Sic Semper [Darth] Tyranus

In the context of the Prequel Trilogy, Count Dooku seems like a bit of a chump.

Dooku is subverted and initiated into the Sith somewhere in the ten year gap between Episode I and Episode II, and all you can really think about when you see him is that Anakin is supposed to kill him and take his place. Especially on repeat viewings. Palpatine, we all know, is a long-term planner and he’s been working on Anakin Skywalker since he was 10 years old.*  While Anakin’s hot-blooded murder of the Tuskens is his first step down the dark path (unless you’ve read Brooks’ novelization of Episode I, where Anakin has precognitive dreams of becoming Vader and is characterized as a bit sullen and battling rage issues, or Greg Bear’s Rogue Planet, in which a 12 year old Anakin continues to have these dreams and, at the novel’s climax, uses the Force to melt an assassin because he believes nobody is watching), it is an act of premeditated murder that Palpatine needs to wedge his prospective apprentice even further away from the Order.

From that macro perspective, Dooku is fated to die as soon as he becomes Darth Tyranus.  He doesn’t fit the pattern Palpatine establishes with his other apprentices – get to them young. Darth Maul was taken by Sidious when Maul was still a child, and the Dark Lord had been angling to acquire Anakin since he was a youth.

Instead, Dooku is solidly a member of the Old Guard, with a lifetime informed by Jedi restraint and the trappings of civilized Old Republic life.  He is counted among the greatest Jedi of his time and his fall from grace is not one inspired by blind anger or some mustache-twirling desire to destroy the universe, but by simple political and philosophical differences.

Especially noteworthy about Dooku is this fact: he resigned from the Jedi. In the lengthy, lengthy history of the Order, there have only been twenty people who have done so. Thousands of years, twenty people: that’s one hell of a ratio. That alone makes him a remarkable character. He’s also renowned as one of the best lightsaber duelists of his day and the master of an out-of-vogue style of combat, both interesting tidbits.****

Where Anakin Skywalker’s arc in the prequels is one of succumbing to his own rage and entitlement, traits he’s had since childhood, Dooku’s progression as a character is a slow decline from honor to ruin based on his ideals.  He quits the Jedi, returns to civilian politics, becomes the lightning rod that electrifies the founding of the Confederation of Independent Systems, and the audience is never clear whether he’s aligned himself with the CIS because of his master Darth Sidious’s plan to foment civil war, or whether he knows he’s being set up to lose that war.

At his best, Count Dooku is something akin to Judas in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Jesus Christ Superstar, a villain driven to villainy because his ideals aren’t satisfied by the high-minded philosophy he is pledged to. That he turns to the Sith to accomplish his goals isn’t surprising, since he seems to no longer believe in the spiritual components of his vocation.

Of course, much of the Count’s characterization comes from John Ostrander and Jan Duursema’s comics, Sean Stewart’s Clone Wars novel Dark Rendezvous and the various animated Clone Wars series. So, for those of you who are sticklers for Star Wars canon, this all means nothing. He appears so infrequently in the films that it’s difficult to flesh him out.

There are hints of a deeper complexity to the character, though, and he’s worth more than his throwaway status in the films. He’s not a chump.

*Me, I sincerely hoped that there’d be an “I’m your father!” reveal in Episode III, that Palpatine had been the secret engineer of Anakin’s terrible circumstances in order to create an ideal apprentice or something. I never took Shmi’s “There was no father,” line literally, and I think that the literal interpretation of it is, frankly, a little stupid.**

**Midi-chlorians are the worst concept ever introduced into the Star Wars universe. The Force comes from them?*** It would be so easy to make them like mitochondria instead. But no.

***And yet the Jedi still treat The Force like a religion, which seems to argue that the light side/dark side distinction is solely a moral one. This flies in the face of every canonical explanation of the twin aspects of The Force.

****And, if I’m going to be a stickler, its depiction on film is completely different from the way it’s conceptualized in print and antithetical to the pistol-grip design of his lightsaber, which seems to imply a fighting style concerned with precise, stabbing strikes and a high degree of wrist control, not the sweeping strokes that Christopher Lee’s stunt double employs.

Tagged as: I Am A Giant Nerd, Movies, Star Wars