What Happened When Darth Vader Found A Picture Of Jar Jar Binks, Kenobi And Padme?

He destroyed it. Sheltering inside a Gungan monument to Naboo's victory over the Trade Federation, Vader found a painting of Palpatine, Jar Jar Binks, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Padme Amidala and the nine year old boy who had helped win the battle. A former handmaiden told him Naboo still mourned that boy alongside its queen. Vader took his lightsaber to the painting.

Why he was on Naboo at all#

This happens shortly after Bespin. Darth Vader has told Luke Skywalker the truth, watched his son throw himself down a reactor shaft rather than accept it, and lost the Millennium Falcon. What he wants now is not the boy. It is the name of whoever kept the boy from him for twenty-three years.

The investigation is methodical and it is bleak. Vader takes a shuttle with a detachment of death troopers and a forensics droid called ZED-6-7 and starts working backwards. First stop is Tatooine and the Lars moisture farm, where he pulls what he can from the place his son grew up and finds himself remembering the failed rescue of his mother and the funeral that followed. Then Coruscant, and Padme's old apartment, where ZED-6-7 finds a scout transmitter someone had planted. That leads to Vendaxa. Vendaxa leads to Naboo.

Somewhere in the middle of it, in a cantina, a man claiming to be Luke Skywalker tried to sell him information. Vader killed him and told the room that anyone claiming the name would inherit the crimes attached to it.

Standing in the fields#

Naboo is the worst possible place for him to be, and he goes anyway.

This is where he married her in secret. Where they visited her family home and he watched her among the flower garden her father kept. Where the Republic he grew up believing in had its last uncomplicated victory. Vader stands in those fields, and the video's word for the state he is in is remorse, which is not a word that usually attaches to him.

The Emperor noticed. When Palpatine learned about the personal mission his apprentice was running, he summoned Vader to the Imperial Palace and sensed something wrong immediately: the man in front of him was full of mourning rather than hate. His solution was Force lightning, applied until Vader remembered how the dark side is supposed to feel.

Vader went back to Naboo anyway.

The monument#

The sequence that gives this story its title is almost accidental. Vader and his escort were attacked by one of Naboo's enormous sea creatures, a sando aqua monster, and had to fall back into an old Gungan structure to get clear of it.

The building turned out to be a commemoration. The Gungans had raised it to mark the defeat of the Trade Federation, the moment their people and the humans of Naboo stood together and won. On the wall was a large painting of the figures who made it happen: Palpatine, still the newly appointed Chancellor. Jar Jar Binks. Obi-Wan Kenobi. Padme Amidala. And a nine year old boy from Tatooine who had flown a starfighter into an orbital control ship because nobody stopped him.

Vader is standing in front of a picture of his wife, his master, his mentor and himself, painted by people who thought they were commemorating a happy ending.

A former handmaiden of Padme Amidala put the last piece in place. Naboo, she explained, had mourned Anakin Skywalker's death as much as Padme's. The boy in the painting had never been forgotten here. He was a hero on this world, remembered fondly, grieved for.

Vader had no way to hold that. The grief he had been carrying around the galaxy turned into anger, and he took his lightsaber and cut the painting apart.

What happened next#

The rest of the visit is a massacre. Padme's loyalists, the Amidalans, had been waiting for him, and they came at him in the jungles under Ric Olie. Vader and his death troopers went through most of them and put Olie down.

At the tomb itself he was surrounded by Sabe and the surviving handmaidens, Eirtae, Rabe, Sache and Dorme, the women who had spent their lives protecting Padme and who had a fairly good idea of who was standing in front of them. They fought hard. Vader beat all of them without much difficulty and opened the door to his wife's tomb.

Why the painting matters more than the fight#

Everything Vader does on Naboo is an attempt to find information, and every step of it forces him to look at his own past instead.

He wanted a name. What he got was the moisture farm where his son was raised, the apartment where his wife lived, a monument to the day he was a hero, and a tomb. The mission is nominally about hunting down whoever hid Luke. In practice it is Anakin Skywalker walking backwards through his own life with a helmet on.

The painting is the moment the two men inside the suit collide directly. Anakin is in the picture. Vader is holding the lightsaber. Only one of them was going to walk out of that room, and the fact that Vader had to destroy a painting to settle it tells you how close the other one was to the surface.

A year later, on the second Death Star, the other one won.