I watched "Return of the Jedi" over the weekend (in HiDef!) and I have to say, the whole Luke/Darth Vader throw down at the end still bugs me. The thing that gets me is that the Emperor, in chiding Luke, kind of gives the whole purpose away and tells Luke what things will happen to turn Luke over to the Dark Side. You know, the way he keeps on saying things like "good, good, let your hate take over...." The thing is that by telling Luke what would turn him, he's making it far too easy for Luke to resist. After all, if you knew that doing certain things would lead to bad things happening, you'd try to keep from doing it.

So, what I'm wondering is if the Emperor was so smart, why didn't he use reverse psychology? Like telling Luke "oh, you know, the last thing, of course, you'd want to do is to let the hate flow through you. That would be bad." Or lie-- "darnit Luke. If you strike down Vader, you'll never turn to do the dark side." Or hell, if they really wanted to turn him mad, they could have said bad things to him. Like as he was fighting Vader, the Emperor could have said something like "you know why Darth abandoned your mother when she had you? Because she was a whore!"

Also, this hardly gets talked about, but the Emperor tells Luke to kill Darth Vader and take Darth's place next to the Emperor. In hindsight, this was probably a bad mood as this probably led to Darth throwing the Emperor down the energy shaft. Why would Darth help the Emperor out, after all, if the Emperor tried to urge somebody to kill you.