- Luke does acknowledge on the second Death Star that he expects to die (with the Emperor) as the rebels destroy it, and while this is a noble act, it’s only really touched on by the one line so it’s not delivered as powerfully as it could have been. To me, the tension that’s lost by having the rebels likely to passively kill three main characters is not worth the benefit, so I’ve always preferred Spence’s approach, which places the Emperor’s throne room on the Super Star Destroyer and has the death star float outside his window to make that very clear.
I’ve said this in other places, but I’m a big fan of Spence’s ROTJ edit and will be incorporating a LOT of the execution there into the ROTJ section of my saga edit.
The trick with having Luke/Vader/Palpatine NOT on the Death Star in terms of the larger saga is that in TROS, Rey goes to that exact location of their fight and it’s made very clear that spot is on the Death Star. How do you reconcile that? Here are some possibilities:
- Swap out the Death Star husk Rey looks at in its TROS establishing shot with a downed Super Star Destroyer, and trim a shot or two of the wreckage as she’s sailing towards it. Once she actually gets inside, there’s nothing we see that couldn’t be on the SSD.
Or
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Reinstate the “2 Death Stars” concept from the ROTJ planning stages. (You can find info on it from Adywan`s ROTJ Wishlist thread here: https://originaltrilogy.com/topic/Info-Ideas-ESB-and-ROTJ-Wishlist/id/8826/page/23#345416)
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Two Death Stars = one larger, still under construction, and serving as a decoy. One smaller, also operational, and sporting Palpatine’s throne room. The rebels are attacking the bigger, shielded one while Palpatine brought Luke to the smaller one.
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This keeps all the Spence visual ideas of showing the still-under-construction Death Star out the window behind Palpatine intact. It also kinda explains why there’s still so much Death Star left to fall on the forest moon after we see Lando barely escape it atomizing itself in the explosion - because it’s the smaller Death Star knocked into the forest moon by the force of the bigger one’s explosion.
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You could also incorporate some of the Piett Sacrifice ideas mentioned in the above thread by having Piett slam his SSD into the smaller Death Star to stop it from firing.
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