The ending of Return of the Jedi

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I was just thinking about Star Wars just now and something popped into my head about the ending of Jedi. Darth Vader the badass villain kills the Emperor, saves his son Luke Skywalker and dies. I don't like to nitpick especially with Star Wars unless it's the prequels and I do love Jedi from start to finish just to let you know and also I maybe wrong as I am probably not looking at this clearly but do you think that Vader switched sides too quickly? I mean this is a guy who has actually killed people without remorse including children and even tried to kill his own son before even telling him that he is his father. Now to be fair I could probably assume he was testing him or trying to weaken him before the final blow but then again he find slice his hand off. In fact now that I think about it didn't he want to take Luke back to the Emperor undamaged which is why they tested the carbon freeze on Han Solo first. The only thing that really tells us that he has some good in him is that Luke sensed it. I mean after Luke and Vader's little talk in Jedi when Luke surrenders himself and the stormtroopers take him away you can probably tell that Vader's head is spinning and thinking. Also Luke being alive when Vader assumed his unborn child died along with his wife might have triggered something. Heck maybe this is like in A New Hope when Luke fired the missiles in the small hole and people nitpick about but even if it is a horrible mistake you really just don't care and want the hero to win and get to the end. Maybe the whole Vader thing is my small hole. Whatever the case I still love these movies and can't wait for the next one.

I think one of the things that made him choose his son over the Emperor is that when Luke defeated Vader, the Emperor told Luke to kill him, but Luke threw away his lightsaber and refused. Vader joined the Emperor (in the prequels) specifically to save Padme and their unborn children, and in the end he had to kill the Emperor to save his son. And it's also the prophecy, he was meant to kill the Emperor.

But killing the younglings was in itself an evil act, and he was seriously deluded already if he thought a group of (as yet) defenceless children posed a threat to the Empire. That very act of violence was the start of the remorseless contamination process that hardened him completely and showed him to be completely under the Emperor's control.

I think he finally realized his destiny at the end of ROTJ and that he had been under the control of the self-serving Emperor for too long. Had the Emperor succeeded in killing Luke he'd have continued to live under the Emperor's shadow as his second in command. All these thoughts flashed through his mind while watching the confrontation between his son and the Emperor and heard Luke's cries of agony as the lightning strikes grew more intense.

I don't think Vader's decision was so rash or immediate. Even the Emperor had asked Vader in Return Of The Jedi if his feelings were clear on the matter of turning Luke to the Dark Side, sensing the inner conflict within his apprentice. And recall, even before Vader had been tasked to bring Luke to the Emperor in The Empire Strikes Back, Vader had secretly been searching for Luke all that time, then when he reveals himself as Luke's father, he offers Luke the chance to join him and overthrow the Emperor, and "rule the galaxy together, as father and son." I had always thought that since learning of Luke, Vader had wanted to be reunited with the son he had previously never known had existed, which superseded any promise he had made to the Emperor to turn Luke to the Dark Side. And despite all the terrible atrocities Vader had committed - murdering children, destroying the Jedi, holding the galaxy under the Emperor's oppression, etc - I think that Anakin was somewhere still alive, deep inside, dormant, but ready to reawaken with the proper stimuli. And that proper stimuli was provided when he saw his son's life threatened by the Emperor.

Palpatine manipulated Anakin right from the very beginning: He turned him against the Jedi, transformed him into Darth Vader, and made him his apprentice. However, when Luke showed up and fought to bring his father back to the light, Anakin finally realized who his true enemy was and saved his son at the last minute.