Look. Hear me out.
It would be insane for Lucasfilm to make Luke Skywalker the antagonist of a film. Let alone, once again, the first Star Wars theatrical release since 2019. Insane! Ballsy, which would be a nice change of pace for the risk-averse studio, but still, insane! And yet, dear reader. And yet.
Luke Skywalker is the perfect balance of everything we’ve talked about in an antagonist so far. He’d be a big, shocking name, hugely important to Star Wars and worthy of the scale of a movie, but also one with a deeply personal relationship to Din and Grogu already: Luke tried to make Grogu the first student of his new Jedi Academy, and he failed. Now, the New Republic he and his friends helped forge faces a crisis that could undo it. What if Luke gets desperate to recruit allies to his cause? What if he just needs Grogu to understand training with him is necessary, that attachment to his father figure is holding him back, blind in his desperation to how attachment made Luke the incredible Jedi he is in the first place?
What if we did his atrocious Book of Boba Fett appearance over and actually spent the time and understanding necessary to do the idea justice, not just as an exploration of Luke’s own inner conflicts and turmoils that would go on to define the rest of his life after Return of the Jedi, but as an actual exploration and test of the bond between Din and Grogu, the battle for the fate of a child’s livelihood? Like I said, an antagonist doesn’t have to be evil to be in opposition to our heroes. They just have to want something different to them.
Or fuck it, make him actually Luuke, the mad clone from The Last Command made by the dark Jedi Joruus C’Baoth and that’s a plot twist. Play with the uncanny valleyness of it all with the the inevitably CG-de-aged and re-voiced Mark Hamill and make that offness intentional! We wanna bring Star Wars back to the big screen? Let’s get nuts.
