I’ve only ever heard of Option C in this thread, which, incidentally, is also where I learned of its rather dubious origin.
You mean the possibility that it originated as a ‘leak’ from LFL? You may or may not have been aware prior to this thread that like the Clone version (“Option A”), this one - Option C - was also circulated as a rumor circa 1980-1981. As I mentioned before, it could go back to the third draft of SW:ANH at the earliest, or in that period between the third and fourth drafts (and wasn’t ‘dropped’ by the fourth draft or film). I wouldn’t say there’s evidence per se, but clues or hints. Luke’s father (Annikin) himself perhaps taking/hiding his child (there was only Luke at this point, before the Neilith-Leia sister) - rather than Ben - might point towards this scenario, that and the fact that Luke remembers his father in the third draft. But then Lucas changed this with the fourth draft to Luke having no memory of him. Even so, Lucas seemingly stuck to this idea for the first draft of ESB written by Brackett - according to a note uncovered by Rinzler - even though Vader isn’t supposed to be Luke’s father in this script.
The ‘clues’ that I thought made Option B (‘The Secret Affair’) plausible were:
- The lack of Luke’s father specifically given any name whatsoever in the films (and the script drafts) until ROTJ. As though Lucas wanted Vader as the father but wasn’t committed to Anakin being his father?
- I thought Vader saying “Obi-Wan never told you what happened to your father!”. This one is admittedly weak - I had probably overreached on Vader’s thought process in ESB assuming that Ben hadn’t told Luke the truth, unless it was because Vader thought Ben didn’t know because his affair was secret.
- Ben and Yoda not knowing (following from above point) ‘explaining’ why they don’t tell or warn Luke before he leaves Dagobah. Also the Emperor speaking to Vader as though (Anakin) Skywalker Sr. was a separate person from Vader (instead of saying “YOUR son must not become a Jedi”. Even though there was a good out-of-Universe reason for this: it would have spoiled the surprise of the twist.
The thing about Lucas and Kurtz’s ‘half-truths’ that I mentioned before is that they ironically paint a more accurate picture of what really happened in the creative/story department than LFL’s official ‘referee’-like stance, which relies on dubious coincidences and just-so conclusions, like “Lucas just came up with the fully formed ROTJ twist when writing the second draft of ESB after Leigh Brackett completed her draft” (with many in the film and fan community following suit).
Though I think Options A and B have their merits - Option A being the stronger of the two, in that there’s no contradiction between ANH and ESB - I lean towards Option C. Beside the other reasons I posted, I think it makes sense of other tendencies of Lucas, like his scenario for the second draft (1995) of TPM, where Obi-Wan the Jedi Master is actually killed by Darth Maul(not Qui-Gon), and his young Padawan Qui-Gon subsequently takes on the name and identity of ‘Obi-Wan Kenobi’ thereafter in honor of his master. Or things like Kasdan half-jokingly tossing out an idea for ROTJ to have Luke put on Vader’s helmet and pretend to be the ‘new Vader’ as an act of subterfuge. I don’t think Kasdan pulled that idea out of nowhere. Kurtz’ take on ESB or a ROTJ-that-never-was for Vader to be actively seeking to ‘make amends’ and make things right with Luke’s help - the only sort of redemptive angle he saw for the character - might or might not have been a left-over plot point of the earlier ‘identity switch’ Option C angle.
@Avimo posted:
- “I’ve done a lot of analysis on the topic (based off of both the discoveries of other people, a few discoveries I’ve made myself, and the confirmed documented SW history like the Lucasfilm books and the public older drafts) and as of now I personally believe that Lucas is genuinely telling the complete truth that he had the Vader=Anakin twist fully conceived in its entirety by the third draft of ANH and just briefly considered scrapping it during ESB’s writing. I’ve gathered a lot of evidence to back this up, which I’d be happy to share with you guys if you’re interested.”*
You may be right, Avimo. In that same “Star Wars to Jedi” 1983 doc*, Lucas says (paraphrasing) something to the affect of “when we got down to the second one, I said to myself, do I want to go through with this? With him being his father?”. And I think in the 1993 ‘The Art of Star Wars Galaxy’ Vol One, paraphrasing, he says something to the affect of being a little taken aback by Vader’s popularity after Star Wars came out in 1977, but that he (Lucas) decided to stick to the original story (of him being his father).
*see: (https://youtu.be/YKhGkiHSlAA?t=3292)
- courtesy of poster @Barfolomew
- It’s important to note that the change in the fourth draft was solely Luke not remembering him, not that Luke never met him. The note Lucas wrote in-between drafts said “Luke doesn’t know father Jedi” and the fourth draft has Luke saying he doesn’t “really” remember him. It wasn’t till ROTJ where Lucas first mentioned that Luke never met his father. In fact, Lucas said as late as 1980 that Luke’s father knew him as a little boy.
- I think the Nellith name was Brackett’s idea, not Lucas’s. Lucas never tells her to name the sister Nellith in any of the story conferences.
- Kasdan got the idea of Luke putting on Vader’s helmet because Lucas made a joke about it in their story conferences
- Honestly I don’t think we know for sure if Vader wasn’t Luke’s father during the Brackett draft era. Lucas came up with reasonable excuses for not telling Brackett about the twist, and the treatment he gave Brackett explicitly said “There is more to Vader’s attempts to win Luke over than meets the eye. For some reason, Vader is reluctant to kill Luke and would rather turn him to the dark side of the Force.” So I think it’s possible that the “I had to decide if I really wanted to do this” era Lucas mentioned in From Star Wars to Jedi was from ESB’s even earlier writing, during the 4 months Lucas was writing the treatment for Brackett.
Either way, we do have a single note hinting at what Lucas’s backup plan was- Rinzler’s Making of ESB book has an undated note saying “The Emperor is the evil one- he kills Luke’s father. Vader begs Luke to kill him–he does.” This note is pretty weird–it seems pretty pointless to reveal that it was simply a different bad guy who killed Luke’s father, when that seemingly wouldn’t impact Luke or the story at all. So I came up with two theories on what Lucas might have meant by that note. This is all speculation below, but it’s based on me trying to interpret the vague info we have about this stuff:
Theory 1:
My first theory is that the purpose of revealing Palpatine killed Luke’s father would be to allow Vader to still be redeemed in ROTJ. This is supported by the note about Palpatine killing Luke’s father and the note about Vader begging Luke to kill him are right next to each other, implying those two events are connected somehow. So my first theory is this: If Lucas is telling the complete truth that he had Vader’s story and redemption mapped out in 1975, that would mean that when Lucas began writing his backup plan story in 1977 that didn’t have Vader as Luke’s father, that would mean Lucas would now have to think of a new reason Vader would get redeemed. However, I imagine Lucas struggled to figure out how a Vader-who-isn’t-Luke’s-father could plausibly be redeemed, because without Vader being Luke’s father, Luke would have no reason to want to redeem Vader, and the audience also might find Vader’s redemption hard to believe when he killed both Obi-Wan and Luke’s father and there was also no foreshadowing toward it. So he came up with the following story:
Anakin and Vader both trained under Obi-Wan and Vader turned to the dark side. Obi-Wan and Anakin then went to confront Vader on the lava planet, and together they wounded Vader and made him need a life support system. However during the battle, Anakin was wounded too, and Obi-Wan was unable to take him with him when escaping the planet since he was in a rush to get away from the arriving Palpatine. So when Palpatine rescued Vader from the volcano and brought him to the city planet to be repaired, he also captured the injured Anakin so he and Vader could interrogate him. Once Palpatine and Vader finished interrogating Anakin, Palpatine ordered Vader to kill Anakin. However, similarly to the rough draft of ROTJ where he hesitated to kill Luke, Vader hesitated to kill Anakin and/or made up an excuse not to, due to him still caring about his former friend. In response, Palpatine murdered Anakin himself. However at some point Obi-Wan found a recording of Palpatine telling Vader to kill Anakin, so he assumed Vader killed Anakin.
Then when Vader bests Luke in ESB and pleads with him to join him, Luke says “I’ll never join you, you killed my father!” and Vader responds “But I didn’t kill your father” and reveals the true story to Luke, and the fact that Vader refused to kill Anakin would be used as foreshadowing to set up his redemption in the next film. Maybe in this version it’d be Anakin’s dying wish for Vader to be redeemed and that’s why Luke set out to redeem him.
Theory 2:
The second theory I have is that Lucas planned for Anakin to survive his duel with Vader and be alive during the OT, and only be killed by Palpatine much later on. When explaining Luke’s sister to Brackett, Lucas tells her “Luke’s father had two children who were twins. He took one to an uncle on one side of the universe, and another to the other side of the universe. The sister is also becoming a Jedi.” But what Lucas doesn’t explain is who exactly Anakin left the sister with to raise her and train her as a Jedi. So what if it was supposed to be Anakin himself? Lucas toying with the idea of Anakin being alive, but not as Darth Vader and still as a good guy would be in line with things Lucas had done in the past; In the second draft of ANH, Luke mentioned that he once believed his father was killed but Deak told him he was alive and still a Jedi. And in the final ANH, Owen tells Luke Obi-Wan is dead, and we later find out Obi-Wan is alive in hiding and just changed his name. So my second theory is that the backup plan story went like this:
When Vader fought and killed Anakin, Anakin narrowly survived, unbeknownst to Vader. After he and Obi-Wan escaped the lava planet, they agreed that each of them would both fake their deaths and change their names and go into hiding, and one of them would look after Luke while the other would look after the sister. So Anakin brought Luke to Owen and decided that Owen would raise him while Obi-Wan would look after him and train him, and the sister he took to the other side of the universe where he raised her and trained her himself. As part of the “One won’t know the other is there if they got killed” plan Obi-Wan devised with Anakin, Obi-Wan lied to Luke and told him Vader killed his father in order to maintain the secret because if the Empire found out Anakin was alive, they might realize the sister was alive too.
Then in Episode VIII where Luke learns the secret location of his twin sister and reunites with her, he also learns of his father’s survival and reunites with him too. And then in Episode IX when Luke and his sister are having that big final battle with Palpatine Kurtz mentioned, Anakin also participates in the battle, but then Palpatine kills him for real.