DuracellEnergizer said:
This whole discussion just serves to remind me of Lucas' ineptitude at crafting a cohesive "cosmic" story that makes any sense.
George's party line is that when the two Sith personified in the beings of the Emperor and Vader were killed/redeemed, evil itself was pretty much destroyed, a horrible imbalance created by the Sith's use of the Force was corrected, and a possibly-eternal period of peace and prosperity was ushered into existence throughout the universe. So, how the hell does this exactly work? The Sith can't misuse the Force, since the dark side is an inherent aspect of the Force that exists independently of any user who may choose to weild it. Even if two darksiders could profane the Force, so to speak, how come the thousands of Jedi who used to exist - who supposedly used the Force in the right way - couldn't use their powers to offset this disturbance somehow? And anyway, assuming all this claptrap could be made to make sense, how does the eradication of two Sith prevent other non-Sith darksiders - either from within or without the galaxy - from coming into existence? Logically, unless the Star Wars universe doesn't extend far beyond the main galaxy, there will always be darksiders elsewhere in the universe to misuse and unbalance the Force.
The explanation that I've gotten for this seems to be that the Sith at some time pre-TPM took some deliberate actions to throw the Force out of balance. It's not just their existence, but something they did to affect it. If I recall, it's probably in the Darth Plagueis book.
How Anakin killing Palpatine and then dying himself would fix this, isn't immediately clear. Neither is what exactly was done to destabilize the Force in the first place, or why it couldn't just be done again. And the idea that it's something they did instead of that they exist at all is not clear from the films alone, I think.
Even though explanations for these issues can be made, I think the whole topic is unnecessary. From the OT, there's no particular reason to think that the Force can even be out of balance, and what "out of balance" means in this instance is pretty vague. And if Lucas included it to intentionally reference some aspect of Buddhist theology or make some other metaphysical point, it's a little bit lost on me. I used a World War II metaphor to describe this elsewhere - no matter if the Allies or the Axis won, the sun would still rise and set. This business of knocking the Force around changes the stakes. I suppose the point could be simply to make it more 'epic,' but again, it just seems unnecessary and a little too grandiose to me.