1. Not Arresting Palpatine In Public During Revenge Of The Sith
There were numerous places to carry out the public arrest of Palpatine. Doing so would have revealed that he is indeed the evil Dark Lord of the Sith, and also would have been documented by the media of Coruscant. Literally anywhere else would have been better - The Senate, the Temple, a landing platform or even a public park - than the small private chambers of a man that you think may be the head of the Sith with no witnesses. This man is someone that has already fooled the Jedi, for years. Why take this risk? Who signed off on this mission? The Jedi had no chance of success, even though technically Mace did gain the upper hand. He was undone by an earlier mess-up by the Jedi Council (see previous entry). This forced Anakin's hand and he killed Mace. Every part of this was dumb and doomed from both a strategic and logic standpoint. Where was their backup, for example? All of these occasions are either an example of poor character development or bad script writing by George Lucas (likely the latter). Or perhaps they're events that reference the underlying plot of Sidious' master plan in the canon. This is a legitimate possibility. However, that idea does not transfer well in these movies, but it is discussed in the SWEU. Terrance MacMullan writes about this on page 89 of his article Elegant Weapons for Civilized Ages: The Jedi and Warrior- Monks throughout History, "their struggle against the Sith is such as defining feature of the Jedi Order that the Jedi nearly slip into oblivion when they delude themselves into thinking that the Sith have been extinguished at the Battle of Ruusan. Without their evil opposites, the Jedi lapse into complacency and are caught unaware by the Sith's brilliant revenge under Darth Sidious in Revenge of the Sith." In other words, Darth Sidious clouded the Force and little-by-little, influenced the Jedi to achieve his endgame. He knew that the Jedi's arrogance could cost them everything. Sadly in the prequel films this just makes them act and look like fools; or at the very least characters who have no idea what they are doing.
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