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George Lucas Also Would've Killed Luke Skywalker in Star Wars Episode 8

Luke is very pensive.
Luke is very pensive.
Image: Lucasfilm/Disney

Thanks to a new book written by Lucasfilm Star Wars fact extraordinaire Pablo Hidalgo, we have a lot of interesting new information about the galaxy far, far away. And it turns out George Lucas’s original plans for a sequel trilogy bore some interesting resemblances to what actually happened.

As reported by Slash Film, according to Hidalgo in Star Wars: Fascinating Facts: Story, Lore & History From the Greatest Galaxy, “years before The Last Jedi began development, the treatment left behind by George Lucas in 2012 also had Episode 8 be the one wherein Luke Skywalker would die.”

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Well ain’t that something! Hidalgo also says that, in Lucas’s telling, Luke is “a recluse, withdrawn into a very dark space and needs to be drawn back from despair.”

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What’s particularly intriguing about these revelations is that they suggest that Lucas’s ideas for Luke and Star Wars were not, in the end, all that different from those as developed by Rian Johnson in The Last Jedi, ideas for which he was very powerfully criticized by a certain band of fans of the franchise. No matter who was in charge of that movie, it seems likely that a sad, bitter old Luke who redeemed himself and died would have been a likely part of it.

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The book also reveals, about Lucas’s version of the story from 2012, that it featured a figure much like Rey, a young woman becoming a Jedi. But in Lucas’s version, her name and age shifted a lot—at one point she was 14 years old and named Taryn, while later she took on other names, like Thea. Or Winkie. Yes, Winkie.

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To be fair, not all of George’s ideas are good. We can all admit that now. 


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