Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back
Forget what you know about the opening on Hoth.
According to his own words in The Making of ESB, GL appears to have originally planned for the Rebels to be still housed on Yavin IV when he began to plan out the sequels to SW 1977.
This means that much less time would have passed between the two movies than is allotted by current canon (three years). Perhaps only a couple of months, let’s say.
Most likely, the original reason for this different opening was because the Rebels were making hurried preparations to evacuate, and had selected a new site, but had not yet cleared out everything from their old base.
As in the finished film, the Empire must have taken them by surprise.
Darth Vader’s fleet—no doubt hastily assembled from across the galaxy--appeared unexpectedly in the skies over Yavin, and poured a rain of fire down upon the jungle planet, turning it into an inferno much like Condawn.
The Rebels barely escaped: Luke and Ben together with R2-D2, and Han and Leia with Chewbacca and C-3PO, separated into two groups by the chaos of the evacuation.
Small side note: It’s very possible that this second film is where Leia would have originally worn the famous cinnamon-bun hairstyle inspired by Flash Gordon. After all, it doesn’t show up in any of Ralph McQuarrie’s concept art sketches for the first movie, nor, as far as I know, in the drawings of anyone else.
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Instead of Dagobah, Luke and Ben would have traveled to the rocky, cavernous planet of Ttaz, where Ben worked to train Luke in the ways of the Force.
GL told Leigh Brackett in 1977 that he’d wanted to show such a place in his earlier, discarded ideas for the first SW sequel. Here Luke was supposed have scary visions in the desert, reminiscent of The Exorcist, or Jesus’ temptation by Satan in the Bible. I think I can guess what that vision was.
At Ben’s bidding, Luke entered a dark cave, but he defied Ben’s advice by taking his weapons with him.
There Luke saw a vision of a man and a woman. To be precise, he saw spectral versions of Han and Leia, as lovers, who taunted him for his failure to win the heart of the Princess.
(Think of Ron Weasley and the visions he receives from Voldemort’s locket in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Ever notice that the giant-size Wizard Chess scene at the end of The Philosopher’s Stone appears to come straight from Edgar Rice Burroughs?)
Luke used his lightsaber to slay both of the specters. And they fell dead—resolving themselves into their true shapes, Aubra and Zeno Kadar. Luke began to cry, for he had done murder out of the jealousy in his heart.
Ben told him that they were evil Sith creatures, but little else of the truth at present. After all, some part of him still feared the consequences of giving Luke the true knowledge of his paternity. (Who knows? Maybe there really was a reason for that strange look Alec Guinness gets in his eyes in SW 1977.)
In fact, Ben knew in his heart that Luke still needed to face one final test: to confront Vader, and the evil within himself, and decide whether to accept or reject it.
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After a harrowing space voyage, Han and Leia eventually made their way to a refuge—not Bespin but Kashyyyk, the Wookiee Planet.
There Han had been born to a settler couple long ago. But his father and mother were killed by the Wookiees, and young Han himself was raised among the creatures, until a friendly trader found him and brought him back to civilization. (Think of the literary Tarzan, or Leigh Brackett’s Eric John Stark and his boyhood on Mercury.)
That trader was now the powerful head of the Transport Guild: a recluse, and a man reluctant to get involved either way in the Galactic Civil War, but an old friend and one to be counted on in Han’s hour of need.
Han hoped to contact him here, on his old home base of Kashyyyk, where he’d gotten his start in the Guild. He would likely offer Han protection; he might even, if asked nicely, commit his powerful fleet to the Rebel cause.
This guy really needs a name. Perhaps we can call him Bail Whitsun—combining the names of two characters from the 1974 rough draft, who meet in a metropolitan nightclub to discuss Imperial restraints on trade.
But the new trader in town was not a friend of Han. He was Jabba the Hutt—the humanoid (not slug!) smuggler whom Han had wronged in the 1975 rough draft, by stealing the Millennium Falcon (whose construction Jabba financed) out from under his nose.
And Jabba had already been tipped off to watch for visitors matching the description of Han Solo and his friends. But even Jabba had an Imperial minder: his ostensible servant, Akira Valorum, the secret King of the Clones.
Han and Leia went to Jabba, not suspecting his treachery. Han apologized to him, and Jabba pretended to forgive him. Leia probably used a pseudonym—perhaps Ethania Eredith, as in the Leigh Brackett draft—but Jabba surely knew who she was on sight.
They were both tortured, in the Sith fashion. For Vader had arrived there already. And as in the finished film, he wished to lay a trap to snare his son.
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On Ttaz, Luke heard his friends’ cries of pain through the Force. Ben Kenobi told him that if his friends needed him, then he ought to go—as long as he came back afterward.
For his part, Ben would go on to the new Rebel base. Ttaz was a world whose heart had been poisoned by its denizens, and no one should stay there too long, at least until it had healed.
Luke and R2-D2 made it safely to Kashyyyk, but feared to go straight into the Imperial traders’ base, high in the treetops. So Luke landed on the ground to reconnoiter, and encountered the Wookiees there. He rescued several of them some from Imperial fur trappers. Luke was taken to their village, and there bested the Wookiees’ greatest warrior in fair fight, receiving a scar on one cheek in the duel.
Luke was inducted as an honorary member of the clan. He was all the more beloved because he was a friend of Chewbacca, the long-absent son of the Wookiee chief, and he could already understand their language in part.
The Wookiees helped Luke sneak up into the Silver City in the treetops: the lofty palace of the traders, built by Bail Whitsun years ago. (This concept is based on Prince Barin’s forest kingdom of Arboria in the Flash Gordon comics.)
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Luke came into the dungeons of the Silver City, but there he was discovered by Akira Valorum. Like the Prince Valorum of the 1974 rough draft, this Valorum was an honorable man, and he was sympathetic to Luke’s plight. For Vader had already forced him to break the greatest of the Clones’ religious taboos.
Akira Valorum freed Luke, and together they went to rescue Leia and Han, and Chewbacca and C-3PO.
As in the final film, 3PO would have been blown apart and partially reassembled—though here, given the more mature overall tone, at least one of his body parts would likely never have been found. Most probably, he’d have lost his legs, explaining why he’d have had to be carried by Chewbacca.
(Forget what you’ve heard about C-3PO having a silver leg at the start of Episode IV. That’s not true, OK? Look at Ralph McQuarrie’s pre-1977 art and see for yourself.)
Luke and Akira went into the dungeons of the Silver City, and found Han and Leia in separate cells. Han’s wounds grieved Akira, but the sight of Leia angered and sickened Luke. Once again she lay unconscious and bloody, but now even worse, for one of her eyes was blinded, and her beautiful hair had been cut off. Luke awoke her with a kiss, and she clung to him, and cried from mingled pain and joy.
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Though his friends escaped in the Falcon, thanks to the aid of Akira Valorum, Luke remained behind to slay Jabba, which he did with venomous relish.
Then he went to confront Vader.
This scene no doubt took place in some sort of dangerous environment, as in the final film—perhaps the edge of a balcony opening out into empty sky.
In the duel, Luke used his Dark Side rage to fight Vader, hoping to defeat evil with evil. He almost won—but he stabbed Vader in the shoulder, and Vader groaned in a great outcry of pain. And Luke hesitated to finish him off.
But Vader had deceived him. He cut off Luke’s right arm at the elbow, and Annikin’s lightsaber went along with it.
And he tore Luke’s Kiber Crystal from around his neck, and crushed it in his hand. Luke was terrified, for he believed that all power had fled from him, and in so thinking, he made it so.
Vader took off his mask, revealing his own face: that of a fair-haired, pale-skinned man, with one eye missing, and the brand of the Sith upon his forehead. He told Luke the truth about his parentage, and about his kinship with Leia.
This last revelation horrified Luke even more, though he did not show it—for he now knew he had committed incest. (I highly doubt that would actually have been mentioned on screen, except via implication. But of course Siegfried does the same thing with his aunt, the Valkyrie Brunnhilde, in Richard Wagner’s operas.)
Vader extended an invitation to Luke to join the Sith, and jointly rule the galaxy… but Luke jumped off the balcony.
He was rescued by a passing flying creature, a winged steed of the Wookiees—ridden by Leia and Han, who had come to rescue him at his subconscious call. The Millennium Falcon escaped Imperial pursuit, as in the final film, with Vader left to ponder why Luke did not accept his father’s generous offer of half the Empire.
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But Vader did make one more stop before he left Kashyyyk: to the forest floor, far below the balcony where he and Luke had dueled.
There, after long searching, he found the thing he had been looking for, clutched in his son’s lifeless, partially decayed hand: his own father’s lightsaber.
Darth Vader, too, wished to honor his father’s memory, if only in secret.
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At the new Rebel base—quite likely on a grass planet, an idea considered for a Rebel headquarters in ROTJ—Luke and Leia and Han all received medical treatment. Han opted for illegal clone parts, grown by Akira Valorum, to replace his losses. But Luke opted to wear his wound with pride. He now had a golden prosthetic right arm.
Leia, meanwhile, once again opted for well-crafted false teeth, indistinguishable from real ones. But she left her missing fingers alone, as a visible war wound of her own to match Luke’s.
And she did not bother to replace her blind eye. It would, she knew, make a good effect on the Rebel propaganda posters.
C-3PO was offered new legs, of the wrong metal—silver. The Rebels’ resources were not limitless. He protested about the mismatch, but accepted one of them, thinking it a great honor. Though, for his other missing limb, he preferred to use a carved wooden leg instead. He said that it was a fitting memento for a brave droid like himself, even though it had to be replaced frequently.
(Really, forget what I said about C-3PO already having had a silver leg by the time the first Star Wars film opened.)
In the finale, the Rebels received a coded message from Bail Whitsun, refusing for the moment to talk of an alliance, or even to deal with the Rebels at all. With that, Han decided to depart, since he feared that their cause would ultimately be lost without Bail’s aid.
(The idea that “Han splits at the end of the second [film],” leaving Leia alone with Luke, goes all the way back to GL’s conversation with Alan Dean Foster in 1975.)