Star Words: Episode VI, Part 14

[matril]

You've probably seen that meme circulating about how familiar it is to parents when Yoda finally gets so tired of answering Luke's questions that he just goes ahead and dies. It's funny and relatable; it makes me chuckle. But Yoda is in fact quite anxious to instruct Luke as much as he possibly can, right until the very end. After acknowledging that Luke must confront Vader and warning him about the Dark Side and the Emperor, Yoda struggles through his weakness to give him a final charge. Luke will be the last of the Jedi. He must pass on his knowledge. To whom?

"There is...another...Skywalker."

And so Yoda leaves him, disappearing into the Force like Obi-Wan before him. I love Luke's expressions here, shifting from confusion and shock to warmth at his master's passing. (I just watched a conversation between Frank Oz and Mark Hamill, quite delightful! and Frank declared that Mark provided half of what made Yoda work in responding so convincingly to a puppet. Of course Mark demurred and put all the credit on Frank. It was a nice exchange of mutual admiration.)

What an evocative declaration. It echoes Yoda's words from the previous film, There is another, and this time we won't have to speculate long before learning what it means. But Luke is completely gobsmacked. His family was always just Owen and Beru, with a long-dead father to wistfully wonder about. Then that long-dead father turned out to be a very-much-alive Darth Lord of the Sith, which, eep, isn't really an upgrade. But what's this -- another Skywalker? Who? How?

Luke has been alone in so many ways for so long. To learn that there's someone else out there -- someone who can become a Jedi -- can you imagine his joy? Confusion and uncertainty, of course, but certainly joy.

Next, we see how to justify a sort-of kind-of partial truth....

Comments

[krpalmer]

I have to admit I'd never thought of reading Luke's expressions as showing "shifting mixed emotions"; maybe I'd always just fixated on his next line to Artoo, where he seems at a low ebb (and might have been influenced before that by the Return of the Jedi novelization, where he broods in Yoda's empty house until the lamps burn out as opposed to seeing that happen from outside in the movie). Considering the revelation of "another Skywalker" as beginning to affect him right away does seem interesting now that I'm aware of the possibility, though. (Maybe it's a tonic against the old brushoffs of Return of the Jedi, perhaps as all-encompassing in the late 1990s as "prequel dismissal" got, disdaining the specific explanation for the cryptic comment one episode earlier...)