Nov 12, 2017
Battlefront 2 Offers Key Insight Into Luke Skywalker’s Absence After Vader’s Death
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The driving force, pun intended, of the new Star Wars trilogy is less the new characters introduced in The Force Awakens but everyone’s questions about what the hell Luke Skywalker has been doing since we last saw him hugging his friends and dancing with murderbears after the Rebel’s victory on Endor. Two new “canon” stories in the Star Wars extended universe give us our first real glimpse of his activities, but it’s in Battlefront 2, a video game that will be released this week, that we get our first real insight into why Luke is so absent from the stories we’ve seen set immediately after Return of the Jedi.
There is a video below, and there will be light spoilers for both the campaign mode of the new video game and the new junior novel The Legends of Luke Skywalker by Ken Liu.
The only post ROTJ appearance from Luke Skywalker, other than his pensive staring at Daisy Ridely’s Rey in the final moments of the last Star Wars saga film has come in the comic series Shattered Empire. That story, a single issue of a four-issue comic book series, is a classic Luke Skywalker caper. He and Poe Dameron’s mother, a retiring rebel pilot, infiltrate an Imperial outpost to heist something the Emperor stole from the Jedi Order.
In the other canon stories set in the post-ROTJ time, Luke Skywalker is noticeably absent from the narrative. Specifically in Chuck Wendig’s Aftermath books, which detail the final years of the remaining Imperial forces culminating in the Battle of Jakku which forever ended the Galactic Civil War that served as our entrance into this mythology. In an interview with the Beltway Banthas podcast, Wendig said that he was told by Lucasfilm that the only Legacy character he couldn’t use in his books was Skywalker. This is, obviously, because the mysteries about him are what will get butts in seats in the new saga films.
Yet, even though this was essentially a marketing decision, the talented storytellers who write the film scripts, the books, and the video games, have to come up with a justification for why the most powerful soldier in the Rebel Alliance essentially vanishes from the fight. Early on in the campaign for Battlefront 2, we get some insight into why that might be.
Luke Skywalker encounters one of the new characters in the game, Del Meeko a member of Imperial Special Forces. He has been dispatched to destroy an “observatory” of the Emperor’s, a place where he keeps all sorts of creepy odds and ends related to the Force, the Jedi, and the Sith. Because it’s a video game, the player has to slay dozens of Stormtroopers by Luke’s hand, but when he finds Meeko the Imperial is defenseless. He asks Luke for help, and Luke helps him without question. After some more video game shenanigans, they arrive at the observatory,
There’s a lot we can extrapolate from this clip. First, Luke came for a compass which presumably leads to Jedi temples and is rumored to be part of the story in the upcoming film The Last Jedi. However, his exchange with Meeko is what’s the most telling about where he stands when it comes to the Rebellion now that he’s a fully-realized Jedi. When Meeko asks if he should join the Rebel Alliance, Luke doesn’t say he should. One would think one of the Rebels’ greatest heroes would eagerly take the chance to turn a conflicted Imperial to their side. But, instead, he just tells him to choose to be “better,” leaving it up to Meeko to decide what that means for him.
During the gameplay, Meeko says something to Luke about all the Stormtroopers he presumably killed and wonders if Luke will turn his lightsaber on him. Again, Luke takes out these guys because otherwise this would be a very boring video game, but this is “justified” in the story when he replies that those Imperials didn’t give him a choice whereas Meeko asked him for help. This suggests that Luke has little interest left in fighting the Empire, fully adopting the Jedi ethos of only using violence in defense of himself or others, be they Imperial or Rebel.
We still don’t know what Luke’s primary goals are here, beyond learning more about the Force and Yoda’s last order to him to pass on what he knows. Perhaps from the moment he turned himself into his father in the last act of ROTJ, Luke ceased fighting the Empire and only sought to destroy the dark side and the Sith. That mission was accomplished. Now, it seems Luke is mostly focused on trying to relearn the lost knowledge of the Jedi.
The Legends of Luke Skywalker also supports this hypothesis, though there’s no guarantee any of the stories we’re told about in that book are actually true. The purpose of the story, which is a canon novel about a trip to Canto Bight — a casino location that will be featured in the new film — in which the crew and passengers tell stories they’ve heard second- or third-hand about Skywalker. The purpose of this book is to add weight to the idea that until she met Finn, Rey (like many others) thought that Luke Skywalker and his Jedi heroics were but a myth.
Two of the stories are pure nonsense, one a send-up of Star/Info Wars conspiracy theories about the original trilogy characters and another story that retells the first part of ROTJ but one that makes a talking flea the hero of the story. (This is a book for kids, to be fair.) The other three stories feature Luke rescuing R2D2, rescuing an Imperial on Jakku (while searching for another observatory), escaping an exogorth like from Empire Strikes Back, and learning the ways of the Force from a group of people on a new planet to the mythos.
With all this, it is safe to assume that Luke did not tie his new Jedi Order to the Galactic Republic, an arguably fatal flaw in the last Jedi Order, and essentially removed himself from the larger fight in the interest of gaining knowledge and teaching it to others. Obviously, a certain unruly nephew of his ruined that plan. Faced with the same two objectives again: stopping the rise of the Dark Side and passing on his knowledge, Luke apparently decided he still didn’t know enough and thus went on his journey to the islands of the planet where we most recently saw him.
This still doesn’t explain why Luke wants the Jedi “to end” or why precisely he seems unwilling to train our new heroine. Yet, this context explains both why Luke seemed to disassociate himself from galactic affairs and tells us his interpretation of the Jedi code of conduct, especially when it comes to using violence. He abhors taking life, but rather wants to do all he can to save them, even if they are his enemies. For those worried that by making Luke seem to “go dark” it undermines his character from the original films, this should allay those fears. (Also, the flat denial from Mark Hamill that Luke has fallen to the dark side should also do that.)
What do you think? Share your Luke theories in the comments below.
