Written by Mr. Mouseburger 11th Mar 2006
Kindly submitted by Kooshmeister
Captain Needa is the Imperial officer who commands the Star Destroyer Avenger. Darth Vader tasks him with hunting down and capturing the Millennium Falcon, and despite some early promise, he fails miserably. First, he loses them when the Falcon flies into a convenient placed asteroid field. Then, when they come out again, the Avenger loses them a second time when the Falcon mysteriously vanishes from the Avenger's scopes.
Just when Needa is thinking his day cannot get any worse, Darth Vader picks this precise moment to contact him and demand a report. Little knowing that the Millennium Falcon is actually clinging to the Avenger's hull, Needa takes a shuttle over to Vader's flagship, the Super Star Destroyer Executor, to apologize. Vader forgives Needa... but only after he has choked the life out of him with the Force.
Tempting Fate? After all, you don't go to Darth Vader with the boneheaded idea of apologizing for failure!
A good point, but what else was this poor guy supposed to do. Put Darth Vader on hold?
True. It's possible he could have just lied to Darth about the situation, rather than put all the blame for losing the Falcon on himself.
I agree with matt, lie to vader is just what i would do if i was needa. what the heck would you do in a situation like that?
Personally I think we're misinterpreting Vader's supposed penchant for executing subordinates on a whim. Needa actually thinking he could apologize could be taken as a lack of intelligence on his part, or, perhaps, he honestly believed he had a chance because Vader does not, in fact, have a nasty habit of randomly killing minions for the slightest screwup.
Personally I think we ought to all take Piett as an example. He, too, lost the Falcon, but Vader didn't kill him, did he? The difference is that Piett did everything he was supposed to do, whereas Needa's mistake wasn't so much that he lost the Falcon, but that he gave up too easily. The very idea of giving up the search for the sole purpose of explaining how you screwed up is career suicide in any military. What likely signed Needa's death warrant was when he dropped the bomb, "....and then as soon as you called I admitted defeat and came scrambling back here to apologize."
So yeah, Needa wasn't killed because he lost the Falcon. He was killed because he did a halfassed job (offhandedly telling his crew to "continue scanning the area" doesn't count).