Tarkin, Grand Moff

• Appeared in:
  
  I
  II
  III
  IV
  V
  VI
  CW

• Homeworld:
  Eriadu

• Species:
  Human

• Gender:
  Male

• Size:
  1.8 meters

• Weapon:
  Death Star

• Affiliation:
  Empire

• 

From the Movies

Grand Moff Tarkin was the Imperial governor of the Outland Regions, and the mastermind of the Death Star project. A brilliant and ruthless tactician, Tarkin was a loyal adherent to Emperor Palpatine's vision of the New Order. He saw the Death Star as the ultimate weapon to ensure absolute rule over the galaxy. The power of the battle station's prime weapon was enough to deter any rebellion, he reasoned. To demonstrate the Death Star's power, he destroyed the planet of Alderaan.

Some questioned whether Tarkin's methods were merely bids to aggrandize his own status, in defiance of the Emperor's ultimate goal. The truth will never be known, for Tarkin perished aboard his creation. The Rebel Alliance dared to wage war with the Empire, and targeted a weak spot in the battle station. A proton torpedo volley fired by young Luke Skywalker sealed the station's fate. Tarkin was killed in the resulting explosion.

From the Expanded Universe

Even as a young man, Wilhuff Tarkin was a being of vision. He saw the decay inherent in the Republic all too well from his base of operations in the Outer Rim. He ascended the military and political ranks of his native Eriadu, a densely populated world in the Seswenna sector. During the waning days of the Republic, he made valuable contacts in Palpatine's senate, and in the world of corporate interests.

When Palpatine restructured the galactic government, Tarkin was granted command of the Seswenna sector. This came on the heels of an outrage orchestrated by Tarkin on the distant world of Ghorman. Tarkin landed his vessel on a platform filled with activists protesting Imperial taxation. Rather than be reprimanded for the murder of hundreds, Tarkin was rewarded for orchestrating the Ghorman Massacre, as it later became labeled by the Rebellion.

From the start, resistance forces fought against the New Order. They took advantage of the bureaucratic borders that separated sectors, knowing that they could elude Imperial sector forces by jumping out of their spheres of influence.

To counter this tactic, Tarkin proposed a new organizational scheme to the Emperor. In addition to the sectors defined by astrographic and political boundaries, there'd be overlapping 'priority sectors' defined by the amount of treasonous activity therein. A single official would command these territories -- a Grand Moff -- who would oversee the allotment of resources personally. Palpatine was pleased with Tarkin's proposal, and granted Tarkin with the title and an enormous area of operations in the Outer Rim Territories.

Another of Tarkin's visions was the so-called doctrine of fear, or the Tarkin Doctrine as it is officially known. Rather than expend the incredible amounts of resources necessary for subjugating all the worlds of the Empire, the New Order would instead make visible a single show of force that could be used to cow any treasonous activity. This mindset culminated in the creation of the Death Star, a brainchild of Tarkin realized by a cadre of advanced scientists in a secret laboratory known as Maw Installation.

During the secrecy surrounding Maw Installation, Tarkin took a mistress, a young Imperial commander named Daala. Tarkin considered the young Naval officer his prot?g?, and taught her the basics of military tactics. She was assigned the duty of protecting Maw Installation. No one in the upper echelons of the Empire knew of the secret laboratory, and the engineers who had fashioned the deep space installation were killed after its completion. When Tarkin died at Yavin, he took the Maw secret to the grave with him.

Tarkin was survived by his widow, a severe woman who ran a megonite moss mining operation on Phelarion. On that planet, a solid black obelisk stands as tribute to the memory of this influential Imperial.

Behind the Scenes

The rough draft of Star Wars didn't have Tarkin as an Imperial official at all. Instead, the Grande Mouff Tarkin was a holyman of a religion native to Aquilae, and an extremely minor character. In the second draft, Tarkin is "a thin, bird-like commander of the outland Kesselian Dragoons."