Last year I wrote pretty much all I have to say about The Phantom Menace, or so I thought. Tonight it occurred to me, as my son showed it to his younger sister for the first time, that there was a larger narrative purpose for the Padmé/Sabé decoy ruse—which, within the film, makes no sense and has no payoff whatsoever. I’m surprised I’ve never seen it before, though I’m sure others have.

The rationale is this: to plant the seed now, in the first film of the trilogy, that even the wisest and most experienced of the Jedi could be fooled by a simple swap, one person posing as another. In other words, the Jedi are so decadent and blinkered that they are fooled by a queen slipping out and playacting as a servant in her entourage, and the servant standing in for the queen. If the eyes of the Jedi can be blinded so easily, all the more so in the case of a Sith lord donning the robes of an esteemed senator and infiltrating the heart of the Republic.

It’s worth adding, too, that this narrative decision by Lucas adds more fodder to the Darth Jar Jar theory. The Jedi can’t see the queen in the servant or the Sith in the senator; nor can they see the Sith apprentice in the bumbling Gungan fool in front of them.