Why Plagueis Went to Meet Anakin in The Phantom Menace

Plagueis went looking for Anakin because the Force showed him what the boy would become. In Legends, the Muun Sith Lord was still alive during The Phantom Menace, and the moment Anakin set foot on Coruscant, Plagueis was struck by a vision of a black helmeted cyborg rising from a table. He made straight for the boy's chambers and found them empty. Anakin had already been taken to the Jedi.

Who Plagueis was and what he was doing#

Darth Plagueis was a Muun Dark Lord of the Sith whose knowledge of the dark side was deep enough that he could influence midi-chlorians to create life, and keep the people he cared about from dying. That is the version Palpatine tells Anakin at the opera, and it is broadly accurate. Plagueis believed the secret to immortality was a scientific problem rather than a mystical one, and he ran experiments on the biological machinery of life itself to crack it.

He took Sheev Palpatine, a human from Naboo, as his apprentice, and the pair spent years working the problem together. Plagueis taught him that two Sith were required for the plan to work, with one serving as bait for the dark side and the other as a vessel. He also arranged for his student to become Senator for Naboo and the Chommell sector, which is how the mild-mannered politician ended up positioned exactly where the Sith needed him.

The obsession had a cost. Plagueis was so fixated on immortality that he ignored the signs his faithful apprentice was progressing in a way that should have worried him. He was, as Sidious later put it, wise enough to keep others from dying and not wise enough to save himself.

The Force answered back#

The Legends framing of Anakin's conception is what makes this story land. Anakin Skywalker was born on Tatooine in 41 BBY to Shmi Skywalker, a slave who conceived a child with no father. His blood carried over twenty thousand midi-chlorians, more than Yoda or any other Jedi in the galaxy. Qui-Gon Jinn took one look at the numbers and theorised the boy had been conceived by the midi-chlorians themselves.

Put that next to what Plagueis had been doing for decades and the picture changes. Two Sith Lords spent years forcing the midi-chlorians to do things they were never meant to do, and the Force pushed back by producing the Chosen One. In that reading Plagueis is Anakin's father in the only sense that matters: he made the conditions, and the galaxy produced the answer. He just never got to see what the answer was for.

The vision on Coruscant#

By the time the Naboo crisis reached Coruscant, Plagueis was days from death and did not know it. He watched the Queen's party arrive and saw the boy from Tatooine step off the ship for the first time.

The vision hit him immediately: a black helmeted cyborg rising from a table. It is one of the sharper pieces of irony in Legends, because Plagueis was looking at the thing his own apprentice would build, and the surgical table it would rise from was less than a decade away. He read the image as proof that the boy mattered enormously. He did not read it as proof that the boy would end him and everyone like him.

Plagueis went to find Anakin in his chambers. He arrived to find the boy gone, already taken to the Jedi Temple to stand in front of the Council. That was the whole encounter. No confrontation, no offer, no duel. A Sith Lord walking into an empty room.

What he understood too late#

The empty chambers told Plagueis something he had not previously accepted. The Force was no longer neutral ground the Sith could manipulate at will. It was actively working against them, and it had moved the boy out of reach before Plagueis could get near him.

He was right, and it made no difference. Within days Sidious killed him, and the plan they had built together passed entirely into the hands of the apprentice. Anakin went on to be admitted to the Jedi Order as Obi-Wan Kenobi's Padawan after the Battle of Naboo, which put him precisely where Sidious wanted him.

Worth flagging the continuity line here. The vision, the empty chambers and the timing all come from the 2012 Legends novel Darth Plagueis by James Luceno, which is where most of what fans know about the character originated, including that he was a Muun. Current canon has since brought Plagueis back into play through The Acolyte and Sidious' own writings on transference, but the meeting that never happened during The Phantom Menace belongs to Legends.

The ending is the same in both continuities. Plagueis chased a way to cheat death, produced Darth Vader by accident, and was murdered in his sleep before he could work out what he had done.