- If you, like me, wish to remove both the moment that the fake Queen orders Padmé to go clean R2 and the scene where she actually is cleaning him and meets Jar Jar, you only miss two things:
- The first part of a small subplot where Panaka gets impatient/distrustful with the Jedi
- Padmé’s name.
The first one doesn’t matter very much, is arguably even good since there’s no payoff anyway, but the second one can be a big problem. We’d only learn her name when Anakin seeks her out in Coruscant before he’s rejected by the Jedi, which is a bit too late for us to gain a degree of intimacy we should already have with her character.
Here’s a thought - what if we just cut the first scene, but preserve the second? What if Padmé’s cleaning R2 just because she feels like it, rather than being ordered? She’s Queen, so she can do as she pleases, and she’s not exactly busy with official business. This way, one of the first things she’d do when given a bit of liberty is choose to clean up a little robot - hinting at both her humility and compassion (similar to Rey with BB8) and her interest in droids (and perhaps mechanics).
One of the weaker plot points in the prequels is Padmé and Anakin’s romance, and one of the weaker plot points in TPM is the connection that Padmé and Anakin seem to develop that isn’t exactly well explored on screen. But if she has a natural interest in droids (and mechanics), that could help show why she’s drawn to Anakin when she sees he’s built (or repaired) his own, C-3PO. It’s arguably one of the better scenes relating to their character development together in this film (as much as people tend to skip it because it’s world-shrinking). And showing her compassion (plus highlighting it in the crawl, if you like) also shows why she’s drawn to a boy who acts so selflessly.