly that they would trade a luxus yacht for some piece of junk. Did you miss the part of them trying to lay low, not wanting the bring the attention of the Hutts on them?
2: Who would trade a functioning ship to one that can barely leave the star-system and costs a fortune to repair???
contacting Coruscant to send someone to pick them up,
Again, they were hiding! They state it repeadly that they can't send any messages because the Federation would find them! And since the Federation ships were much closer, they would've been on their necks long before anyone they could've rioted arrived.
or just stealing the parts he needs since he's already willing to abuse his power.
It took a caravan of space cammals to transport the parts they needed. How do you suggest they should’ve gone about stealing them? And again: they didn't need the heat. If the vendor they stole from/robbed out rioted the Hutts or just a couple of bounty hunters they would've been in trouble before they had time to install the pieces!
The rest of the good guys aren't much better. To escape from Naboo they fly into the teeth of the Trade Federation blockade, which is neatly lined up on one side of the planet, rather than taking advantage of the third dimension.
1: Tropes Are Tools. Even the entry admits that 2-D Space was used, making this complaining for the sake of complaining. 2: Just because we don't see ships at other vector doesn't mean they weren't there. 3: It's possible they were protecting hyperspace corridords, that could only be accessed from those vectors.
Padme places herself and the future of her planet at risk by pointlessly keeping up her charade as a handmaiden rather than letting the Jedi Knights who saved her life in on it so a hypothetical future crisis doesn't wind up with her sacrificed to protect the decoy queen.
This is about the only legit complain in this Wall of Text, however Qui-gon knew it all along, so such an event would not have occured. Doesn’t excuses Padmé tho.
The Chancellor needs to send a committee to verify the testimony of the Jedi he personally sent to investigate a situation.
It’s in the Opening Crawl that he sent the Jedi in secret, behind the back of the Senate and it’s made pretty clear that his intention with doing so was to ”bully” the Trade Federation into dissolving the blockade. The Jedi didn’t give any testimony, because admitting any of this would’ve discredited them and the Chancellor, and ultimetely could’ve back-fired horribly.
When faced with reports of a deadly Sith Lord running around (a conclusion backed up by no evidence beyond the attacker's skill with a red lightsaber), the Jedi Council sends a whopping two Jedi to deal with him even though the Sith was encountered on an entirely different planet and has nothing to do with the Naboo crisis as far as they should be able to ascertain.
1: The example admits that the conclusion of Maul being a Sith isn’t properly backed up, yet it complains that the Council sent only two Jedi after him. Ha??? So it admits that the Coulcil doesn’t really have a sound reason to think that two Jedi wouldn’t be enough to deal with the guy, but regardless complains that they should’ve known that two Jedi wouldn’t be enough to deal with the guy. What???
2: Yeah, by total coincidence a guy who happens to have a red ligthsaber and knows how to use it, bumps into the entorage of a Queen on the run and undercover on a sparsely populated galactic arm pit.... Again WHAT??? This is again blatant complaining for the sake of complaining.
At a crucial moment during the resulting lightsaber duel, Obi-Wan's failure to employ the superspeed Jedi have earlier been shown to possess leads to his master's death,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3dI-ghYimg
at which point Obi-Wan proceeds to cut Darth Maul in two without having learned anything from him despite the fact that the Jedi were only sent back to Naboo in the first place to "discover the identity of the dark warrior."
At that point it was kill or die, and if Obi-Wan died the whole mission would’ve failed. Once more complaining for the sake of complaining.
The good guys commit to a ground war with the Trade Federation when all they needed to do was sneak some pilots into the hangar and shoot down the droid control ship, neutralizing the entire enemy army, and leave the Jedi behind to capture the defenseless Gunray before he has a chance to flee.
Which would’ve been impossible with tens of thousands of droids guarding the city and the castle, not to mention they suspected that Maul would be there as well.
In fairness, it was the Trade Federation who suggested that a committee verify the validity of the invasion rather than the Chancellor, although why Valorum seems to agree with them rather than just saying "no" is anyone's guess. They have the testimony of the Naboo leadership, as well as two Jedi and Jar Jar. In few to no legislative bodies in the world can a single member of Parliament force the executive to publically verify such sensitive intelligence. The fact that all communications with Naboo have suddenly been cut should also have sent alarm bells ringing. There is also the question of how a completely unprovoked (as far as we know) blockade by a private company against a member state of the Republic, with the purpose of subverting the law of the Republic, can be legal at all. It's also established in the second film that the Republic did not have an army at all, meaning that there was nothing they could have really done about the invasion anyway.
Okay A: Justifying Edit and Conversation in the Main Page by the same editor that’s blatantly used to pretend that the whole entry has another purpose besides complaining. B: I already addressed some of these above, but here’s the rest: 1: Sidious is running everything behind the curtains. The Trade Fedaration are not the only ones in his pocket. Palpatine says so himself, when he explains politics to Padmé (of course he leaves out that he’s the one behind everything) 2: Again, it’s in the Opening Crawl that the blockade was (officially) the Federation’s form of demonstration against the planned taxing of important traderoutes. This is a fantasy world, so how companies and their relation to states work in real life has no bearing on how things works there. It might be illogical for us, but that’s how things work there. In fact the movie presents why something like this should never be allowed to happen.
Everything about Anakin's training. In The Phantom Menace, Qui-Gon Jinn is established to be a bit of a Jedi hippie, defying the Jedi code. Qui-Gon discovers a nine-year-old slave boy who has great potential for power. Qui-Gon goes through ridiculous lengths to free the boy (which itself is part of an above-mentioned Idiot Plot) and presents him to the Jedi Council to request to take him on as his apprentice. The Jedi wisely tell him to fuck off, telling him that he's too old and his attachment to his mother and his past as a slave (which would be traumatic for any child) make him dangerous and a possible threat. Even Obi-Wan Kenobi, Qui-Gon's apprentice and best friend, tells him that the kid is dangerous. Some shit happens and Qui-Gon gets killed by a Sith Lord, who is swiftly killed by Obi-Wan. Qui-Gon's dying wish is for Obi-Wan to train Anakin, based on some ancient prophecy that says someone would rise to bring balance to the Force... despite the fact that there are only ever two Sith Lords at a time (no more, no less) and that Obi-Wan just killed one of them, and the fact that all things considered the Force is pretty balanced. Ignoring the fact that there is a good chance Anakin will fall to the dark side, ignoring the fact that there is a Sith lord out there no doubt looking for a new partner (remember, no more nor less than two), and ignoring how the kid is clearly troubled, sweating and scowling during his examinations, the Council decides to let him become a Jedi anyway. Essentially, all these Jedi Masters' instincts keep telling them what a bad idea training Anakin would be, and they repeatedly mention how they don't trust him, how he's dangerous, how sending him off on these missions is risky — but they do it all anyway, so Darth Vader can happen.
1: This part has dropped any pretences of neutrality and objectivity, and went full complaining mode.
2: Qui-Gon was ultimately right.
3: Anakin had to be trained otherwise there wouldn’t be Original Trilogy.
4: It wasn’t only Anakin’s attachment issues and past that turned him to the Dark Side, Obi-Wan’s (self-admitted) inability to teach him how to let go, and Palpatine’s whispering in his ears had at least equal parts in it.
5: How letting Anakin go, insulted by their refusal, to be found and taken in by the lurking Sith really would’ve changed anything?
6: The editor presumes they know what the Balance of the Force means, when it is a matter of debate to this day.
I think the whole thing should be severly rewritten to at least give it a neutral tone and the factually incorrect and unsupported stuff should be cut. I know YMMV is about subjective reactions, but that's not excuse to let blatant complaining for the sake of complaining like this slide. I'd do it myself, but as presented above, I disagree with practically everything in it, so I doupt I would be able to remain neutral myself.
Edited by Werebazs Hide / Show Replies