Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith, the final chapter of the Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, concludes the fall of Anakin Skywalker in a grand, operatic way. He suffers a falling out with his vocation, a division of brotherhood, and worse of all, the loss of his beloved wife and unborn child. In many ways, his turn from the light to the dark, from young man with immense power to a pit bull in service of unnatural evil, is a tragedy by textbook definition. Unsurprisingly, Anakin’s greatest tragedy was Palpatine’s greatest triumph: Padmé. Palpatine deftly used Padmé to ensnare and seduce Anakin to the dark side of the force. Then, her life force was consumed by the joining of the two men in Sith accord.
Palpatine has been manipulating and orchestrating poor Anakin Skywalker’s life since before conception. Only when the opportunity arose did he then cast his dark tendrils over the life of Padmé Naberrie, a treasure in his Sith arsenal. Padmé was the fait accompli to Palpatine’s triumph over Anakin. Anakin’s actions and decisions to save her from death directly caused her death. This was exactly the way Palpatine planned it out from the beginning. Padmé’s doom was the great tragedy of Revenge of the Sith.
It was Palpatine All Along
It was not enough to conceive a child of incredible force power, Palpatine had to guide the child, rear the child, toward a life of servitude and Sith doctrine. First the child must be born into slavery. In this way Anakin would know how to be broken by a Master. He would learn both the hierarchy of power and the hatred of not wielding that power. He would covet a position at the top, a Sith value.
Then, Palpatine had to give Anakin something to fear. Something so intense that one would do anything to prevent it from happening. It was not enough for Palpatine to organize the Tuscan Raiders to raid and butcher Shmi Skywalker on Tatooine, that was just a mere taste of sadness and loss. Palpatine had to give Anakin someone to love deeply – someone to fear to lose. As Master Yoda forewarned, “fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering.” Palpatine’s actions on Naboo led to the coupling of Anakin and Padmé, a relationship forbidden by Anakin’s vocation. Anakin’s obsession over Padmé led to him becoming willing to do anything to save her, thus to him being easily seduced into the dark side of the force.
Sith Sniper
If one follows the theory that Darth Plagueis and Darth Sidious used Sith sorcery to impregnate Shmi Skywalker, it could then be supposed that Darth Sidious may wield another version of this power. If the two could give life from a distance, could not Palpatine also take life from a distance? If so, could it not be presumed that Palpatine, knowing that the loss of Padmé would be so devastating to Anakin that it would seal his path to the dark side, intentionally ended her life from a distance too?
Palpatine not only dangled her in front of Anakin to divert his attention away from the teachings of the Jedi, but he also threatened her life to usher Anakin into his welcoming evil embrace. She was both the desire to and the consequence of becoming a Sith Lord.
Love Will Tear Us Apart, Again
Palpatine also knew full well that killing Padmé would end the life of their child. Promptly, he blames Anakin’s force choke as the cause of her death to make the wound that much deeper. To join the dark side, not only has Anakin ended his association with the Jedi in the most dismembering way (alas poor Mace Windu), but he believed that he has killed the very family he sold his soul to save.
Once his future was burned to cinders, there was nothing left for Anakin except anger, hatred, regret and a devotion to the man he assumed to be his only ally. As Darth Vader, Palpatine could use him in any manner of evil ways like hunting down and killing other Jedi or enforcing the will of the Empire on people as impoverished and disadvantaged as Anakin was when he was a child. The Sith ways of cruelty, violence and domination gush forth from the black heart of misery.
It was only when he learned his child survived, and that he in fact had two children, did Darth Vader slowly tip back toward being Anakin Skywalker. A single ray of light had crested the dark void of his horizon to give him hope. For the time in between, he was a miserable, isolated, and dreadful figure. All the power Anakin was born with was manipulated, exploited, and abused by the evil Sith Grand Plan of Palpatine. Palpatine assaulted the love between Anakin and Padmé and received her death as the signature of Anakin’s soul to the dark side. That Anakin never saw it coming was a literal tragedy in Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith.