If able to get Vader into the shuttle, Luke could have flown straight to the medical frigate to dump him into a bacta tank and possibly save Vader’s life.
If able to get Vader into the shuttle, Luke could have flown straight to the medical frigate to dump him into a bacta tank and possibly save Vader’s life.
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I suspect the medics on the frigate may have given Luke some pushback on that.
Plausible: He didn’t want to draw more attention to them than he needed to. It was bad enough having people see him half-dragging Vader to the ship; having them see him floating an unresisting Vader would have raised a lot of neon red flags.
Headcanon: Luke was trying to but Vader, accepting his looming death as a form of penance, was fighting him on it. That’s also why Vader couldn’t sustain himself on Force energy; he was using it to stop Luke from trying to help him (and potentially jeopardizing Luke’s escape as well).
How do you know he didn’t? We only see the tail end when they arrive at the hangar, which is canonically miles from the Emperor’s throne room. For all we know Luke force-lifted Vader for 99% of the way, only dropping him here in case there was an ambush/need to fight for a ship at the hangar and he needed his force powers. We can also hear blasterfire in the background for Vader’s death, this likely contributed to Luke’s choice to support Vader with his body in case he needed the force to deflect it.
The will of the Force always wins out. You can subvert it – for decades at a time, even – but in the end, the Force always balances itself. Look at it like this; the jedi and the sith are both standing in a river. The Jedi lets the water rush over and around him, guiding the flow with their body and using the water’s power to make their own movements stronger. The Sith uses their body to force the river to flow differently (which works for a time, at the cost of their body). It is the will of the Force that the price for true redemption is death. There is no universe where Vader realizes his mistakes, atones for them, and lives. Luke could be grand master of the Jedi at that point and he wouldn’t be able to change that.
His technical ability aside – which, lets be honest, Luke had been a “full” Jedi for a few days at that point, he’s not levitating Vader’s body back to his ship lol – the will of the Force dictates that Vader would not survive his redemption.
The Force — for a Jedi, at least — requires a controlled emotional state to use.
Luke had just been through a lot, including outright torture, the emperor dying, watching his father be redeemed and be heavily wounded…
He might not have been able to muster the control necessary to levitate anything.
Luke had just gotten Force-Lightninged almost to death. He wasn’t anywhere near his peak ability.
Even if he was, Bacta heals flesh. It doesnt fix mechanical parts.
Vader was heavily cyborged at this point (If you look at him when his skeliton is being lit up by Force Lightning you can see along with his bones there are big chunks of his body including his neck that are mechanical). Vader’s body is so torn up that needs his mechanical components to live. The Force Lightning didn’t just hurt his flesh, it damaged the mechanical implants that were keeping him alive. Just throwing him in a Bacta tank might have helped with the lightning burns on his flesh but his mechanical components were too damaged to fix in time.
Anakin was very skilled at mechanics and had been living with his cyborg body for 20 years. He knew how he worked. When Luke protested that taking his mask off would kill him Anakin responded that “Nothing can stop that now”.
He totally did, you remember that he still had Vader’s body when he got off the death star? Like clearly he was going to die, he could die in the back seat while Luke was flying or they could have had one final conversation. But he did get him on the shuttle.
He just went through Palpatine’s lightning session and a mentally and physically draining fight with Vader. I don’t think he’d have the focus to do so.
He almost certainly did. With the fight and torture he’d just gone through, its not like he was completely fit and able to drag two meters of armored strip-steak all the way from the Emperor’s tower to the nearest docking bay without considerable strengthening from the Force.
Vader’s electronic life support equipment was fried by the emperor’s lightning. Even under idea conditions saving Anakin’s life was slim. There no way Luke couldn’t use rebellion ships as most crew wouldn’t let injuries Darth Vader aboard their ship. And empire ships were starting to reteat after death star was destroyed.