I rather liked it, and it gave me hopes for the film that I see may not be unfounded.
scionofgrace has some cogent comments in this post about Palpatine's rise to power, which I have been recommending to people:I was thinking to myself how it could be possible that the Emperor could topple a thousand-plus-year-old Republic and take out the entire Jedi Order, and then be defeated twenty-some years later by a rag-tag Alliance. I think it has to do with his position in the situation. The rise of the Empire was all down to his infiltration of the both the Republic and the order. He knew exactly what he was getting into and could infect it all from the inside. And he had some fifteen years (or more) to do it.
But once his plan was ripe, he couldn't hide any more. He could no longer act from behind the scenes, and by his very triumph he made himself a target of every right-thinking being in the galaxy. The Alliance knew exactly what they would have to do to win. And they had several advantages the Emperor didn't know about, or underestimated. Luke and Leia had grown up free from his influence, and could not be seduced as easily as Vader. Kenobi and Yoda, even after death, could do all kinds of damage just by their influence. Most of all, some part of Vader still remembered what it was to be Anakin Skywalker.
Luke was right. Overconfidence was Palpatine's weakness. The Light Side really was stronger, and he didn't see it until it threw him down a reactor shaft.
Equally so, the selfsame overconfidence made him chop open the goose that laid the golden egg, and discover... nothing.
In other news, Tripitaka theorizes that Anakin is a clone of Darth Plagueis. It's more than farfetched; I know of no basis in canon, and you might think that Palpatine could do better than to seed the clone of the master he murdered on a "backwater" Outer Rim planet. Is the implication really that Plagueis "virtually fathered" Anakin using midichlorians? This didn't come out in the book, and I haven't seen the film yet.
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Banazir
