Nothing is What it Seems (Jabba's Palace, Part 2)

In every step of the narrative process, there must be a deliberate choice made by the storyteller regarding how much information to reveal to the audience. Too much all at once, and you've ruined the tension and the flow of the story. Too little, and you'll leave your audience bewildered or disinterested. I've explored a bit of how being deliberately coy about what your audience knows versus what the story's characters know is merely obnoxious and gimmicky. But if you can withhold just enough information until just the right moment, you can create moments of revelation that are positively transformative, subverting expectations with deft touches of dramatic irony.

The marvelous thing about the opening sequence in Jabba's palace is that it does all of this while also mirroring the opening sequence in Episode III and foreshadowing the latter half of Episode VI. Our expectations are toyed with again and again, showing that nothing is quite what it appears to be - a message that we would do well to remember as we consider Palpatine's duplicity in both Episode III and VI.
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