Ok, I'll get the gushy part out of the way first: Anakin and Padme are just adorable in The Phantom Menace. Aww...

But really, they have the makings of a great relationship. I think the best examples are the dinner table scene and the japor snippet scene.

In the Skywalker hovel, Anakin really shows what his values are: freeing the slaves and helping people out. He tells his new friends about his efforts to build something that can detect the slave transmitters and his desire to free the slaves. He offers to enter a dangerous race so Padme can get the parts she needs to fix her ship. He also shows persistence when Qui-Gon tries to dodge the questions of whether he's a Jedi and why they're on Tatooine; he won't rest until he knows whether the Jedi has come to free the slaves. Besides that, he's built a droid for his mom, a pod for himself (showing resourcefulness, persistence, and a lot of optimism), and he's just adorable in his excitement to show them to Padme. He has a close, loving relationship with his mother. Seeing all this, it's no wonder Padme comes to care about Anakin so quickly.

The journey to Coruscant is the flip side of the dinner scene. Being in the ship shows Anakin a bit of Padme's world the way the hovel and the junk shop showed her his world. He sees Padme's reaction to Sio Bibble's transmission and gets a real feeling for how much she cares about the Naboo. After hearing, "The death toll is catastrophic," he can understand how much courage it took Padme to escape the Trade Federation army and stop on a Hutt-controlled world for repairs in a desperate attempt to get help from the Senate. He can see how her desire to free her people parallels his desire to free the slaves on Tatooine.

These two scenes show how much they have in common, both in their temperments and their values, and how well they get along in (relatively) ordinary situations. Their shared values are an especially strong bond, but it also counts for something that they enjoy just hanging out together. That plus the exchange over the japor snippet shows how wonderful their relationship could have been one day, if everything had worked out.

But right alongside these positive trends are several disturbing moments.

Problem one is Anakin's inability or unwillingness to actually get to know someone before judging what sort of person they are. The first thing he ever says to Padme is, "Are you an angel?" Whenever a guy's first reaction on meeting a girl (or vice-versa) is to comment on her appearance, I get worried. Sure, she's beautiful, and I can understand that you appreciate the view, but you have no idea what she's like! Don't you want to know what kind of person she is before telling her she's gorgeous? You notice that Anakin doesn't really try to find out more about Padme's character either in the junk shop or later. He just acts on the assumption that she's a nice girl and starts telling her all about the stuff he's built and then invites her home to meet his mom.

Maybe it's his Jedi instincts--but then, he thinks Palpatine is nice, too. That admittedly might be Palpatine's Sithiness at work. But there's another example: Anakin thinks that Obiwan is jealous, trying to hold him back, etc. etc. because Obiwan criticizes him sometimes. There's definitely a pattern here: Anakin judges people by superficial attributes. Padme is beautiful, Palpatine tells him he's great, Obiwan doesn't approve of everything he does--when you get down to it, that's about the sum of Anakin's powers of character analysis. His reaction to Padme is something to worry about. How much does he really pay attention to what her later words and actions reveal about her character, and how much is he just coasting along, still entranced by that image of an angel? (And really--one of the most beautiful creatures in the universe? Padme's not that much prettier than Tatooine girls.) Right up until the end, Anakin is blinded by Padme's beauty.

Problem two is Padme's enablement of Anakin's less-than-desirable behaviors. Think back to this scene: "You've never won a race? Not even finished?" Anakin never claimed he had finished a race, but he didn't make a full disclosure, did he? Padme obviously felt she was misled. Anakin either couldn't or didn't want to face telling the whole truth. This is not healthy. But neither Anakin nor Padme addresses this problem at all in TPM, and they never mention this incident again. Their solution is to pretend it didn't happen and nothing is wrong.

I think Padme missed a critical opportunity here. She could have told Anakin, "I understand that you didn't want us to worry about you racing, but it worries me a lot more that you don't think you can be honest with me. Friends need to be honest with each other, Anakin, because friends need to be able to trust each other. From now on, I want you to be completely honest with me, even if you think I won't like what you have to say. I know it's hard, but it's very important to me, and I would appreciate it a lot. I will always be honest with you too." And then she could hug him and thank him for helping her and just generally pile on the positive reinforcement. But she just let it slide. So when, thirteen years later, she comes out with, "When are we going to start being honest with each other?" I wanted to say, "Well, whose fault is it that you're not? Huh? You could have nipped that problem in the bud a long time ago!"

Like Anakin's future, Anakin and Padme's future is clouded, but the clouds could definitely break. These problems aren't fatal, not at this early stage. They're still both very good people. Plus, they're still essentially children--their characters are still open to change. They could have worked these problems out.

But they didn't. They let these problems grow and eat away at the very foundations of their relationship for the next thirteen years.