The best scene in Star Wars
Darth Vader's redemption and the Emperor's death remain the high point of the franchise.
Star Wars might be a 45 year old multimedia behemoth but in my two decades obsessing over it, I’ve never had trouble picking a favorite scene. I decided fairly early on, watching my VHS copy of Return of the Jedi for the first time: Darth Vader’s redemption and the death of the Emperor.
Is my continued love for this scene another nerd hopelessly trying to recapture childhood wonder, like too many others? Perhaps, but I’d argue otherwise. The scene captures the heart of Star Wars, those core themes that made it so enduring: family, redemption, and sacrifice.
I can hardly imagine a better execution of those themes and it’s never been matched by the franchise before or since.
During Return of the Jedi’s climax, as the Rebels find themselves in an elaborate trap at the Second Death Star, a very different conflict unfolds aboard the battle station in the Emperor’s dimly lit throne room.
After tapping into the Dark Side to finally defeat Darth Vader (James Earl Jones), Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) rejects the Emperor’s (Ian McDiarmid) goading to kill his father. Casting his weapon aside, he declares “I am a Jedi, like my father before me.”
It’s here that Luke truly steps into the role after all his trials and uncertainty. Finally confronting his own weakness, he realizes that no weapon can help him defeat the Emperor, only damn him.
The Emperor bitterly responds to this idealistic stand with arcs of blue lightning leaping. Goodness and justice’s last hope can do little more than writhe in pain at the edge of an apparently bottomless pit.
Luke pleads for aid from Vader, who has clumsily risen to join the master who discarded him only moments before. For the first time, we see some humanity playing across Vader’s iconic visage, a monstrous fusion of a German stahlhelm and samurai armor.
Return of the Jedi director Richard Marquand once opined that:
Working on film, which is frequently a media of close-ups, there is nothing blanker than a close-up of Darth Vader. Why do you put a person in it? But you realise you have someone under, and that is why emotion does get through, if the movement is right. If you really work at it, it does work.
This scene fully realizes this, with tight framing and nuanced movements from stunt actor Bob Anderson hinting at Vader’s true thoughts. As lightning dances across his reflective shell, Vader looks back and forth at the Emperor and his victim. He recognizes the choice before him.
At age 4, I didn’t quite appreciate that, though even then I could sense something had changed in how Vader carried himself. I was at the impressionable age where I hadn’t caught on that the good guys always win in these sorts of stories.
So to have Darth Vader — at that point the stuff of my nightmares just as much an object of awe — join the fray only affirmed that there was nothing left to do but watch the Dark Side’s final triumph.
It was to my surprise that Darth Vader responds to the Emperor’s final threat to Luke by lifting his former master aloft.
John Williams’ macabre “The Emperor” theme swells into the triumphant “Light of the Force.” His score is beyond reproach but I never see enough credit for how it conveys Vader casting aside his status as Dark Lord.
Enduring the living electrical storm consuming teacher and master alike, Vader flings the Emperor into an elevator shaft and to his death, which is signaled by a howling storm of ghostly blue energy.
Collapsing after this exertion, Vader’s iconic ominous, breathe has become strained and even more mechanical, signaling the price of his choice. Luke comes to comfort his father, the final birds eye view mirroring Michaelangelo’s Pietà.
Luke’s constant insistence that good remained in his father is finally rewarded.
Beyond the visuals and surprising turn of events, it’s a genuinely novel way to end a space opera epic. There’s a beautiful simplicity to it, something lacking in most similar works and especially other Star Wars media.
The final battle isn’t decided with a lightsaber or force power but instead pure empathy. It’s a parent’s love for his child that saves the galaxy, finally overcoming the Emperor’s seemingly unstoppable might and even Vader’s own corruption.
It still defines what a Jedi is to me, a being who’s real power comes from a self-sacrificing belief in the capacity for good in all beings.
It nearly didn’t happen that way, with the early screenplay Revenge of the Jedi showing a less emotional, convoluted sequence of events. Broad similarities remain, with a few elements recycled in later installments, as Luke and an inexplicably resurrected Obi-Wan Kenobi confront the Emperor in a volcanic dungeon on the city planet Had Abbadon.
Luke overpowering Vader through the dark side doesn’t occur and Obi-Wan taunts the emperor with his vision of a Skywalker defeating him. Once the young Jedi refuses to kill his father, the Emperor’s force lightning bombardment is far tamer, due to a still incorporeal Yoda’s intervention. As the ghostly protection fails:
The Emperor turns around to see Lord Vader flying at him. The lightning bolts around Luke disappear as Vader hits the Emperor, knocking them both into the fiery lake of lava. The hideous screams of the Emperor are soon muted. Luke struggles to his feet and stares at the spot where his enemy and his father disappeared into the cauldron of molten rock.
All in all, a far gaudier scene, from the participants to the set up, and even the absurd setting. Vader’s betrayal is a crude “gotcha” instead of a genuinely surprising turn. It drips with spectacle in contrast with the still dramatic but more emotionally driven version the film offered.
It’s a scene that wouldn’t have been out of place in plenty of other Star Wars tales, particularly the installments after Return of the Jedi, which even with their strengths and many weaknesses, never quite approached the power of the Anakin’s redemption and the Emperor’s death.
On that note, it’s hard for me not to watch this scene and not think of how it’s been totally despoiled. I could live with a scattered Imperial Remnant and new Sith orders emerging after the events of Return of the Jedi. After all, Anakin’s “Chosen One” prophecy was added after the fact. In some ways the element of fate it adds hampers the Dark Lord’s agency and the weight of his sacrifice.
Meanwhile, Lucas adding a repeated, bombastic “No!” as Vader grabs the Emperor might be the most befuddling Special Edition edit, as his silence is part of what makes the scene so powerful.
But the sprawling world of tie-in media was where the real trouble started. In 1991, Dark Horse Comics would publish Star Wars: Dark Empire, beautifully illustrated by Cam Kennedy with a plot that sadly didn’t live up to it, with the Empire reunited under a reborn Emperor.
Writer Tom Veitch claimed George Lucas himself gave him the idea.
The Emperor’s resurrection was immediately a point of contention among fans, with Heir of the Empire author Timothy Zahn quoted in How Star Wars Conquered the Universe saying,
It destroys Darth Vader’s sacrifice in killing the Emperor at the end of Return of the Jedi… it unravels the whole original trilogy.
Zahn would write a thinly veiled criticism towards Dark Empire into his Star Wars novel Specter of the Past, with former agent of the Emperor Mara Jade offhandedly dismissing the events of the comic.
But a licensed comic, especially one that much of the later Expanded Universe entries ignored, can only do so much damage. Even so, one of my few comforts with Disney’s clean slate reset of all non-movie and Clone Wars material was the removal of Dark Empire, which restored no small measure of dignity to Vader’s sacrifice.
But that wouldn’t last, as the fumbling Rise of Skywalker managed to take the worst part of Dark Empire — the Emperor’s resurrection — while also failing to capture any of the comic’s gorgeous visuals, spiritualism or interesting worldbuilding.
Even the comic made a point of showing that the Emperor despised Vader for his unexpected return to the Light Side, whereas one of the opening lines of Episode IX has him casually note “I’ve died before.”
Anakin Skywalker’s redemption becomes something no longer worth registering.
It’s been revised and undermined for decades by now. Even then, I still feel the scene’s punch when I rewatch it. To me nothing else in the franchise so fully embodies what made Star Wars worthwhile, using larger than life space fantasy trappings to tap into more meaningful, genuine emotions.
I will never forget the first time I watched that scene. It definitely stands out.