Star Words: Episode IV, Part 14

[matril]

Having avoided disaster with the unruly bar patrons, our duo meets up with the pilot-for-hire who will bring them to Alderaan. The first thing we learn about Han Solo is his ego. When Obi-Wan asserts that they'll only hire him if his ship is fast, Solo replies with possibly wounded disbelief that Ben has never heard of the Millennium Falcon. Ben's reply is perfect.

"Should I have?"

I think that very slight, subtle raise of the eyebrow puts a lot of extra meaning into his words. Maybe he's even deliberately needling Han, feigning a casual unconcern over the Falcon's relative fame. Such a prospect delights me. Han starts blustering on about the Kessel Run, which is a whole hornet's nest of Star Wars lore, but all that really matters is establishing Han Solo's pride in his reputation, and how easily Ben punctures it.

Next, a snappy retort from our mercenary pilot....

Comments

[krpalmer]

Anticipating this scene, I was winding myself up contemplating a stage direction in the officially available script ("ah, but how can you say it wasn't added after people started making smug comments straight off in 1977?") and a contradictory (yet intriguing in its own way) explanation from George Lucas on the DVD commentary... your "all that really matters" is more than effective there, anyway. I've admitted before that falling into impressions Han Solo is seen or presented as the be-all-and-end-all of Star Wars can leave me kind of cold; so too, perhaps, do intimations of the Millennium Falcon as "its design can't be topped, so we won't even try" (for all the tales of how that design was worked up in a hurry as a previous, almost-finished model of "the pirate ship" was converted into Princess Leia's blockade runner), or indeed the multiple recoveries over the decades of "Luke's blue lightsabre..."

[matril]

Yes, I've expressed my frustration many a time that Han Solo and the Falcon have become so sacrosanct in the eyes of certain fans that they'd rather all creativity or innovation go completely stagnant. It's very disappointing. I can't help thinking of some parody script of a hypothetical "Episode XX" wherein that poor blue lightsaber is yet again retrieved and repaired from being dropped into a gas planet, yanked in half, crushed to powder, dropped into a supernova, devoured by a giant space dragon....and all the explanation we're given is a winking, "Ah, that is a story for another tie-in novel....uh, I mean another time."

[krpalmer]

I'd certainly read with great interest that "Episode XX" parody script should it ever take shape. Still, I can still kind of understand nostalgic tugs towards "the blue lightsabre," half-convinced I was interested to see its first reappearance at the end of "the Thrawn trilogy" over twenty-five years ago... these days, though, the scene does feel sort of off-kilter thinking backwards, and I keep wishing I'd had a chance to see the critique I heard Fernwithy once wrote of those books. (Understanding it was only around for a short time because the "EU-critical" message board it was on had some sort of blowup is a suggestion it might be better to focus on things actually liked, though.)