Originally posted by: Go-Mer-Tonic
No it's hollow for redeeming someone we were never introduced to.

Hah, Go-Mer, I love how you make idiotic replies just to rile people up. It makes me wonder if you truly believe the SE and the "saga" are better. If you can treat truth and reason so lightly, then how am I to believe you are even expressing your honest beliefs and your actual reasoning? Heh, whenever your idiocy is answered, you immediately drop that logical point and bring up yet another. I already know that you spout shit just because you like provoking people, but perhaps that is the end you actually seek. (If you're not allowed to change the topic you simply run away from a conversation.) It's funny. I now believe that there's a good chance that actually you prefer the OT and hate the saga.

You bring up an interesting discussion point though: the meaning that the original form of Vader's redemption had. Darth Vader had no need to be introduced any further than he had already been for us to care about him. It was gripping to know that a man who had fathered Luke (and Leia), had elicited warm memories from Ben, and had fought for the side of good had also somehow fallen into evil and become a monster. But it is a great spiritual truth that no man can know the heart of another completely. The question of whether or not Luke could reach out to Vader’s goodness was an unknown to the other characters and particularly to the audience. Would Vader turn from evil? Could he even if he wanted to?

When Vader saves Luke by killing the emperor, we see that Luke had succeeded in his chosen mission. He took a stand and refused to kill his own father because he believed there was good in him. That's hardly hollow on its own (it gives me goose bumps) but another big question after that concerned the actual redemption. It's one thing for a monster to save the life of his child (he could simply be turning from one evil and embracing another). It's a totally different thing for a monster to have a complete change of heart. We didn't know if Vader would be lost forever or not. But, at the end, we see him standing alongside Ben and Yoda in light. That's very moving.

My point is that the redemption of Darth Vader is so gripping precisely because we know so little about him. Would Luke be able to appeal to his goodness? Could Luke convince him to repent? Would Vader genuinely turn away from darkness and would the good side of the force prevent his spirit from being consumed by it forever? We didn't know! It was fantastic, human drama precisely because we weren’t introduced to Vader in any close way.

I never believed that George Lucas could actually ruin this, however. I thought that no matter how the PT unfolded, Vader would still be a rational man who would make evil choices out of mistaken ideals and impatience. In other words, he would degenerate into a monster, but that the monster would be seen as one that still had the capacity for goodness. Instead, we got a very different kind of monster. We got a psychopath. We got someone so evil and self-centered that we can't even believe he was ever even good in the first place! Even when he seemed to act like a good guy, those actions had to have been only for his own, selfish, psychotic reasons (if the overall character is to make any sense). There's no true goodness to be found there. No real ability to repent. You have a heart that can protect innocent children in one second and then murder them senselessly in the next without any empathy or even a second-thought concerning the wisdom of it all. We weren’t given a rational descent into evil, one that still tried to be honorable and was tortured by what he had become. Instead we got a pathetic crybaby whose only tears were tears of selfish greed.