Originally posted by: COThe PT you have these characters pop in out of nowhere. Where was General Grevious in TPM & AOTC? Where was Count Dooku in TPM? It is bad storytelling to have a new sith in AOTC who was once a jedi not even be on the council or even mentioned in the previous movie!
You know, i had completely forgotten about that. I remember hearing about some fans saying that it would have been a great scene to have Qui Gon talking to Dooku at the Jedi temple in TPM as they await Anakin to return from testing with the jedi temple--and Dooku could quietly relate that his faith in the jedi order is wavering or some such, hinting at the turn he will take some years later. I think Dooku is a fascinating character and its a shame that scenes such as this did not exist. But the reason why such a cohesive scene was not filmed is very simple: Dooku was not created until AOTC. At the time, as far as my research shows, the character of the seperatists leader and the new sith apprentice were two seperate characters--then halfway through the pre-production Lucas got the idea of combining them and having him be played by Christopher Lee; thus he created the idea that Dooku was a former Jedi who left the order after becoming disillusioned, joined the sith and embarked on a ill-begotten quest to "clean up" the Republic. Then after the movie was shot Lucas wrote in that he was Qui Gon's former master, in a pick-up scene.
So the entire character regarding Dooku was made in an evolution. Then in ROTS Dooku was supposed to survive until the end, but Lucas had to totally re-write his plot outline in august of 2002, so he killed off Dooku at the start and had him replaced with a character who took over the role he was originally going to have--General Greivous.
Its fascinating on one hand but its also surprising at how much of the supposedly planned prequels Lucas simply made up as he went, and how these smaller things actually created more inconsistencies than the big things in the OT did.