Movies & TV

The "Tales of the Jedi" animated miniseries goes into this a little bit. Dooku started off as a political dissident after witnessing firsthand the levels of exploitation and corruption in the Republic once you got outside of the core worlds. While he was still a Jedi, he visited one of the worlds in the outer rim that had basically been plundered to nothing by industrialists and the various guilds (e.g., Banking Clan and Trade Federation) who wielded a disproportionate amount of power in the Senate. He and his padawan (young Qui-Gonn) were tasked with extracting a hostage from the "terrorists" on this remote planet, but he ended up sympathizing with their cause. This is why he left the Jedi Order shortly afterward, and tried to do a heckin' entryism only to find out that political power does not flow from the barrel of a .

Since this is Western storytelling and we can't have revolutionaries every be remotely sympathetic, this is why he had to do the hell-turn and something something hand-wavey reasoning, something something dark side. I guess the only explanation that makes any kind of sense there is that Papa Palpatine sold him on doing a little bit of adventurist accelerationism, with Dooku probably planning on taking down Palpatine (like you pointed out, maybe even with the clone army that Sifo Dyas commissioned) if he ever got the opportunity. Instead, he got caught up in yet another "Anakin Does a War Crime" story, and didn't exactly come out ahead.

MFer should have read theory instead of being an idealist . Scratch a Dooku, and a Darth Tyranus bleeds.