Matt Blum is my hero…Okay, maybe not… Â But he’s assembled a great list of low IQ things that the Star Wars Main Characters have done…. Â Take a look…
Have you ever watched a movie where a character figures out the answer to a complicated puzzle before you do, or makes some logical connection that you didn’t see until it was pointed out? I’ll bet it made you a little impressed by the character’s mental abilities. “Wow,†you may have thought, “that character sure is smart.â€
Now, have you ever noticed that you don’t get that feeling at all while watching the Star Wars movies? Seriously, the main characters are supposed to be the elite — the crème de la crème of the galaxy far, far away — but without exception they make some of the most boneheaded decisions you’re ever likely to see.
Here, then, is the evidence I’ve gathered to prove this point. I will make a few references to the prequel trilogy, but am content that characters featured only in those movies can be proved idiots by simply referring to their dialogue. And the Clone Wars movie and series introduce far too many characters to deal with in a blog article. So I’ll be concerning myself primarily with the original trilogy.
Emperor Palpatine: You’re the leader of a powerful Galactic Empire, and you spent an enormous amount of time and resources building a giant planet-killing space station. Then the pesky rebels went and blew it all to bits, wasting all that investment and presumably killing many thousands of your troops. So what do you do as a followup? Why, build another one, of course! Now, perhaps that’s just hubris, not stupidity, but don’t you think you’d get the best engineering minds in your Empire to look over the plans to make sure they didn’t have a giant gaping flaw in them that could be exploited the same way the first one did? And don’t you think it might make just a little more sense to have the (“fully armed and operationalâ€) Death Star generate its own protective shield, rather than situating the source on a nearby moon full of walking teddy bears? And of course, there’s no reason to pay attention to the mental state of your right-hand guy Darth Vader, even though you know his mind is easily manipulated because that’s how he became your right-hand man in the first place.