By: Alex Yang

You can’t have a good story without a great villain, and one of the best comes from the Star Wars franchise in the form of Emperor Palpatine. He was an unsuspecting politician hiding in plain sight. He started a proxy war to settle a grudge, twisted the hero of the story into his personal pawn, and tried to enslave the entire galaxy. Many people watching and rewatching the Star Wars movies skip over the politics of Star Wars and focus on the more “cool” parts of the movies.

By the ‘Phantom Menace,’ Palpatine has the Jedi and the republic right where he wants them. The Jedi think the return of the Dark Side and the Sith is preposterous since the Sith have been “extinct for a millennium,” but the Jedi have lost their way. They have become an arrogant religion making decisions without input from the people, causing Anakin to fall into the less experienced hands of Obi-Wan Kenobi, instead of the wiser and calmer Qui Gon Jin.

This decision is where Palpatine steps in; he becomes the needed father figure to Anakin Skywalker that neither the Jedi Council nor Obi-Wan can be. He becomes the only person who believes in and trusts Anakin, allowing him to twist Anakin into falling to the Dark Side.

The Clone Wars was the next step in Palpatine’s grand plan, and while we only see clips of it in the movies, there’s a reason for that: to Palpatine, the only things that matter are how the war starts and how it ends. By forcing the Republic to fight a proxy war where both sides were working for Palpatine, he made a hypocrite out of the Jedi and destabilized the Republic. This is the birth of the Empire.

Although Palpatine was great in the scope of his plan, there is more to a great villain than his plan. Palpatine, like Sauron or Morgoth, is one of the few villains in literature or film who doesn’t have any redeeming qualities. German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche stated that the ability to love is not what sets good and evil apart – it’s what they have in common, but if you look at Palpatine, he only loves himself and power. There is no tie to another person, which is what you need for redemption. Even entire civilizations are just mere tools for Palpatine.

In short, the story of the prequels is the story of an arrogant religion, that gets ahold of the Messiah, and then accidentally hands him over to evil. The beautiful combination of his plan and his qualities is what makes him the best villain of all time.