If Luke was in hiding....
 

If baby Luke was hidden away from Anakin/Darth Vader, why did he retain his original last name? I know that the family that takes him in are Skywalkers, but they should have also changed their names. Kind of a witness relocation thing. And get the hell of of Tatooine and the house where Anakin visited when his mom died. Ben Kenobi got as far away from Coruscant as he could, as well did Yoda, but the Skywalkers stayed right where they were.

And to answer any potential naysayers, YES I DO STILL ENJOY THE MOVIES! Thank you for your concern.!

Actually, the family that took him in are Lars.

Actually the last names of his uncle and aunt is "Lars"

EDIT: beaten to it by Groucho.

Don't you get it!?!? He was hiding in plain sight!!!!

Maybe they did move places, just not the planet.

Also, I don't think Anakin knew he had kids to begin with, otherwise he would have searched for them.

Yep, Owen & Beru Lars are not Skywalkers. Although that might have been the case when Star Wars released. It seemed to lean towards the way that Owen and the then unnamed Anakin were brothers.

As someone said in another topic, the name Skywalker is probably a little more common than that. Vader knew he had at least a son; Palpy didn't, and assumed that anyone with the name of Skywalker was unrelated to his prized pupil.

It could be that in the Star Wars universe that "Skywalker" is the equivalent of "Smith."

One of the assumptions that fans have made is that Skywalker is the equivalent of "Smith" in the Star Wars galaxy. That is, it's a common name that doesn't raise eyebrows.

However, I assume that Episode III will have to deal with this. Kenobi keeps his last name (although he takes the name of "Ben"), takes Luke (who has the last name of 'Skywalker') to go live with Anakin's stepbrother on Anakin's homeworld. Doesn't seem to be the best hiding job I could imagine.

I assume that either (a) Anakin/Vader will be unaware that Padme is pregnant or (b) Anakin will make some comment that makes it clear he will NEVER return to Tatooine.

It all adds up to Anakin not knowing he had kids. My only question is how far into pregnancy was Padme before Anakin became Vader. The most logical choice for her after seeing Anakin's growing insanity is to hide her pregnancy, but we all know you can only do that for so long.

There will probably be a scene in Episode III where Anakin tells Obi-Wan that he's going to be a father. This would also tie-in with Anakin passing on the lightsaber to Obi-Wan and tells him to give it to his offspring. Yeah, he probably could've done it himself, but with the war still raging, Anakin might have feared that he would not make it out alive. And in a way, that is exactly what happened.

Heh, Groucho's on the ball today! 1 step ahead of everyone :)

Simple thinking.


Anakin had a terrible memory connected to that location. His mom is buried there. I doubt he would want to go back and visit her grave ever. So keeping the kid in the spot vader would most likely never go because of a bad memory seems logical.

Luke was a purloined letter.

Luke Starkiller sounded to silly so he stayed with Skywalker?

Perhaps Vader knew where his son was all along, but had no interest in him or didn't want his son to know who he was until he got older. When he realized what a powerful Jedi he could be (when Luke blew up the Death Star) it was then that he decided to try and join forces with him. Perhaps Luke was only being hidden from the Emperor, and not Vader (and Vader didn't want him to know about his son yet).

That Vader was quite possibly hiding his son from the Emperor is an interesting argument. It is quite possible he had some unconcscious knowledge of Luke and Leah's existance through the Force.

If you watch in Empire it is clear he has some emotional ambivalence as he allows Leah and Solo to embrace before entombing Han.

Two things! One, Vader thinks his kids have died in Episode III because of what happens to Padme. I won't tell you anymore so as not to spoil everything. Two, Luke would have been safer on Tatooine that anywhere else. Tatooine is a place Anakin doesn't want to go back to. That's why he waits 10 years before going back there in Episode II, and only goes back for one reason. He feels that his mother is in trouble. Tatooine is a place of bad memories and bad occurences. His mother died, he was a slave there, and yes, he hated sand. ;):D

Well from ROTJ, it really did seem like Vader first realized that there was a sister involved, so I doubt he let his daught have a moment with the soon to be test subject of the freezing process.

Watch that scene again and observe what Vader does.

What about the possibility that Anakin knows Padme is pregnant, but he's become so dangerous that she's sent away into hiding. Then either by accident or intentionally he thinks she's been killed. It'd certainly help push him over to the dark side, especially if he blames Obi-wan for her loss.

Boy, ain't speculation fun?

Please try to spoil nothing. Thx.

We all know Padme doesn't make it out of Ep 3, and we can assume Anakin thought she was only pregnant with 1 kid (hey, just because they can make spaceships and ray guns doesn't mean they had ultrasound!).

Therefore, when she dies, Anakin probably assumes the baby dies with her. So, there's nothing for him to look for, and he goes about for the next 25 or so years being an evil badass.

After the destruction of the Death Star, it would be common knowledge that someone named Skywalker destroyed it. He would've done some research to find out where Luke came from and he would also remember that "the Force was strong with this one".

He would've realized that Luke was with Obi-Wan on the Death Star, and deduced that Obi-Wan saved the baby and hid him all these years. So finally, by Ep5 he hatched a plan to "rule the galaxy as Father and Son".

(and actually Vader never does set foot on Tattoine again - the closest he got was in orbit in Ep4)

With Episodes I & II now having taken place, it seems to give a bit more depth to what happens to Owen & Beru in Episode IV. Instead of being taken prisoners, they are wiped out pretty badly. I can just picture the stormtroopers informing Vader they traced the missing droids to the Lars homestead and ask for further instructions. Vader's repressed memories would make him go ballistic; he would order them to destroy everything. Even though the Tusken Raiders killed his mother, he probably would've put equal blame on the Lars family.

How about...

Luke's last name was "Lars" until he grew up and found out who his real father was and then changed his name to "SkyWalker".

We do not know that she dies, in fact Leah says in ROTJ that she remembers that her mother was "beautiful and yet very sad". So, I say she takes Leah to another planet (Alderan - If that is how you spell it) and dies some there.

Her death may be faked at 1st to protect her and the babies, but once the twinns are born, Luke is taken away by Obe-Wan and Leah goes with her mother somewhere else. Leah's mother must die when Leah is 2 to 4 years old for her to remember her.

There is a chance that the force helps her to remember from an earlier age (1 - 3 years old).

So to me it's obvious that Leia had to be 3 or 4 when Padme died.
Which means Padme survives Episode III and dies 3to4 years after the events of episode III, and Obi-Wan takes luke to the Lars after birth.

I don't "know" Padme dies, and if you do, please use spoiler tags to conceal any info you have on ROTS. Some of us want the story to unravel before us in the theater, not on some internet message board.

If Padme dies or wether Ani knows about his children are MAJOR plot points in the film. Please be considerate and use spoiler tags where necessary as per the TOS agreement of this website.

But everything else Obi Wan told Luke about his father was bullshit, why should the lightsaber story be any different. I imagine Obi Wan will just pick up Akakin's lightsaber after their confrontation, just so the audience can make the connection with that scene in ANH. I don't think the statement "Your father wanted you to have this when you were old enough" is anymore truthful than "He betrayed and murdered your father". Hell, they way they act in Episode II, "He was a good friend" is really stretching the truth.

Imagine what sand would do to that respirator thingie he wears.

That one is easy. Lucas didn't decide to make Vader his father until after the first movie was released.

Ding ding ding! We have a winner!

So who was Darth Vader going to be originally?

Now I don't buy all of the explainations that Lucas currently gives about always intending this or that, but I do believe he always intended Darth to be Luke's father. There are a lot of subtle cues by Alec Guiness and the guy who plays Owen.

Subtle clues? Like what?

I've always thought it's been extremely obvious that the Darth father thing was some "revelation" that came up during scripting/filming Ep. 5.

It's just far too clumsy with the way things are said.

Vader's real identity was something that Lucas toyed around with back and forth before settling with what we know now. He even considered not revealing it until ROTJ. In early drafts of TESB, Vader & Anakin were two completely different people.

A New Hope:

Beru: "He (Luke) has too much of his father in him."
Owen: "That's what I'm afraid of. (Because his father is Darth Vader)"

The book "The Annotated Screenplays" says they brainstormed a scene where Obi Wan introduces Luke to the ghost of Anakin on Dagobah. Read the book. There was no plans towards any sequel (or prequel) other than "We hope to make a sequel". The movies were completely made up as they went along. It's in black and white. Now that's not to say they didn't have an incredible epiphany when they did come up with such ideas as Vader being his father, but he didn't have an overall plan for 6 (9-12) movies from the start. Knowing this, I find it silly to pick apart every line in the movies (first one, especially) and expect complete concordance. Even Tolkien had to go back and rewrite part of "The Hobbit" to allow LOTR to work.

And another point is that most of the lines in A New Hope could be interpreted in different ways. They are vague, and there were probably a number of ways Lucas could take the Trilogy and still make it work. Heck, he even wanted Han to sacrifice himself for his friends in Empire, but that idea got changed as well.

"He's got too much of his father in him" could mean what? At one point, Lucas wanted Obi Wan to be Luke's father. Obi Wan was a crazy old man according to Uncle Owen, and that would be sufficient enough to say that was what he was afraid of. It was a vague enough statement that no matter what Lucas came up with, people would have gone back and heard that line, and gone, "OH, that's what Lucas meant!" I doubt if Obi Wan was Luke's father anybody hearing that line would have concluded that truly meant that Luke's dad should have been Darth Vader.

I don't know if it's in the doc material or from a seperate interview that Hamill did, but when George told him that Leia was Luke's sister, Mark's reaction was:

"You made that up on the drive over here, didn't you?!"