A Muun banker treated the Force as a biological machine, only to trigger the cosmic backlash that ended the Sith.
The Banker in Plain Sight
Most Sith Lords built their legends on battlefield slaughter and ancient temples. Darth Plagueis took a quieter and far more dangerous path. To the wider galaxy, he was Hego Damask, a wealthy Muun financier who ran Damask Holdings. His firm brokered plasma mining rights, negotiated corporate disputes, and quietly funded entire planetary governments. Muuns were already renowned as elite bankers and mathematicians, so no one looked twice at his endless spreadsheets or private meetings. Behind that dull corporate facade, Plagueis was directing the dark side grand plan designed a thousand years earlier by Darth Bane.
Plagueis lived by careful routines rather than sudden dramatic acts. In the morning, he sat at a polished desk, reading market reports that doubled as political intelligence dispatches. He maintained standing in the Candid Circle, an elite fraternity of galactic oligarchs, and relied on the Sun Guards of Thyrsus for discreet protection. Each year, he hosted the Sojourn gatherings on a private moon. There, powerful senators and corporate barons drank strong liquor and spoke too freely. Plagueis listened quietly, turning off-hand complaints into financial investments and political grudges into leverage. By the time the Trade Federation blockaded Naboo, the planet's economy was already trapped in a web of debt his firm had woven years earlier.
Laboratory Experiments on Death
Power over senators and shipping lanes was merely a tool for Plagueis. His real obsession began on the mining world of Bal'demnic in 67 BBY. After dropping a cavern ceiling on his master, Darth Tenebrous, and snapping the dying Bith's neck, Plagueis knelt beside the corpse. Through the Force, he watched Tenebrous's midi-chlorians fade out like dying embers. He decided right then that death was not an absolute law. It was simply an engineering problem no one had solved yet.
Where ancient dark lords relied on incantations, Plagueis built an antiseptic medical laboratory. He treated midi-chlorians as biological machinery that could be commanded and broken. His greatest breakthrough came from studying Darth Venamis, a secret rival apprentice whom Tenebrous had trained in violation of the Rule of Two. Plagueis captured Venamis and kept him in stasis for decades. In a horrific series of tests, he repeatedly brought the Bith to the brink of death, pulled him back through cellular manipulation, and let him slip away again. These tests proved that the line between life and death could be crossed at will. After surviving an ambush by Maladian assassins that slashed his neck and forced him to rely on a breathing transpirator, mastering that boundary became deeply personal.
The Manufacture of Darth Sidious
Plagueis knew an alien banker could never sit openly on the Republic's throne. He needed a human face to carry the Sith into high office. On Naboo, he found Palpatine, a proud young aristocrat simmering with hatred for his controlling father. Plagueis stoked that resentment until Palpatine snapped, murdering his parents and siblings aboard a family starship. Plagueis covered up the slaughter, freed the young man from legal consequences, and bound him forever to the dark side under the name Darth Sidious.
Over eleven brutal years of training, Plagueis remade Sidious into a predatory political weapon. He forced Palpatine to hunt wild beasts on low-gravity worlds and combat hundreds of battle droids in fabricated arenas. But the most critical lessons took place behind locked boardroom doors. Plagueis taught Sidious the art of institutional concealment. The goal was not to hide in shadows, but to appear modest, ordinary, and public-spirited while pulling every hidden string. With Plagueis arranging financial backing and eliminating rivals like Senator Vidar Kim, Palpatine entered the Senate and steadily climbed toward supreme power.
A Reckless Push and the Cosmic Rebound
Around 42 BBY, master and apprentice pushed their ambitions to an unprecedented level. Entering deep meditation together, they waged a mental campaign to wrench the Force out of balance. They pushed with everything they had, expecting their own bodies might tear apart under the strain. Instead, the Force gave way. The light side dipped, and darkness surged across the galaxy. Emboldened by this success, Plagueis attempted an even more extreme feat. He reached across space and tried to force midi-chlorians to spawn a child from nothing. The living Force refused his command and went completely silent.
The Force did not simply resist. It retaliated. Roughly nine years before the blockade of Naboo, a slave woman named Shmi Skywalker on Tatooine conceived a child without a father. When Qui-Gon Jinn later discovered Anakin Skywalker and tested his blood, the boy carried more than twenty thousand midi-chlorians per cell. When news of the fatherless boy reached Coruscant, Plagueis rushed to see him. Spotting the child through macrobinoculars, Plagueis reached out with the Force and received a terrifying vision of starfighters clashing, lightsabers flashing, and a black-armored cyborg rising from an operating table. Plagueis realized with sudden dread that they had not created a weapon. They had provoked the Force into creating their executioner.
Betrayal in the Penthouse
While Plagueis panicked over the cosmic threat, Sidious saw an asset he could bend. Sidious had also grown weary of his master's caution. Plagueis dreamed of ruling openly as co-chancellor, an idea that disgusted the younger Sith. The apprentice decided the time had come to claim the galaxy alone. On the eve of Palpatine's election as Supreme Chancellor in 32 BBY, the two met in Plagueis's Coruscant penthouse to celebrate the fall of Chancellor Valorum.
For twenty years, Plagueis had refused to let himself fall into deep sleep, fearing assassination. But flushed with victory, he drank heavily from bottles of rare wine and finally drifted off. Sidious struck without hesitation. Leaping forward, he unleashed a barrage of Force lightning directly into his master's breathing apparatus. The machinery shattered. As Plagueis choked and desperately tried to marshal his cellular powers to repair his ruined lungs, his abilities failed him. Sidious mocked the dying Muun, reminding him that the Rule of Two always ended with the apprentice replacing the master. The Sith Lord who learned to preserve others could not save his own life.
The Trap That Broke the Sith
Plagueis was gone, but his work outlived him in devastating ways. Years later, Palpatine used his master's cellular research to trap Anakin Skywalker. In an opera house box on Coruscant, Palpatine dangled the tale of Darth Plagueis the Wise, knowing Anakin was desperate to save his wife from death. Sidious framed Plagueis's research as the only key to conquering mortality, a power the Jedi would never grant. Tempted by the dead master's science, Anakin fell to the dark side and became Darth Vader.
Yet the cosmic trap set by Plagueis's recklessness never truly broke. Anakin spent two decades inside his mechanical armor, but the discovery of his son, Luke Skywalker, shattered the Emperor's hold on him. Above Endor, when Palpatine turned his lightning on Luke, Anakin chose family over the Sith. He lifted his master and hurled him down the reactor shaft. The thousand-year grand plan collapsed precisely because Plagueis had pushed the living Force past its limit. He tried to turn life itself into a predictable machine, and the Force answered with a boy who ended his entire legacy.