Star Wars: Was Anakin/Vader The Balance In The Force All Along?

When we were first introduced to Star Wars it was like nothing anyone has seen before. Since then it has grown into this cultural phenomenon with one of the most passionate fanbases known to man. With all sorts of new content coming each year, there’s something from the original trilogy we’re still hung up on. Did Luke Skywalker succeed in bringing balance to the force? Between the OG trilogy and the prequels, maybe he did.

In Star Wars: A New Hope we meet Luke Skywalker, the good guy to Darth Vader’s bad guy. Instantly the film develops that balance right from the start, that Luke would be the savior while Vader was the destroyer. Even with that balance in place, the movies would go on to further their point with Vader carrying out Palpatine’s orders, but still, their powers were balanced out by Luke and Leia. However, by the end of Episode VI, the good guys win. Vader sacrifices himself to save his children, up until this point, the force is balanced. When they win, it’s back to being unbalanced to the light side.

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So in the end, Luke didn’t bring balance, he offset the boundaries. However, if you take a look at the bigger picture, out of all the characters, Anakin/Vader was still the most balanced of them all throughout the entire series. When we first meet him, he’s full of light, and hope. All the way back to the prequel trilogies, Anakin only turned to the dark side as his story progressed and things started to challenge his inner darkness. We see him as the villain in the original trilogy and then we’re led to believe he choose the path to darkness, but in reality, he still had balance.

Throughout his story, Anakin couldn’t separate himself from his connection to his loved ones, Padme, Ahsoka, and Obi-Wan. Once he felt betrayed by Padme and Obi-Wan he let Palpatine get in his head and bring out the darkness in him. However, as we see in the end, he’s brought back from the path of a Sith by that same connection to Luke proving that the light was still within him.

Even in the new Star Wars series Obi-Wan Kenobi, we’re led to believe that the balance is between Vader/Obi-Wan. But you have to ask yourself, isn’t it still there within Vader? Even as Vader says Anakin is no longer there, he killed him, that whole scene seems like he’s fighting within himself. As he’s defying Obi-Wan forcing him to come to grips with what he turned him into, there’s a desperation in his voice that almost seems as if he hopes Obi-Wan would end it then and there, but he doesn’t. Again he feels as if Ben had the chance to finish him off and end his pain and he turned his back on Anakin again.

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His open defiance and dialogue in that scene makes it seem like he’s pushing buttons trying to get an emotional response out of Obi-Wan. Being the Jedi Master that he is, instead, he walks away. That plea for Obi-Wan to end it again proves the balance in Anakin/Vader. He knows that he’s too far gone and that the only way to end the suffering was to be struck down at that moment. The emotion and pain in that scene is Anakin pushing through the control that is Vader, again showing off just how balanced the character is.

Maybe Qui-Gon was right and Anakin is the chosen one and maybe he was the balance in the force all along. He was impulsive and let his emotions get the best of him, but in the end, he had both a dark and a light side whereas Luke was generally good, and Palpatine bad. Both characters tipped the scale one way or the other while it was Anakin and Vader who was perfectly balanced.