Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back

…On Kashyyyk, Luke and Akira went into the dungeons of the Silver City, and found Han Solo 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.

Though his friends escaped in the Falcon, thanks to the aid of Akira Valorum, Luke remained behind to slay Jabba the Hutt, which he did with venomous relish.

Then he went to confront Darth 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 red-haired, pale-skinned man, with metallic golden droid eyes. The brand of the Sith he wore upon his left arm instead of his forehead—the tradition for those who first became Sith Lords secretly, or in pectore.

He told Luke the truth about his father’s death, heretofore unguessed: that Vader had been the one to kill him upon the fields of Condawn.

Vader said that he admired Luke’s dueling prowess. He had the heart of a Sith indeed. But, if Luke would not ally himself to the Empire, he would have to be destroyed, even as his father had been.

Nevertheless, if Luke accepted, the rewards would be substantial.

Vader extended an invitation to Luke to join the Sith, so that they might 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 generous offer of half the Empire.

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 Luke Starkiller’s lifeless, partially decayed hand: Annikin’s lightsaber.

Darth Vader honored his worthy opponents, even those he had slain… if only in secret.

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, whose lost hair was just beginning to grow back, once again opted for well-crafted false teeth, indistinguishable from real ones. However, she replaced her missing fingers with outwardly visible droid parts.

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.

In the finale, the Rebels received a coded message from Han Solo's stepfather, the powerful trade baron Bail Whitsun. He refused 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.)