So in this video we’re going to delve deep in to Darth Vader’s suit…
After the injuries sustained on Mustafar in the duel with Obi-Wan Kenobi, for all intents
and purposes Vader became wholly depended on the self-contained life-support system
that is his suit.
This suit takes care of all of his bodily needs, essentially replacing or subsidizing
most of his internal organs and taking care of Vader’s breathing, heart rate, eating
and, yes, even pooping.
In regards to the latter, the novel, Dark Lord: The Rise of Darth Vader, notes that
the Sith Lord relies on a complex series of “catheters, collection pouches, and recyclers”
so that he can pass waste.
All of these systems work, for the most part, autonomously without any direct input from
Vader himself.
However, they can be interacted with via the buttons on his chest plate.
According Darth Vader: A 3-D Reconstruction Log, which goes into detail about the specifics
of Vader’s armour, the big red button on Vader’s chest was a “manual override”
switch which allowed Vader to exert himself more than his suit would normally allow with
the proper tweaking of some of the other controls on his chest plate and belt.
The blue button located above this red one, returns control to the suit’s automated
systems.
The other buttons on his chest are noted by the book to be “programming touch plates”
save for the rightmost, red button, which when pressed, would reset all of Vader’s
life-support systems, including heart rate regulation.
During the reset process, Vader would be more or less disabled and near death while things
came back online.
So, yes, Vader would be easily defeatable by any Jedi simply using the force to press
the reset button on his suit, then sweeping in quickly while he’s partially disabled
and lopping his head off.
As such, in any duel, Vader always had to carefully guard his chest piece above anything
else, both with his lightsaber and the force.
Something like this happened in the Expanded Universe when Antinnis Tremayne almost defeated
Vader by pressing a button on his chest panel, causing Vader to collapse while gasping for
air.
Vader also has a belt that has three small control boxes on it, with the left one including
controls for regulating his breathing manually.
As for the other boxes, the middle one is said to contain spare energy cells and some
basic communications equipment for emergencies, as well as audio sensors.
The buttons on the rightmost box are temperature controls, allowing Vader to adjust his suit’s
internal temperature to suit his needs.
Get it?
This same type of environmental control is also found in storm trooper suits.
If you’re wondering why Vader’s suit has external, very vulnerable controls that could
kill or incapacitate him if someone fiddled with them, Vader was curious about that too
and though it’s never explicitly confirmed by the Emperor, a popular theory is that the
suit was specifically designed that way to make sure that Vader is always vulnerable.
For instance, in the book, Dark Lord: The Rise of Darth Vader, Vader expressed both
confusion and annoyance at the poor quality of the cybernetic implants he’d been given,
especially in comparison to the much more modern cybernetic limb he had previously had
installed after Count Dooku lopped off one of his limbs.
You see, the suit that was crafted for Vader was using obsolete technology when it was
meticulously installed on his charred body.
Even General Grievous’ many decades old suit was superior in many ways to Vader’s,
particularly when it came to mobility.
In the novels and comics where you’re granted a brief glimpse into Vader’s mind, the Sith
Lord makes it clear that his armour is both uncomfortable and ill-fitting, painfully “snagging
on his ruined flesh” as he moves.
Beyond this, the synthetic flesh they chose to use to replace his old skin is noted to
itch constantly.
The suit also included needles that were uncomfortably jammed into his head to interface with his
mind and the monitoring panel on his chest beeped frequently and for no reason.
Beyond being outdated, the equipment was also conspicuously spotty in its reliability, with
parts regularly breaking down and various bits of his life support system regularly
on the fritz, constantly reminding Vader of how tenuously he was clinging to his life.
All this hindered his ability to ever relax or even get anything better than short stints
of sleep here and there.
No wonder he was grumpy all the time.
This ensured Vader was always suffering from some level of exhaustion to go along with
being uncomfortable and having limited mobility, including it being extremely difficult for
him to even raise his arms above his shoulder level.
Then there’s the weight of the suit.
This was such that one of the few areas of his body that wasn’t damaged after his battle
with Obi-Wan, his spine, actually largely had to be replaced over time as it could not
support the bulky suit.
One of the droids who outfitted Vader with the suit, DD-13, even wondered as they were
working on him if the limitations they were being forced to work under in saving Vader
were intentional.
Beyond the fact that better cybernetics to give Vader a more comfortable life were available,
they could have also performed reconstructive cosmetic surgery to make him look more or
less normal if they had not been given budgetary limitations and limited equipment.
You might be wondering at this point why Vader didn’t simply get a more modern suit made
for himself that would be comfortable, drastically less vulnerable to damage, and not make him
feel claustrophobic all the time, and give him back his old mobility.
Such a suit was designed, but unfortunately without the Emperors’ help to sustain his
life during the transplant of his body from one suit to the other, such an operation would
likely result in his death.
And even with said help (which would require a great deal of trust in the Emperor on Vader’s
part), it would have been a risky procedure, so the suit was never built.
He did, however, create special chambers he could sustain himself in for short periods
to recharge his suit and rejuvenate somewhat.
On occasion, he also made attempts to use the Force to sustain his body without need
of the suit, but all efforts ultimately failed.
Because of the limitations of the outdated suit, Vader was unable to ever truly tap the
full extent of his connection to the Force, something that Palpatine was all too aware
of.
You see, it’s revealed in the Expanded Universe that Palpatine was of the mindset that Vader’s
inability to tap into his full power was all due to his mental state and not from his injuries.
Vader himself wondered about on more than one occasion.
For instance, Vader stated, “You are so far less now than what you were, you are more
than half machine, you are like a painter gone blind, a composer gone deaf, you can
remember where the power was but the power you can touch is only a memory…”
And keeping Vader down was of vital importance to the Emperor.
As various sources, like the novel The Last Jedi, states, even in this weakened, distracted,
and permanently exhausted state, Vader was still almost as powerful as the Emperor and
could theoretically best him in combat.
A final piece of evidence that corroborates this is that Vader’s suit was designed in
such a way that many of his vital systems were extremely vulnerable to simple electrical
shocks.
This was revealed to Vader by the Emperor himself, after Vader began to chafe under
the Emperor’s rule.
The Emperor made sure Vader knew that any time he wished, he could use Force Lightning
to irreversibly damage Vader’s life support systems.
After learning of this, Vader re-submitted himself to the Emperor and on the side added
some electrical insulators to the vulnerable parts of his suit to help mitigate the problem.
But it wasn’t enough.
In the end, it was this vulnerability that ended Vader’s life.
When he picked up the Emperor to save Luke, even the non-directed Force Lightning was
sufficient to severely damage Vader’s respiratory control system, leading to his death aboard
the second Death Star in Return of the Jedi.
If you liked this video, please share it with your friends and subscribe.
Also, check out the store for some Viral merchandise.
I’ll see you later.
Hit the like button you must, yes, mmm…