This makes more sense if you first read Part I: Good and Bad Fathers!

George Lucas first hinted at the plot of the Prequel Trilogy in an interview published in June of 1983, the same month he went public with his divorce. He spoke of Star Wars as a modern fairy tale, with moral lessons about good and evil. "Darth Vader is the bad father; Ben Kenobi is the good father," said Lucas. "The good and bad mothers are still to come." (9)

The good mother, in this case, is clearly Shmi Skywalker. She's a character Lucas could relate to, having been suddenly thrust into parenting himself. "There's no one I admire more than single mothers," Lucas has remarked, "because they are the real heroes." (10) Shmi didn't even choose to get pregnant, but her home was a place of warmth and kindness, and she taught Anakin to be sensitive and giving. Perhaps more important, though, was her willingness to let him go. As Qui-Gon presents Anakin with the opportunity to leave home and become a Jedi, Shmi selflessly encourages her son to follow his dream. She allows him to not only be taken away and raised by a surrogate father, but does so knowing that she will never see him again.

Shmi may have been able to let go of Anakin, but he was unable to forget her. This inability to move on also affects his marriage to the love of his life, Padmé. They are forced to keep the union a secret, since matrimony is forbidden by the Jedi. And Padmé, after initially being reluctant to fall in love, begins to pull Anakin away from his promising career. In Revenge of the Sith, the now-pregnant Padmé decides to leave politics behind -- and she wants Anakin to go with her, to resign from his life as a Jedi so they can raise a family in seclusion.

Anakin's central conflict then becomes the struggle between his duties as a Jedi and his new responsibilities as a family man. It's a challenge similar to what George Lucas faced during the making of the first Star Wars trilogy. While he was consumed with finishing his saga, Marcia Griffin wanted her workaholic husband to stay home, have a social life, and take vacations with her. (11) "She was not feeling happy," Lucas later admitted, "and she was feeling, I think, that the reason she was not feeling happy was because I wasn't being able to spend enough time with her, and pay enough attention." (12)

Unlike Lucas, Anakin doesn't get divorced -- instead, he stays married until it turns him evil. After receiving prophetic visions of Padmé dying in childbirth, Anakin embraces the dark side of the Force in the hopes of using it to prevent her death. (13) But Anakin's love for his wife, like Lucas', had a breaking point. As Padmé makes one final appeal to Anakin, pleading with him to "leave everything else behind," Obi-Wan Kenobi emerges, having secretly stowed away on Padmé's ship. Anakin lets his suspicions get the better of him, and his furious reaction -- the jealousy of a jilted husband -- reflects Lucas' own experience. (14) This leads to Anakin's final descent into darkness, in which he duels Obi-Wan and chokes Padmé out of anger.

Following Anakin's attack, Padmé is found barely conscious. She's brought to a medical facility, where hospital robots work quickly to save her twin babies. But Padmé's deteriorating condition perplexes everyone involved. "Medically, she is completely healthy," one droid reports; their official diagnosis is simply that she has lost the will to live. Padmé, then, gets the blame for her own unexplained death. This is more than a character flaw, or the tragic result of a broken heart. By dying of her own accord, Padmé commits the central crime of Star Wars lore: she abandons her children, leaving them without father or mother.

Neither Shmi Skywalker nor Obi-Wan Kenobi planned to be parents, but they accepted the challenge and committed themselves to the task. In this capacity, they are essentially stand-ins for a young George Lucas. Padmé, who leaves her family instead of trying to save it, is the emotional echo of Marcia Griffin. And Padmé did possess the power to save Anakin, since she was the last person in the galaxy who believed that there was some good left in him. That flicker of hope could have redeemed Anakin (after all, it worked for their son Luke in Return of the Jedi), but when she died, so did his chance for salvation. So not only was Padmé the root of his turn to the dark side, she was also the reason he remained evil for decades afterwards. Padmé is the Bad Mother, a charge which becomes evident during the climax of Revenge of the Sith. As Padmé delivers the twins, her labor pangs are intercut with the mechanical reconstruction of Anakin's mangled body. The effect is startling -- Padmé is giving birth to Darth Vader.

Her destructive maternity is then balanced by a heroic act of fatherhood. Senator Bail Organa, who had previously been relegated to chauffeuring Obi-Wan and Yoda around the galaxy, offers to adopt the newborn girl, Princess Leia. Her brother, Luke Skywalker, is taken to live with his father's step-brother. The emphasis on adoption is no doubt a reflection of George Lucas' personal life, but it's also an underlying theme of the entire Prequel Trilogy. Good parenting, according to Lucas, can make the difference between virtue and villainy. And those who choose to have children -- such as Jango Fett, Bail Organa, and Lucas himself -- make the best parents. This alone introduces Anakin as a tragic figure, since he's never given the choice to raise his own children.

Lucas emphasized this point even before the release of Revenge of the Sith. In 2004, he released his original Star Wars trilogy on DVD, which gave him the opportunity to tweak various elements from the three films. His biggest change was to a scene from The Empire Strikes Back, in which Darth Vader shares a holographic chat with Emperor Palpatine. For the DVD, several lines were added to the conversation, to clarify that Vader had no idea that Luke Skywalker was his son. Only after this revelation does Vader suggest converting Luke to the dark side instead of killing him. Vader's journey towards righteousness begins at that moment; apparently, the mere knowledge that he has a son is enough to start him down that path. This revised scene, especially combined with the Prequel Trilogy, changes our entire perception of Episodes IV - VI. It's no longer the story of a son redeeming his father, it's now about a man who finds redemption simply because he is a father.

Likewise, after the sting of his divorce, George Lucas found redemption in his children. And though it took a full fifteen years, he was finally able to balance the demands of filmmaking and fatherhood. The one thing he hasn't been able to reincorporate is marriage. He insists that he'd love to get married again, but for now, Lucas seems content to live the paternal yet unattached life of a Jedi. "Yes, there's a lonely part to having kids alone,'' he told The New York Times, shortly before the release of the first prequel. "Without two, the emotional need is always there. You don't have that level of sharing. But also, you don't have to compromise." (15)


Notes:
(9) Quoted in Aljean Harmetz, "Burden of Dreams: George Lucas," American Film (June 1983), pp. 30-36. There is a theory that the "good and bad mothers" concept was played out in Willow (1988), but because the quote was in reference to Star Wars -- and due to the obvious inclusion of a "good mother" in the Prequel Trilogy -- I'm not convinced.
(10) Quoted in Orville Schell, "A Galaxy of Myth, Money and Kids," The New York Times (21 March, 1999).
(11) For more on Lucas' marriage, see Kerry O'Quinn, "The George Lucas Saga," Starlog (3 parts: July, August, September 1983); and Aljean Harmetz, "Burden of Dreams: George Lucas," American Film (June 1983), pp. 30-36.
(12) Quoted from Biography: George Lucas: Creating an Empire, A&E, January 27, 2002.
(13) Interestingly, the same method which promised to save Padmé -- the ability to "create life" -- could also potentially explain how Anakin was conceived without a father, giving him extra incentive to turn to the dark side.
(14) Michael Kaminski, in his fascinating work, The Secret History of Star Wars, dissects early drafts of the prequel screenplays to illustrate the possibility of a planned Anakin/Padme/Obi-Wan love triangle (p. 423). However, in his audio commentary on the Revenge of the Sith DVD, Lucas notes that while Anakin was indeed suspicious of Obi-Wan and Padmé, he didn't necessarily suspect a romantic relationship.
(15) Quoted in Orville Schell, "A Galaxy of Myth, Money and Kids," The New York Times (21 March, 1999).

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This twin blog published in honor of the newest "Stoogelings," Malachi and Beruriah... but you can call them Mal and Beru.