Forget the Force, 'The Lord' Rules
Eric Lipton

It is the climax of the movie, and easily one of the most powerful scenes in the history of cinema. Luke Skywalker, facing Darth Vader at the end of "The Empire Strikes Back," losing both the battle and his hand, crouches precariously on a small bridge over a seemingly bottomless pit. Vader picks that traditional bonding moment to inform Luke that he is actually Luke's father.

Luke's whine of disagreement is understandable: His dad is a genocidal planet-destroying maniac, he just lost one of his more useful evolutionary tools and, let's face it, Luke generally whines about everything anyway.


Darth's revelation takes all the film's previous insistence on the easy dichotomy of good vs. evil and throws it, well, into a bottomless pit. Evil can spawn good, and good can become evil, and the lines in between are fluid and ever changing. Suddenly the "Star Wars" universe is much more real and interesting.

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