Luke Skywalker, You Are Not The Jedi That I Used To Know

With the release of “The Last Jedi”, Star Wars fans reunited with Luke Skywalker. Many viewers were surprised that the once wide-eyed farm boy was now a broken and grizzled man. How could 30 years have changed Luke so much?

            

Though the movie attempts to answer this question, the real answer probably stems from the necessity of the storytelling process. When J.J. Abrams was writing “The Force Awakens” he tried including Luke Skywalker in the script. Yet every time Luke entered J.J.’s  story something would happen. Luke would kind of take over the story, he would overshadow the new characters, he would steal every scene. How could he not? He’s freaking Luke Skywalker!

 To give the new characters some room to grow, J.J. decided to save Luke for the next film, to have “The Force Awakens” become a film about the question: “Where is Luke Skywalker?” The answer to this question was: “Hiding on a secluded island somewhere” and when Rian Johnson took over he had to answer a new question: “Why is Luke Skywalker hiding away on some island?”

 It is the answer to this last question, which kind of kills the Jedi that we all knew as Luke Skywalker. The answer, for Rian, was that Luke Skywalker isn’t hiding away on some island somewhere, because Luke Skywalker would never do that. When his friends are in trouble, Luke is there to help. Therefore, Rian faced a terrible realization. The man hiding away on that island isn’t Luke Skywalker- not the one we used to know- this is some new Luke Skywalker. Some old man that used to be Luke Skywalker.

 The fact that Luke has changed so much after 30 years had made some fans angry and there are some good reasons for their anger. A thousand questions run, like rivers, through their collective consciousness. How could Luke have got so old? Was Return of the Jedi really so long ago? Am I old? Why did George Lucas spend so much time making prequels, when he could have made the further adventures of Luke?

And while some fans are angry over how much Luke Skywalker storyline that they have missed out on between the years of 1983 and 2017, others are angry because they didn’t miss out. They have spent the last thirty years growing up with Luke Skywalker, it was just a different Luke.

 This “Other” Luke that I am referring to is the Luke that continued to have adventures, long after the original trilogy was complete. It is the Luke that married Mara Jade. It is the Luke that founded a new Jedi Temple on Yavin IV. It is the Luke that saved the galaxy, time and time again and ran away and never stopped being a hero. It is the Luke from the old Expanded Universe. The Luke from the books that were published between 1991 – 2014. The books that are no longer canon.

The fans that spent over 20 years reading those books have to wonder “Where is the Luke Skywalker that I used to know? The champion of the Yuuzhan Vong war? The father of Ben Skywalker?” And the answer is: “That Luke is gone now. And we are left with the broken and grizzled one.”

 Next time on the blog I want to talk about that “Other” Luke Skywalker. The one with the wife and kid who never lost hope. The one that, in a fair world, would still be with us.