“I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.” So said Obi-Wan Kenobi in “Star Wars: A New Hope”, right after the Death Star destroyed the planet Alderaan, as he reeled from the spiritual shockwave so much that Luke Skywalker felt compelled to ask if he was alright and what was wrong.
There is strategic logic to the concept of the Death Star: after all, the Empire cannot be everywhere all the time in a vast and necessarily highly decentralized galaxy, so rule by terror is the only option for an autocrat who seeks, in Palpatine’s immortal words, “unlimited power!”. As pointed out in the meeting room on the Death Star itself in “A New Hope”, without the Senate, the Emperor had no hope of maintaining control…unless terror and fear could be put in the place of the once-democratic institution that governed the galaxy.
But why a Death Star? In particular, Darth Sidious appears to be obsessed with planet-destroying superweapons of mass death and maximum terror in a way that his apprentice Darth Vader, notably, has no interest in, to the point of being utterly contemptuous of the whole idea; he looks visibly dissatisfied in “Revenge of the Sith” as he observes it being constructed, and in “A New Hope” Vader is openly contemptuous of “this technological terror you’ve constructed”, believing “the ability to destroy a planet is insignificant next to the power of the Force”.
But what if the ability to destroy a planet and the power of the Force are not as contradictory as they might first appear? After all, Obi-Wan Kenobi, a Jedi Master, felt deleterious effects from the disturbance the destruction of Alderaan caused in the Force. A Sith Lord, steeped in the dark side, may well have the opposite experience…
Consider that in “Revenge of the Sith” Order 66, the onset of the Great Jedi Purge, visibly disturbed Yoda like nothing else: the death screams of thousands of Jedi spreading out like a tear in the fabric of the universe itself. It stands to reason that a practitioner of the dark side, a Sith Lord such as Emperor Palpatine, might thrive on such energy, and the idea that such a disturbance in the Force could be harnessed through ancient Sith rituals for sinister purposes cannot be ruled out at all.
Indeed, it makes eminent sense in the context of the movies, and even in the larger lore. Consider that the power of the dark side is explicitly said to be growing stronger as the Republic becomes corrupt, and especially as the Clone Wars break out: clearly, mass death, fear, and terror strengthen the dark side of the Force, and tip the balance in favor of the Sith. Palpatine seems visibly gleeful and more empowered than ever during and immediately after Order 66, the dark side of the Force empowered as never seen in the Star Wars saga before or since.
Consider also that many a fan have noted that Palpatine seems visibly spryer, more energetic, and dare we say younger in “Revenge of the Sith” than he does in “Attack of the Clones” despite in fact being three years older; what if the war was directly strengthening the dark side of the Force, and thus empowering and rejuvenating Darth Sidious in some fashion, as if he was feeding off the extinction of other life-forms in the cosmos, and even hope itself, as, dare we say, a spiritual vampire?
Many a fan has noted that Palpatine may have been hell-bent on the Death Star precisely in order to recreate the high he experienced during Order 66; notably, the mass death and sheer terror from slaughtering billions in an instant is about the only disturbance in the Force that could even theoretically compare to the Great Jedi Purge. Notably, the instant destruction of a planet of billions with a superweapon would be expected to cause a much greater wave in the Force than the more gradual genocide of a bombardment by star destroyers (known in the lore by the codename “Base Delta Zero”). So is that it? Is the entire purpose of the Death Star not really to burnish the material power of the Empire, but rather the spiritual power of the Emperor?
The Death Star as effectively a temple of death, intended as a vehicle for mass human sacrifice to the Sith, makes even more sense when you consider what Palpatine’s ultimate endgame even was: immortality, and unlimited power, the logical conclusion of which would be Palpatine becoming a god, the Force itself being perverted into an instrument of his will. Creating disturbances in the Force to be harnessed through arcane Sith rituals is precisely the sort of avenue we would expect Darth Sidious to be exploring.
Indeed, it would even go a long way toward explaining why he’s absent from the action in “A New Hope”: perhaps he was experimenting with these rituals, and hence was unavailable. It also helps to explain why Alderaan, specifically, is targeted first: it’s a peaceful planet, heavily populated, full of life; yes, the terror the Empire would cause is maximized by making an example of Alderaan, but why them and not, say, Mon Calamari, which the lore tells us was in far more open rebellion at the time? Precisely because it was peaceful and innocent.
It also goes a long way toward explaining why the Force was with the Rebellion, why such an improbable chain of events happened to cause the destruction of the Death Star: because if Darth Sidious were allowed to progress, if his plans had come to fruition, hope in the galaxy would be extinguished, the Sith would grow far stronger, the imbalance in the Force would spiral out of control, and there would be no stopping Palpatine from becoming an immortal god.
What would that even look like? To answer that question we must explore what Palpatine’s ultimate plans for the Empire were. The lore (in both Canon and Legends) holds that Palpatine’s ultimate goal was to transition away from rule by the military into an overt Sith theocracy, modeled on the ancient Sith empires. Abolishing the Senate in favor of rule by fear was the first step; the next would have been a progressive replacement of conventional military men with Force-sensitive Sith cultists and dark-side adepts. Vader perhaps was something of a prototype: with no formal rank, he stood both outside and above the conventional military hierarchy. As in the ancient Sith empires, personal strength and power, not bureaucratic rank and position, would be decisive. Sith philosophy would be promoted, with all pretense of being a democratic republic erased from popular perception, replaced with a cult-like worship of Palpatine himself as a personal god.
If the Sith draw power from draining others of their life force, akin to vampirism, then we can envision the Empire engaging in increasingly regular and overt rituals of mass death as human sacrifice to its god-emperor, the Force itself increasingly being twisted into an instrument of his will, with ordinary citizens and innocent life-forms alike increasingly impotent to resist.
This even has precedent in the lore in the form of Darth Nihilus, an ancient Sith Lord who became immortal and achieved great power through being a “wound in the Force”, a void who lived only to feed on the life energy of others, a force of nature who devoured entire planets to sate his eternal endless hunger (again, much like a vampire in classical gothic fiction). It’s been theorized by many fans that Palpatine, if he actually achieved unlimited power, would eventually devolve into a being akin to Darth Nihilus, living only to feed on the souls of others, a black void where once there was perhaps the inner light of a human soul.
Indeed, as an aside, the very name of the Death Star has parallels with the esoteric concept of the Black Sun; as the White Sun gives life, the Black Sun gives death, its nature cold, lifeless, destructive. Like the Sun, the Death Star is spherical, but it’s hollow and artificial, suggesting an underlying spiritual falsehood, a rubric of demonic evil. And like the Black Sun, the Death Star serves various esoteric and even alchemical purposes, lending the Empire of Star Wars not only material and symbolic kinship to our very own Nazism, but also esoteric and mystical affinities that might not be readily apparent at first glance.
I’ve stuck to the original six movies made by George Lucas here for the most part, but consider that if we take “The Rise of Skywalker” and the sequel trilogy into account, that Palpatine is (presumably) only fully resurrected around the same time Starkiller Base is revealed to the galaxy, and annihilates not just one but five planets at a stroke. We see this in “The Force Awakens”, and not a year later “the dead speak!”. Coincidence? Perhaps not. Perhaps Palpatine’s spirit required such a disturbance in the Force to be harnessed by his Sith cultists on Exegol to revive himself physically, and through Snoke a multi-planetary holocaust was arranged to that effect.
Even as it was, he was little more than a corpse kept alive by machines…until he literally drains the energy of the dyad in the Force shared by Rey and Ben, after which he’s able to revive himself properly and reach (and surpass?) his former strength: he’s throwing Ben Skywalker into a chasm with the Force and shooting Sith lightning into orbit (!), without the need for any machines to keep him alive anymore.
From the original saga, notice also that Padmé Amidala dies of causes that are overtly mysterious to the medical droids who are caring for her on Polis Massa; she “loses the will to live” and dies…at precisely the same time her beloved husband is defying death from his injuries at Mustafar and is being transformed into a cyborg. Presumably Darth Vader was kept alive only through the power of the dark side. Could this have affected Padmé? Many a fan have theorized that Palpatine drained Padmé Amidala’s life force from afar to resurrect Darth Vader, but consider that we know from the lore (such as “Knights of the Old Republic”) that in Star Wars lovers may share a Force bond with each other.
Consider that Padmé shows signs of visible distress and even arguably attunement with happenings she shouldn’t know about in “Revenge of the Sith”: she gets up and stares at Anakin across miles of Coruscant skyline when he looks her way from the council chambers in the Jedi temple, she is visibly crying and knows something terrible has happened when the Jedi temple is attacked, and so forth. Consider also the relative ease with which Anakin seduces her in “Attack of the Clones” once he decides to possess her: Force powers, conscious or otherwise, may be at play. Now, what happens when two people share a Force bond with each other, and the heart of one partner is broken? Nothing good, most likely, as far as their spiritual balance is concerned. Especially if one partner is radiating the dark side into the bond, and especially if the nature of the dark side is to consume all life in proximity. That would go double if said practitioner of the dark side was on the brink of death and keeping themselves alive only through the power of hatred.
Where it gets even fancier is how Darth Plagueis factors into all of this. Yes, there was the “Darth Plagueis” novel, but judging strictly by the movies, we know Plagueis was a master of life and death, capable of directly manipulating midi-chlorians, and quite possibly had some role in Anakin Skywalker’s creation through the Force (thus arguably being Anakin’s true “father”, since his was after all a virgin birth). Presumably Palpatine’s abilities to pervert the Force were a continuation of his master’s work.
Plagieus’s experiments with midi-chlorians and directly manipulating the balance of the Force itself might have been without precedent in the history of the Sith, explaining why the Chosen One, namely Anakin Skywalker, appears right at the moment Plagueis is on the brink of achieving unlimited power. The Force itself struck back by choosing the very vessel of the Sith to carry out its will.
And yes, Anakin may well have been a vessel of the Sith: consider he was effectively created by the Sith, and always seemed to display a natural affinity toward the dark side. This made him a poor fit to ever be a Jedi, but to the Force, you see, this was a feature, not a bug, for only a Sith Lord could be assured of eventually destroying both themselves and their master, thus ending the threat to the balance of the universe once and for all.
Why would the Force strike back in this fashion? Because the Sith, in their ultimate incarnation under Plagueis and Sidious, are a threat not only to the balance but to its very existence. Consider that the Force, per Obi-Wan Kenobi in “A New Hope”, is “an energy field generated by all living things”. If the nature of the dark side is to feed, parasitically, like a vampire, then if left unchecked, the ecology that is the Force would collapse and be destroyed.
Consider what happens if Palpatine achieves his goal of becoming a god, and the Force itself is perverted more and more into an instrument of his will, the life-forms of the galaxy enslaved to feed the lord of hunger.
Rule by fear through the Death Star eventually becomes rule by ritual human sacrifice, the galaxy transformed into the Final Order, a religious empire of death. As more life is drained from the galaxy, the Force itself would start to degrade. Jedi ghosts vanish, unable to manifest. Plants with strong life signatures like Dagobah or even Naboo gradually wither and die, even if they escape outright destruction through the dark-side altars that are the Death Stars. In much of the galaxy, Force-sensitive children cease to be born. The dark side rises to the point where once vibrant worlds are turned into dull grey husks: what happened to the tombs of Korriban spreads like a virus throughout the cosmos.
Over time, Palpatine’s body becomes not human but a wraith-like nexus of stolen life energy, reality itself distorting and warping around his presence, no longer speaking (at least in any terms a human would describe as a language), residing on a throne-world like Exegol, which becomes such a strong dark-side nexus that reality itself becomes warped and twisted in his presence, devouring light and corrupting minds across an ever-expanding event horizon. A force out of H.P. Lovecraft, rather than a character in any human sense of the word.
Civilization is drained of vitality: cities are quiet, ritualistic, obedient, every citizen trained to participate in regular death rites, public executions, or offerings of vitality, with even non-Force-sensitive people indoctrinated to fear joy, emotion having become taboo unless it’s fear, awe, despair, or some other nexus for the Sith god to feed upon. Culture? Dead. Language? Withered. Art? Gone. Only the machine, the ritual, and the will of the Emperor remain.
Eventually, this almighty dark god would begin to fracture reality itself in what once was the galaxy far, far away: whole regions of space become psychic echo chambers; people feel the Emperor in their thoughts, or see him in their dreams. Navigators go mad; hyperspace is warped; planets become haunted tombs.
The Force would go inert, like a battery drained to zero. The cloning facilities we see in “The Rise of Skywalker” as well as even the factories of Kamino in “Attack of the Clones” point toward perhaps an even darker turn: as Force sensitivity wanes, less and less life force is available from each individual for the insatiable god of hunger to feed upon, so eventually many more individuals will be needed to sacrifice — cloning is the only way to effect this. The rarefied zombie-like populations of the Final Order would, at the direction of their “god”, direct their efforts into building clone factories to churn out beings en masse, trillions and eventually quadrillions who are mere husks of humanity, barely if at all sentient, experiencing only just enough to feel fear, terror, and suffering so they may be consumed by Palpatine’s will. Eventually even this last resort would stop working, and what was once Palpatine, and the galaxy, would starve, collapsing inward on itself like a parasite that’s devoured its ecosystem.
What happens then? Would it become an eternal psychic void, still reaching out to consume even the slightest sign of any Force-containing object that strays near it? Does the galaxy just die, not only spiritually but materially as well, perhaps becoming part of the dark matter we see today, a ghost devoid of all spiritual and material substance, influencing the wider universe only through what’s left of its gravity? Or does the Force die, leaving the galaxy to recover into an existence much like ours: rich with material possibilities, perhaps, but with, as in Tolkien’s legendarium, the magic gone forever, decayed into nothingness.
There are many possibilities. Among the most fascinating of which is the idea that this has happened before in the galaxy far, far away. Consider that in the lore there are the “unknown regions” which are notoriously difficult to penetrate and navigate through hyperspace. That might be considered a quirk of science or physics…but consider that the Force is in fact intimately linked to hyperspace in “Star Wars”: the earliest navigators of hyperspace all sensed routes through it using the Force, starting with the Rakata, the earliest known empire on a galactic scale, and up through the Skywalker era Jedi were still pioneering new routes using the Force.
What if such a dark-side singularity was in progress but for whatever reason it was halted before it could consume the entire galaxy, leading to just a portion of it being relatively inaccessible through hyperspace? Force-sensitives don’t perceive a radiation of darkness from the unknown regions, but it’s still possible that a scar from a previous “Sith singularity” (as we might call it) remains, and impacts the structure of hyperspace in that part of the galaxy still in the Skywalker era. The Force itself became fractured and weak, and only relatively recently has it begun to heal enough for hyperspace travel to be possible again for even typical Force-sensitive navigators.
It’s even possible that a still more ancient dark-side singularity once twisted hyperspace and threatened to consume all life, thwarting civilization; consider that in “Star Wars” galactic civilization emerged in the geologically recent past, with species arising more or less independently but all at roughly the same time. What if there’s something deeper going on than just a classic space-opera trope? What if it’s the product of all earlier spacefaring cultures connected to hyperspace being wiped out by the Force itself being twisted beyond recognition by the emergence of a dark-side god?
It would even explain much about the lore, chillingly enough: what if the Force nexuses we see across the galaxy are not really natural phenomena, but echoes of earlier collapses of the galactic spiritual ecology? Prophecy, myth, and even the visions of the future might not even be of the future at all, but rather memories from the past, carried forward by the Force as a kind of immune system in subsequent cycles.
The Sith in this case are a recurring cancer upon the Force that periodically achieves a kind of critical mass, becomes a singularity, and devours the galaxy until not even the darkness they feed upon remain; Palpatine and indeed the Sith was we know them are but the latest expression of it in this cycle, and (for all we know) a failed attempt at achieving godhood (for themselves) and universal armageddon (for the rest of us).
Even more chillingly, from the perspective of Star Wars cosmology, this theory explains what we see in our own galaxy today. Perhaps our own galaxy is, unbeknownst to the denizens of our planet, subject to the earliest stages of such a cancer upon the Force, where sensitivity to it weakened along with easy access to hyperspace but the stars haven’t burned out…yet.
Force sensitivity on our own planet might have once been stronger; the ancient myths, the age of the gods, and even the use of magic in former times reflect a distant memory of Force usage, but over time this sensitivity has recede. The spiritual revelations that inform our most ancient and gnostic texts? Distorted half-remembered fragments of what the Force whispered to us about the previous cycles in our galaxy and even beyond. The sacred sites, the megaliths, the pyramids? In the Bronze Age, conduits for channeling the Force. In our age, inert artifacts that mystify us as to their true purpose.
Even the evolution of our species, from participants in the circle of life as hunter-gatherers to the wardens of Auschwitz in the industrial era eerily parallel exactly the influence one would expect from the rise of Sith-like spiritual vampirism on a galactic scale. The architecture for a soulless society of human sacrifice that has the utter consumption of the entire ecology as its foundation is already here.
The dark gods cometh…