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Mike Duncan (00:01):

Last night, I accidentally loaded up a garbled version of episode 3.17 rather than 3.18. It was a few hours before I noticed the pile of emails alerting me that something had gone wrong. In the meantime, a group of dismayed listeners decided to take control of the comment thread on the episode and make up their own version of a story to pass the time. So here now is that story by listeners Jeremy, David, B. Minich, Steve SC, and Jim Silk, please to enjoy.

(00:39):

Hello and welcome to Revolutions. Temporary replacement to episode 3.18, The Flight of Emperor Palpatine.

(00:56):

In June of 1791, Emperor Palpatine I fled the capital of Coruscant, family in tow. With the Jedi Council and the Senate firmly aligned in their opposition, Palpatine was friendless and forced to disguise his family as bilge droids to escape the planet. They hitched a ride aboard a Vogon destroyer, but as Vogons are notoriously unsympathetic to hitchhikers, when the stowaways were inevitably discovered, they found themselves promptly returned to Coruscant, and Palpatine had a lot of awkward questions to answer, like did I forget my towel again?

(01:29):

At this point, Palpatine discovered that his options were very limited. He wasn’t very well liked, and had completely vacillated on the question of whether or not to allow clones into the very broken army. This, in turn, had turned the Vorlons against him, because they had a stake in who the clones claimed they were, which they could not prove if they were, you know, left on the sidelines. General Kenobi was looking like he was in a great position. As head of the army and leader of the revolutionary ideals, his party was ascendant, while Anakin Skywalker was on the outside looking in. Little did anyone know that in a year’s time, their relative positions would be completely different.

(02:08):

By the time Palpatine got to Arrakis, the Spicing Guild was ready to go to the line with Rico’s Roughnecks against the Sardaukar. General Jack D. Ripper barked, take off and nuke the entire site from orbit, it’s the only way to be sure.

(02:22):

Of course, now we run into a common problem that plagued the Empire in later years. Namely, some general would get a full head of steam, and his troops would declare him Augustus. When both Kenobi and Ripper were thus declared, it appeared for a moment as if Palpatine would simply be forgotten in the shuffle. But those pesky Vorlans, not content to simply let Palpatine off the hook, they leaked the whole story, along with incriminating documents and a few salacious limericks the Good Emperor had composed while whacked out on spice to the Daily Bugle, where Marat was editor-in-chief. The revolution, you’ll recall, had let the media off its leash.

(02:59):

Meanwhile, Lieutenant Bonaparte nudges Private Duncan, asking, and the dialogue here is in French, so I just used Google to translate it verbatim. Bonaparte asks Private Duncan, you sleep on the job? This is baby, is it not? Duncan replies, yes, but the Apple Eye melody not B. Once the Marquis de Lafayette leaked the Pentagon Papers to Brenda Starr, the jig was up. The colonial defense forces showed up and kicked ass. Everyone got life in crematoria, or seppuku, their choice.

(03:31):

The end.

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Would really like to get my hands on the salacious limericks the good Emperor composed while whacked on spice. 

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