I've taken some note of the Trade Federation seeming less ruthless than Sidious commands them to be in that they only go so far as to round up the Gungans and Naboo in the time they have to act; when thinking just now about this (and sort of worrying once again about those I can imagine being indignant "the story pulled its punches"), I happened to think captives might seem more useful than corpses in applying pressure to get Queen Amidala to sign the treaty at last.
That also got me wondering again about something I've been considering throughout this series but never quite got around to bringing up in a comment, namely what would have happened had any one of the previous narrow escapes in this movie gone awry and the Queen been "permanently" captured. I suppose I can never think of any definite, in-story evidence that everything start to finish had gone precisely according to Palpatine's plan, but I still forever want to resist the idea he possesses a diabolical foresight that denies all other characters any free will, if in part because a question winds up being "so why did it finally go awry only at the end of Return of the Jedi?" I have seen theories that Qui-Gon's "they will kill you if you stay" warning was a premonition of Sidious's first plan being to assassinate Amidala before she could sign the treaty (even if this can smack to some extent of "Darth Maul is cool, so he has to do something") and then use that outrage to become Chancellor and start the Jedi-consuming galactic war a decade early. That the heroes (unwittingly) got something (unrealized and unusable) out of their struggles and that Palpatine has to be quick on his feet sometimes is just more engaging for me to contemplate.
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Date: 2017-09-02 12:50 am (UTC)That also got me wondering again about something I've been considering throughout this series but never quite got around to bringing up in a comment, namely what would have happened had any one of the previous narrow escapes in this movie gone awry and the Queen been "permanently" captured. I suppose I can never think of any definite, in-story evidence that everything start to finish had gone precisely according to Palpatine's plan, but I still forever want to resist the idea he possesses a diabolical foresight that denies all other characters any free will, if in part because a question winds up being "so why did it finally go awry only at the end of Return of the Jedi?" I have seen theories that Qui-Gon's "they will kill you if you stay" warning was a premonition of Sidious's first plan being to assassinate Amidala before she could sign the treaty (even if this can smack to some extent of "Darth Maul is cool, so he has to do something") and then use that outrage to become Chancellor and start the Jedi-consuming galactic war a decade early. That the heroes (unwittingly) got something (unrealized and unusable) out of their struggles and that Palpatine has to be quick on his feet sometimes is just more engaging for me to contemplate.