I still remember the first time I saw that duel on screen—it felt like a turning point for Anakin, the first time he won a duel in the prequel. But later, when I read the ROTS novelization, I realized the fight wasn’t what I thought it was. The difference between page and film stunned me, and it changes how you see the whole sequence, turns out, everything was rigged. Let me walk you through how the book tells it.
A Quiet Deal Between Palpatine And Dooku
Count Dooku walks in calm and confident.
He glances at the Chancellor and says, “Is he?” then, “How fortunate for you.” In his head, the path is already mapped out: “Quite simple, in the end. Isolate Skywalker, slaughter Kenobi. Beyond that, it would be merely a matter of spinning Skywalker up into enough of a frenzy to break through his Jedi restraint and reveal the infinite vista of Sith power. Lord Sidious would take it from there.”
That’s the understanding. A quiet deal. A plan that puts the apprentice in the crosshairs and leaves the rest to Sidious.
Right Away, Small Things Show The Plan Is Slipping
At first, he intends to hold back and let himself captured after the duel, but when the fight opens, Dooku has to bail out fast. The book has him blink—“Dooku thought, What?”—as Obi-Wan and Anakin crash in together. He jumps to the table to reset, but Kenobi is already on him, blade “weaving through a defensive velocity so bewilderingly fast” that Dooku won’t even risk a strike.
He feints at Obi-Wan’s face, drops into a reverse ankle sweep—and gets a rude shock. Kenobi clears it, and Anakin nearly takes Dooku’s foot off while carving the table in half. Dooku hits the floor. The line lands hard: “This was not in the plan.”
From There, The Plan Keeps Breaking Apart
The hits keep coming. A blast “scorched his shoulder,” he gives ground, and then the novel turns the dial up: Anakin advances “mechanically inexorable, impossibly powerful, a destroyer droid with a lightsaber: each step a blow and each blow a step.” Dooku can’t meet him strength to strength. He starts guiding strikes away just to stay upright. Only now does he realize the setup: he’s been suckered.
The style read throws him. “Skywalker’s Shien ready-stance had been a ruse, as had his Ataro gymnastics; the boy was a Djem So stylist, and as fine a one as Dooku had ever seen. His own elegant Makashi simply did not generate the kinetic power to meet Djem So head-to-head. Especially not while also defending against a second attacker. It was time to alter his own tactics.”
So he switches. Another ankle sweep clips Anakin’s boot, buys a beat to leap clear—straight back into Kenobi’s “wheel of blue lightning.” Dooku flips the switch in his mind: “Dooku decided that the comedy had ended. Now it was time to kill.”
He reverts to experience: Kenobi learned under Qui-Gon—Dooku’s own Padawan—so he drives fast, low thrusts at Obi-Wan’s legs, baiting the predictable flip to open a killing line “from kidneys to shoulder blades.” But the image in his head doesn’t match reality. Kenobi doesn’t even move his feet. He stands “perfectly centered, perfectly balanced,” blade economy at its peak, and answers with ripostes “swifter than the tongue of a Garollian ghost viper.”
The reveal lands: Kenobi’s Ataro and Shii-Cho were ploys. “Kenobi had become a master of Soresu.”
That’s the “sudden, unexpected, overpowering, and entirely distressing bad feeling” taking root.
That Pressure Explains Why Palpatine Wanted Anakin
The tone turns lethal: his farce “spun from humorous to deadly serious.” He realizes the two Jedi “had somehow managed to become entirely dangerous.” The thought hits clean: “These clowns might—just possibly—actually be able to beat him.” He won’t risk it—“Lord Sidious could come up with a new plan more easily than a new apprentice.” He gathers the Force; a “slightest whipcrack” sends Kenobi slamming into a wall.
The pressure ages him “a decade” with every block. He doesn’t even try to counter. Exhaustion drags his senses inward. He falls back up the stairs for leverage, but Anakin “kept on coming, tirelessly ferocious.” They reset on the balcony, and the visual shift unsettles him; the roles have reversed.
He draws on the Force one more time and beckons. Anakin leaps. In the air, Dooku finally connects the last dots: “He understood how Skywalker was getting stronger. Why he no longer spoke. How he had become a machine of battle. He understood why Sidious had been so interested in him for so long. Skywalker was a natural.”
The machine part isn’t abstract here; Dooku knows he took the boy’s arm. He’s now facing a fighter who hits like a droid and grows colder with every exchange.
Even Then, Dooku Hangs On To A Thin Hope
Even then, Dooku holds a thread of belief. The text says he “still finds some hope in his heart that he is wrong, that Palpatine has not betrayed him, that this has all been proceeding according to plan—” Right then comes the line from the chair: “Good, Anakin! Good! I knew you could do it!” And the order: “Kill him. Kill him now.”
Anakin’s eyes show “only flames.” Dooku begs: “Chancellor, please! … Please, you promised me immunity! We had a deal! Help me!” The reply is ice: “A deal only if you released me. Not if you used me as bait to kill my friends.”
The trap shifts focus in one sentence: “This had been a Jedi trap indeed, but Jedi were not the quarry. They were the bait.” Then one more quiet push: “Anakin,” Palpatine says quietly. “Finish him.”
At The End, The Real Plan Lands All At Once
Anakin looks down and Dooku “sees not a Lord of the Sith but a beaten, broken, cringing old man.” Anakin starts with “I shouldn’t—” and Palpatine snaps back, “Do it! Now!” The book notes the realization that follows: this isn’t an order so much as permission—“Permission.”
And Dooku—
The narration locks in. As he looks up for the last time, he knows he’s been deceived “not just today, but for many, many years.” He was never the true apprentice or “the heir to the power of the Sith.” He was “only a tool.” The summing up is brutal: his victories, struggles, heritage, principles, sacrifices—“everything he’s done, everything he owns, everything he’s been,” all his dreams and grand plans—“have been only a pathetic sham, because all of them, all of him, add up only to this.”
“He has existed only for this.”
“This.”
“To be the victim of Anakin Skywalker’s first cold-blooded murder.”
“First but not, he knows, the last.”
Then the image you know: “the blades crossed at his throat uncross like scissors.”
“Snip.”
“And all of him becomes nothing at all.”
