The universe which the Star Wars films inhabit is, as established in Star Wars Is Back!, too broad and too deep even for the big screen. To the apparent frustration of some fans, the films themselves only offer us a narrow window on it. Now that Lucas is finally about to open the curtains a little wider on his vision, their fevered imaginations are once more running wild. Thoughts have turned to the past, the subject of the new films, but at the same time interest has also been reawakened in the series future.
As is widely known, Lucas has billed these new films as the first half of the six part Star Wars story. This flatly contradicts his previous assertions that there were to be nine episodes in total. As these six films are now known to concern the life-story of Anakin Skywalker, this would seem to make perfect sense. But apparently not. Despite all the publicity, there are still a bewildering number of people who are confidently expecting episodes 7 to 9 to follow - and an equal number who have at last accepted that they arent, but are upset about it! Frankly, this worries me.
I know I shouldnt be surprised. These are, after all, the same Star Wars fans who eagerly devour the endless spin-offs - books, comics, games and toys, none of which seem to have anything in common with the Star Wars film trilogy other than the logo and the names of some of the characters therein, yet treat them as at least equally important.
My problem with their position is not (for once) a question of canonicity. Admittedly, with my Doctor Who hat on I could argue for my country on the limits of the Whoniverse. The merits and demerits of treating the New and Missing Adventures, the comics and the spin-off videos etc. as on a par with the television adventures are very much a matter of personal taste. Generally, fans will twist the argument to arrive at the conclusion they want. If you like your Doctor Who too broad, too deep and too rude for the small screen, heres to the New Adventures; if you thought the third Doctors era was cruelly cut short, cheer on the Missing Adventures; if you like prefer your Doctor Who resolutely two-dimensional, fight the comics corner. And so on.
Yet when it comes to Star Wars, I say balls to the canon. Its not on grounds of authenticity that I object to spin-offs such as The Continuing Adventures of Wedge Antilles, Young Boba Fett or Shadows of the Bit Between the Films. Nor do I care much about their (disputable) quality. I simply find them irrelevant, because the Star Wars I know and love is not founded upon such trivia.
What enables us to treat Doctor Who, Star Trek and television in general in such a relaxed way is that we accept them as fluid, non-finite texts, with have no absolute beginning, certainly no ultimate end, and plenty of gaps in the middle to explore. They are, although broken up into discrete chunks for the purposes of storytelling, sci-fi soap-operas (though not quite as literally as Babyawn 5). We feel that we are justified in plugging holes - as we would have to if Corrie went off air for six months - or theorising about characters lives after they exit stage left for the final time.
By contrast, the Star Wars story has a precise beginning and end, both of which were set down in stone before the first episode was written. (Youre sceptical? Dont worry, Ill be coming to that later). Thus it is clearly not a soap opera. However, the fact that the films form a continuing narrative appears to have fooled a great many of its followers into thinking that it is, and by extension, that the narrative can continue indefinitely.
Perhaps confusion arises because Star Wars itself is pretty much self-contained. In the context of this one film it is possible to view the Star Wars set-up as The Adventures of Luke Skywalker and his Pals. (We know that Lucas himself did, though only very early in its development.) The assumption here is that our heroes are by nature adventurers, and will continue to fight evil (Luke) or find themselves in scrapes (Han) even after the demise of the Empire.
Well - maybe they will. Luke is, after all, a Jedi knight, and Han a scoundrel. But enjoyable as their continuing escapades might be, they cannot be part of the Star Wars story, because they are irrelevant. Luke and Han have already reached their respective narrative closures, by achieving the goals set for them at the outset (namely defeating Vader/the Emperor and becoming a Jedi, and resolving the Jabba problem. On the subject of which, one can only assume that Leias quest is to get herself a bloke). To set them off on further adventures would necessitate starting up a new storyline, and Star Wars is, essentially, one story. Where would you stop?
The key to pin-pointing the beginning and end of the Star Wars saga is in identifying what truly lies at its centre. Doctor Who, for example, has an obvious centre in the Doctor; this allows it to be virtually open-ended (to paraphrase the Doctor himself, it could go on forever, barring accidents.). Star Treks centre, meanwhile, is growing increasingly vague (almost inevitable when you let fans control the means of production). Since Deep Space Nine, it is no longer even about a star trek, with the result that the programme has lost much of its distinctiveness. It has become a soap opera where the setting is Space, the 24th century - no different really to, say, Dallas, the nineteen-eighties.
The subject of Star Wars, though, is pretty clear. It is not the star wars themselves, but Anakin Skywalker. The demise of the Jedi Knights and the rise and fall of the Empire are certainly part of the story, but only because they are inextricably linked with Anakin, and he with them. Like all myths on the classical model, Star Wars tells of great events from the point of view of a great man.
Just as not all of its episodes have the same tone (three and five at least have downbeat endings), similarly the entire story comprises many narrative styles. Parts One to Three on their own are a tragedy: the Tragedie of Anakin Skywalker. All six episodes together form a saga: the Saga of the Skywalker Family. Because it is told via a series of heroic battles affecting an entire civilisation, the story also takes on the form of an epic. The fact that it combines all these is, of course, one reason why it is so distinctive a tale.
With all this in mind, it should be obvious that to continue the Star Wars saga beyond the end of Return of the Jedi would basically be redundant. Whatever interesting adventures or character development could be explored in that way, it would still be missing the point of the whole enterprise, big time. Thats why it is this issue, above all others, which separates the fans from the fanboys.
Where there is still room for debate is over Lucas grand plan. The retreat from nine episodes to six took place quietly and without many people noticing - hence the current confusion. It has also fuelled the scepticism which always existed in some quarters over whether the grand plan Lucas has been following ever since really pre-existed the first film. What is disputed is one simple, but vital fact: whether or not Darth Vader was originally intended to be Anakin Skywalker. This would clarify, one way or the other, whether the series has always been simply a vehicle for telling his life-story.
Firm evidence of such a design is difficult to come by, and often inconclusive. For instance, even the subtitle Episode Four - A New Hope was only appended to Star Wars on its re-release in the summer of 1978. Was this simply because Lucas had to treat the film as a one-off until its success was beyond doubt? Or was it, as cynics say, a hasty addition merely to facilitate the continued milking of his cash-cow?
Whatever the truth, once the Star Wars series future was assured Lucas never missed an opportunity to tell us that the film was just part of a nine-episode sequence. Details of the other films were vague, and most probably apocryphal. I remember reading at the time - and Im not alone - that the three trilogies would be set so far apart that only R2D2 and C3PO would appear in them all, and this idea stayed with me until very recently. (I am, I admit, a newly-minted convert to the cult of Anakin, and my earlier piety on the subject was forged in the hypocrisy of hindsight.) It is not impossible that this was Lucas original intention. The extensive referencing of past events in Star Wars does not necessarily mean that they would have formed the first trilogy - it could as easily have been a way of covering the ground between two much more distant parts of the story.
Vaders real identity is apparently not mentioned anywhere in Lucas extensive original notes, or the rough drafts of Star Wars. But, then again, would it be? We can tell by watching the development of the plot that this idea came to Lucas at quite a late stage. As is well known, Lucas originally dreamed up the story that roughly corresponds to the original trilogy, then split it in three because it was too long to be told in one film. At the same time he developed the back-story, initially to satisfy his own curiosity at how the characters became who they were. It may have been only at this point that the idea of Vaders dual identity came to him.
There is some persuasive evidence to suggest that Lucas knew by 1976. The name Darth Vader itself is intended to suggest dark father (vader is Dutch for father). In the early drafts, which are uniformly overcomplicated, the heros father often appears, whether at the beginning (a dying man who is almost entirely machine) or at the end (as the object of a quest-style plot). Eventually this character disappears, to be replaced by Obi-Wan. Lucas explained this in 1997: I wanted the father to be Darth Vader, but I also wanted a father figure. So I created Ben as the other half. You have one who is the light half and one who is the dark half this sort of gave a twist to the whole story. It seems more than serendipity that the relevant dialogue in the first film fits so well with what was revealed later, and even takes on added resonance.
The basic structure of the Empire Strikes Back did not change much during its development, although it is worth noting that Lucas did not tell Leigh Brackett, who wrote the first draft, that Vader was in fact Lukes father. He says this is because we still wasnt sure in which film he was going to reveal the fact. The biggest changes to Lucas original plan appear to have affected Return of the Jedi. Although many of the basic elements were the same - Jabba the Hutt, the Wookie/Ewok battle - other details changed significantly. Although the Emperor was present in all contemporary drafts of the movie, he apparently did not feature in the original synopsis. Gary Kurtz, producer of the first two films, recalls that the original ending of the treatment featured Leia being crowned the queen of her people. He apparently fell out with Lucas over the way the story was heading, particularly the introduction of the Emperor which, he felt, detracted from the status of Vader as the main villain.
This is a little problematic. If Lucas had a grand plan, surely Kurtz would have been among the first to know that Vader was not the main villain of the piece but in fact its tragic hero? On the other hand, it does seem rather nave to have raised such objections so late in the day, especially following Empire. If Vader was never intended to be anything other than the main villain, why have him working for a higher power? He would have been Ming the Merciless to Luke Skywalkers Flash Gordon. Yet the Emperors shadowy presence as the hand controlling Vader, Tarkin and the rest is clearly established early on in Star Wars. Perhaps we should assume that Kurtzs conception of the Star Wars story was fixed at a very early stage in its drafting, when it was still little more than a futuristic fairy tale.
In conclusion, then, it seems that the Star Wars story was by no means always intended to be the life story of Anakin Skywalker, but that this approach arose naturally out of the development process. So where does this leave the mysterious third trilogy? Are we to assume that the Emperor would have been the main villain? And if so, who would have been opposing him? Lucas is no help, generally content to muffle the issue by rewriting history, as here (again from 1997): There was a point when I was writing Star Wars where I just sat down and went through the entire story While I was writing the treatment, I decided to limit Star Wars. I said this is the stuff that happens later, this is the stuff that happens before... And thats how it came about that there was enough material for six scripts.
The most common conception of the final trilogy is that it would feature at least Luke, and possibly the other main characters from the second trilogy, in later life. In the past, Lucas himself occasionally said as much. Of late, however, he has come clean and admitted that the casting was as far as his ideas had ever extended. Bearing in mind the thoroughness with which he plotted the first six episodes, it seems unlikely that the final three would have been completely unconnected to the main story. Therefore, the most logical conclusion one can draw is that episodes three to nine would have been nothing more than an extended (or heavily padded) version of the second trilogy as eventually made.
So why did Lucas cut short his oeuvre? Did he decide that the story was too flabby and could be told more economically in 6 episodes? Did he realise, after making Empire, that he simply didnt have it in him to complete all nine? Or was it because he completely changed his original conception of the series? We may never know. But it is a good thing that he did. Return of the Jedi may be slightly rushed, but it still completes the story in a satisfying way. Luke, the new hope of the Jedi, brings about the redemption of his father. Anakin Skywalker overthrows the Emperor who caused his downfall. Even Ben Kenobi, who apparently set much of this in motion in the first place, can finally rest in peace. Where else is there to go? Answers on a postcard, please, but not to me.
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