Yeah in the novel Palpatine and Sidious fought dead evenly, until Mace finally won via tactics and shatter point.
Even in the film its pretty clear they are going back and forth. And Gillard confirmed they were both level 9 duelists, even later retconning Mace down a tiny bit to a 8.5/9.
With regards to Mace vs Palpatine, there's probably no point in rehashing the same old arguments regarding whether or not Mace's disarming of Palpatine was legitimate; since the fight is never shown from Palpatine's perspective, there's no way to prove his intentions one way or the other. What we do have is Mace's perspective, and what can be said for sure is that, even taking the most generous possible interpretation for Mace, blade-to-blade he'd reached an impasse with Sidious:
Then, after sensing fear in his opponent, he made to take advantage of that moment of weakness and score the decisive blow:
That's the questionable bit, though, since Palpatine suggests just afterwards that it hadn't been his fear and hesistance that Mace had sensed at all--but rather Anakin's:
Even if we disregard the legitimacy that the narration lends to the claim, and assume that Palpatine was just bluffing, Mace still wouldn't have bested Sidious had the contest continued. Once again, impasse is the most favorable possible interpretation:
All of this is pretty irrelevant to the topic at hand, though, since Mace's contest with Palpatine is the outlier. His sole feat that suggests parity with Yoda amongst the wealth of them that he has, performed under clearly extraordinary circumstances. For those who aren't aware, Mace's fighting style, Vaapad, is a technique that uses negative emotions, like the Sith do. When Mace fights, he flirts with the dark side, with his discipline--his diligence in holding himself back--being the only thing that prevents him from falling to evil like Vaapad's other practitioners did:
Like with the Sith, Mace's strength is rooted in the intensity of his passions and negative thoughts, which is crucial to note, because his inner darkness is explicitly at an unprecedented, all-time high going into his fight with Sidious:
This is directly referenced in the fight itself. Mace fights for his "secret love," casting away his Jedi restraint and allowing himself to be swallowed by the dark, in contrast with his previous disposition:
Given that Dooku is not the Supreme Chancellor of the Republic, and that Mace is (presumably) not coming into the fight fresh after having his heart "shredded, burned to ashes, and fed to him," it's fair to assume that his performance here will be more in line with the rest of his performances, rather than the outlier that is his contest with Palpatine.
When he duels against late-CW Grievous, even though the General's mobility is severely limited by the environment, Mace is pressured, and he even almost has the tables turned on him when he moves to capitalize on an opening created by his environmental advantage:
Dooku's handling of Grievous from the same time period (both in and out of universe) is, once again, as good or better than Mace's. I could also post panels of both of them slapping around Quinlan Vos with impunity, but with this much, the point already ought to be made: in none of the cases where Mace fights opponents that Dooku had also fought, does Mace ever fare decidedly better than Dooku did. Nor does he, in his duels with Saesee Tiin, Depa Billaba, Mother Talzin, or even his 2v1 against Darth Maul or his brief duel with the Count himself, ever perform in line with what one would expect from Yoda or Palpatine.
And this is completely consistent with what we're told. In both Yoda: Dark Rendezvous and the Power of the Jedi sourcebook, Mace and Dooku are presented as peers:
This is consistent with Nick Gillards' categorization of the two as "level eight" combatants, as opposed to Anakin, Yoda, and Palpatine, who were categorized as "level nines":
In fairness, Mace was highlighted as being on the higher end of the "level eight" spectrum, and I would argue that, when he fully embraced his darkness against Sidious, he probably did cross that border into "level nine" territory. Extraordinary circumstances aside, though, he is an eight, his feats are consistent with other eights, and Count Dooku--being significantly stronger than Maul per several sources--is also a likely candidate to be high on the "level eight" spectrum. Ergo, the fight is likely to be decided by compatibility rather than a gulf in skill or power.
Shatterpoint has never been effectively applied that way, though, not by Mace or by anybody else. Shatterpoints typically present themselves in ways that are either too literal or too abstract to be practically useful in a duel. In the case of his contest with Palpatine, Mace's use of shatterpoint is arguably what got him killed:
He was so reassured by his realization that Anakin was Palpatine's shatterpoint, so certain that victory was imminent, that he never even considered that Anakin would betray him. He was right about Palpatine's weakness, but he had no way of making use of it in the battle.
Mace's fighting style doesn't actually emphasize physical strength, though; Vaapad is aggressive, but it's all about overwhelming the opponent with fast and erratic strikes, not pounding them like Djem So does. Besides, while Mace does have some fair strength feats to his name, Dooku deals with physically dominant opponents all of the time; his weakness against brute force is overstated. Mace Windu is no Savage Oppress, and he's certainly no Anakin Skywalker.
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Last edited by NewGuy01 on Jan 2nd, 2020 at 10:39 AM
Jan 1st, 2020 10:18 PM
