Vader did it to save his son, not to “kill the bad guy”. There’s a big difference there.
But that just makes Vader’s motives more selfish. Palpatine was slaughtering people by the shipload (not to mention subjugating an entire galaxy). You’d think Luke would be justified in taking this guy down. But no, all Luke could do was make sure he stayed Zen. Great if you’re scoring brownie points at a Buddhist retreat maybe, but not much help with the war effort.
Vader’s position was purely selfish. “Hey, no-one messes with my kid!”. He was merely protecting his own. How does this earn him instant Jedi nirvana?Therein lies my problem with Vader’s “redemption”. Even if you can make the case that a mass murderer can absolve himself with one good act, Vader’s one good act was hardly selfless.
Exactly! At least in the case of the OT you could argue that Vader’s redemption was a personal one - that he died for his son and got to be a smiley ghost guy for that reason alone (ghost-Obi and ghost-Yoda’s fireside forbearance notwithstanding). But changing Shaw into Hayden opens the can of worms that is the prophecy of the Chosen One, the ridiculous ‘balance to the Force’ business, and a last-minute pardon for unspeakable war crimes that should make any Jedi-supporter uneasy to say the least.
But the bigger problem for me (slightly off-topic but…) is that Luke didn’t save the galaxy. After all that build-up, all that stuff about the quick and easy path, all that guff about ‘a new hope’ and ‘our only hope’ and ‘the other hope’ and everything else, all Luke did was keep his cool long enough for his mass-murdering old man to get a bedside conversion. I bet Luke brought the house down when he related his story at the Ewok luau.
The real saviour of the galaxy was Chewbacca. It was Chewie who hijacked a Scout Walker and turned the tide of the battle. All Luke did was make sure old Anakin went out with a smile.