Is Anakin Skywalker a Consistent Character? by FernWithy When The Phantom Menace first came out, many people complained that the character of Anakin Skywalker was not what they had expected -- how could that little boy be the same as the bogeyman that haunted a generation worth of little kids who did their  hair in cinnamon buns and carried whiffle bats for lightsabers? I, personally, was delighted with the way Anakin was developed in TPM.  As I've mentioned, the character has always fascinated me, and I'd spent a lot of time wondering what it was about Vader that Luke was able to call to, and carry back from the darkness.  I hadn't hoped that we'd be able to meet him as a child, but, thankfully, we got the chance.  And I thought, from the first time we saw him, "Yes, that's the boy who will be Vader." But I've listened to the questions raised by critics, and I decided to take a look, and try to understand why he seemed so consistent to me.  I won't venture any guesses as to why he doesn't for other people; mileage varies.  Obi-Wan did say that Anakin Skywalker ceased to exist when Darth Vader was born... but then again, we know that Obi-Wan has some peculiar points of view. Of course, there are significant differences.  We're dealing with the passage from childhood to adulthood, as well as the fall from innocence to evil.  My position is not that there was no real change; that would be ludicrous.  My argument is only that beneath these changes, Anakin Skywalker retained enough of his own identity that Luke was able to see it.  Some points are important points, others simple, inconsequential things. Obviously, I'm only working from TPM here, and it will serve me right for being presumptuous if Episode II proves me wrong point by point. ;-) Innate talents and acquired skills. First, and least important, Anakin's talents and learned skills carry over into his adult life as Vader.  Even at nine, Anakin had acquired considerable skill as a pilot, adding to his apparently inborn talent for flying.  This will eventually carry over into Obi-Wan's memory of him as "the best star pilot in the galaxy," and, indeed, to the warrior we first met in A New Hope--the high ranking official who flew in the trenches of the Death Star with his subordinates, leading the way into the same narrow trenches that the rebels had identified as dangerous, beaten only by the unexpected arrival of another great intuitive pilot... and even then able to save himself by flying a short range fighter through deep space. Anakin is also shown as having an affinity for machines.  The connection is not quite as clear.  We never get to see Vader tinkering with the engines of a TIE fighter, or even retooling the mechanics of his own suit.  The closest we come is the implication that he installed the tracking device on the Millennium Falcon in A New Hope.  Still, in the Classic Trilogy, Vader is so associated with machinery that on the two occasions when he appears in natural surroundings--Hoth and Endor--the image is striking.  In a way, there is a more chilling implication to this: in The Phantom Menace, Anakin Skywalker is shown as intimately concerned with machines, but still the master of them; by the time he has become Vader, the affinity has turned on him, and the machines have come to control him. Personality traits. In one of many conversations on The Force,Net's Jedi Council discussion forum (I believe this one was "Is Leia more like Anakin than Amidala?"), ami-padme (see "Fire and Darkness" on the Fan Fiction page) referred to Anakin as a "surprisingly eloquent chatterbox."  This is as good a description of Anakin as you can get... and a pretty fair one of Vader as well. Like innate talents, it is inevitable that certain traits of a person's personality--little tics, neither good nor evil--will survive even the most cataclysmic character change (though of course, I argue that the character change here is not as cataclysmic as it pretends to be).  Anakin's talkativeness is a consistent feature.  In TPM, it shows an eagerness to meet people and engage them in conversation.  By the time we get to his ceaselessly narrated duels in the Classic trilogy, it has become more threatening and intrusive... yet still, oddly, reaching for those connection points.  Even in the duel with Kenobi, which both know will end with the Master's death, Anakin seeks out the forms of their relationship, and expresses regret that it has come to this ("You should not have come back" -- which makes me wonder if Vader was perfectly aware of Obi-Wan's survival and allowing it, but that's the subject of another essay, I think).  Certainly, the man opens his first conversation with his son by saying "The Force is strong in you, young Skywalker, but you are not a Jedi yet" shows the same unusual eloquence in opening as the boy who starts a conversation with a girl he has never met with "Are you an angel?" (A post-AotC comment: This definitely was carried from childhood into adulthood.  Only a character like Anakin, who has a precedent set of saying exactly what he's feeling pretty much all the time, could have made "The thought of not being with you... I can't breathe!" sound absolutely sincere.) Another "tic" which has been brought up--and if it was deliberately acted or directed, kudos to Jake Lloyd and/or George Lucas for it--is the scene at Anakin's dinner table, where he is explaining his plan for the pod race.  He leans forward, wagging his pointed finger at Qui-Gon to emphasize each point.  This pointing is another behavior that is associated constantly with Vader (watch his interactions with Piett, particularly). Finally, the scenes in which Anakin dealt with Sebulba also reflect a pattern we've seen associated with Vader.  In the first case, when he rescues Jar Jar from Sebulba, he simply strides into an argument he isn't part of (think Ozzel and Piett in The Empire Strikes Back), threatens the one he considers in the wrong, and solves the situation, at least temporarily.  In the second, when Sebulba comes to taunt him at the pod race, he grows steadily more sullen, then finally gives a pointed insult--much like the conference room scene in A New Hope, where Vader takes many insults from the young Imperial officer, before choking him and saying "I find your lack of faith disturbing."  And I must say, if I could imagine Vader deigning to speak Huttese again, what I could imagine him saying is "Chess klini dopot, slimo." ;) Values. Most important of all for his redemption, there is a consistency of values in Anakin/Vader between TPM and the Classic Trilogy.  I am not saying a consistency in morality--clearly, Anakin at some point throws his moral compass into the galaxy-far-away's equivalent of the Bermuda triangle--but a consistency of goals, of priorities, that first leads him astray, and later leads him back home. Despite his verbosity, in neither incarnation is he particularly given to stating his values; instead, he acts on them, leaving much open to interpretation.  But because, as Vader, he feels the need to explain himself at least at one point, we have at least something of a mirror.  We can also judge by actions he takes, and actions he seems hesitant to take. Law and order. Vader states outright that he wants to "end this destructive conflict and bring order to the galaxy."  What could be possibly be a more consistent position for a boy who longed for the Jedi to come in and free the slaves... to enforce a law that already existed, but had been neglected in the chaos of the Outer Rim?  Or who felt accutely uncomfortable when his new mentor's position caused a conflict with both the Council and Obi-Wan?  There is no reason to doubt Vader's belief in this goal -- he surrounds himself with so much order that it's stifling to look at too closely, and he allows no conflict.  That his method leaves room for improvement is beyond question, but the value springs from a need to make sense of his life, and even from a brand of generosity; Anakin wants stability not only for himself, but for everyone.  In the end, the fact that his methods of achieving this control in fact subvert the very goal he's trying to achieve may well be part of what causes the conflict Luke senses and acts on. Family.  The Jedi seem not to think much of familly--Anakin is warned that his concern for his mother will lead him to the dark side; Luke is later warned that his compassion for his father will lead to the same place, and that his feelings for his sister must be buried deeply to protect her.  But both Anakin and Luke defy this outright.  Even before the conflict turns to one between Palpatine on one side and Vader and Luke on the other, Anakin has staked his position on the subject.  When challenged on his love for his mother, he looks Yoda in the eye and says, "What does that have to do with anything?"  Yoda believes he's trumped him with philosophy, but the distinct impression of the scene is that Anakin remains unconvinced.  Likewise, when Palpatine tells him to kill his son, his immediate response is to seek an alternative--"If he could be turned..." That Palpatine doesn't see this as a challenge is a mark of his increasing overconfidence, but it doesn't change the nature of the action.  Vader, as he did when he was still Anakin, has flat-out contradicted an authority figure over his feelings for his family. "Watto doesn't know I've built it." This leads naturally into the question of how Anakin relates to authority.  In TPM, we got a good glimpse of how he functions when he is under someone's absolute authority -- in this case, Watto.  He never defies Watto (though I'd guess he would have if he'd been there for that little conversation about Shmi), he only argues mildly, and he does as he is told.  He does not enter the pod race without permission.  But he does keep secrets.  Watto may think he has a nearly perfect slave, but Anakin uses disguise and silence to keep the things he wants to keep from falling into Watto's hands.  He's hesitant to make Threepio look complete (in the novelization, he actually doesn't tell Watto that Threeio is functional), and he keeps his podracer looking like junk under a tarp, until he has the opportunity to get Qui-Gon to claim it.  It isn't far-fetched to assume that he retained this mentality -- not a value, precisely, I suppose -- into adulthood.  Obviously, he knew about Luke at least two years before the Emperor did; Palpatine drew him out of the middle of a battle in ESB to state that he'd just discovered this "new enemy," while the audience knows that Vader has already been scouring the galaxy for some time, specifically looking for Luke Skywalker.  When I polled visitors to this site on when Vader knew about Luke, only 20% of the respondents believed that he never knew anything until the Death Star was destroyed.  Why is that feasible?  Because it's the way Anakin operates.  Watto doesn't know I've built it... and Palpatine doesn't know about my son.  What the Master doesn't know about is his own. The character of Anakin Skywalker is one of the most fascinating in modern drama, not because he goes through a radical change -- many characters do -- but because beneath it, there is a basic unity of identity.