Satan Helps Elucidate Skywalker's Rescue Plot

To cut a long story short, I was recently on a long-haul flight and ended up watching The Empire Strike Back and part of Return of the Jedi on the in-flight entertainment screen.

I haven't watched a Star Wars film since The Force Awakens came out at the cinema and I don't believe I had seen any for some time before that either. But there was nothing else on that I wanted to watch (apart from the surprisingly good Everything Everywhere All At Once) and 13 hours is a long time to sit and read without a break. So I watched Empire, was reminded that it is actually a genuinely good and accomplished film, and was enthused enough by the experience that I decided to just get straight into Jedi next.

I loved Return of the Jedi as a kid and was, in a way, childishly looking forward to a rewatch - after what must be approaching twenty years. I know it is maligned in certain circles as the place where the rot set in - and at times it does have the feeling of the prequels, as it were, avant la lettre. But the Jedi I remember from my childhood remains a fun, action-packed roller-coaster ride filled with excitement but leavened by sweet and even moving moments, as when Luke reveals to Leia he is her brother, or when Yoda dies. Yes the ewoks were, in my memory, a bit of an embarrassing misstep. But I also remembered loving the Endor battle when I was a boy and feeling my heart lift every time those furry underdogs destroyed an ATAT walker with a well-placed spitball or made a Stormtrooper slip over on a banana skin or catch his toe in a mouse trap or whatever. So I was up for it, big time. 

What I discovered was that Jedi is just a dreadful film for its first half - almost execrably bad. So bad indeed that I found it practically unwatchable. It is all over the place, filled with ill-judged humour (like the droid being tortured) and weird vignettes that spoil the pacing (like the dance sequence, made unnecessarily longer by Lucas's CGI meddling). And the plot to rescue Han, I thought, doesn't just make little sense, but is also internally inconsistent: I kept asking myself why on earth would Luke send R2D2 and C3PO as gifts to Jabba given that everything we know about Luke previously has indicated a total loyalty to his comrades? Why would Leia be there if Luke has a plan already hatched to free Han? Why doesn't Luke just go in first to negotiate? What is Lando supposed to be doing? 

I got as far as the speeders-in-redwoods bit and gave up. Later, after landing (I don't want to suggest it was the first thing I did when getting off the plane, but it may have been in the first ten things) I sent a message to some friends on WhatsApp observing that the plot to liberate Han made no sense, and wondering why I hadn't realised this as a kid. 

One friend messaged me back the following sequence of messages:

The plot makes perfect sense. It was all about lulling Jabba into a false sense of security. Lando is undercover. Chewie, Leia and the droids go in in such a way as to make Jabba think he is winning or more crafty than our heroes. 

(admittedly C-3PO doesn’t know he is going in but that adds to making Jabba and his cronies believe the story and underestimate Luke) 

In pre-Disney takeover canon, Bib Fortuna and Luke were meeting secretly beforehand; Luke was negotiating for Han’s release and Bib was trying to see if Luke was in some way useful to overthrowing Jabba and installing himself as leader 

Bib Fortuna survived the explosion on the sail barge and then promptly had his brain removed by the spidery monks that live in various parts of the palace (who are weird Force monks that can only commune fully when their brain is in a spider-walker)

Now, one of my biggest pet peeves in life is when the plot of a film can only be made to make sense by retrospectively making it canon that ackshually it was weird Force monks, or whatever (JJ Abrams is always guilty of this type of thing in his film-making); if a film can't make sense in its own right then it is QED a film that makes no sense. But I was amused by the fact that a big exercise had evidently taken place to give a post hoc justification for the Solo rescue and today, recalling the exchange, I decided to ask Satan about it. Here's what Claude's Opus 4.8 with 'extra thinking' and tweaked by my default instructions not to be an obsequious arsehole, came up with:

Short version: there isn't a single authoritative, Lucas-stated breakdown of "the plan." What gets called the canonical explanation is mostly a charitable post-hoc reconstruction that fans and tie-in writers built to make the sequence cohere, plus what's inferable from the film and a few Legends/reference sources. The film deliberately withholds the plan so the audience is as much in the dark as Jabba. With that caveat, here's the reconstruction that's become the accepted reading: 

The operation is a series of escalating contingencies, each a fallback for the one before, with a direct assault ruled out (in Legends, because the Empire had blockaded Tatooine to catch incoming Rebels).

Phase one is diplomacy and bribery. The droids arrive alone carrying Luke's holographic message: he asks Jabba to release Han and offers C-3PO and R2-D2 as a "gift." The critical detail is that R2 is carrying Luke's lightsaber. If Jabba takes the deal, Han walks free with no violence. Jabba refuses. 

Phase two is stealth. Leia, disguised as the bounty hunter Boushh, uses Chewbacca-as-captive as cover to get inside and collect the bounty, then thaws Han at night and tries to slip him out. Lando is already embedded among the guards as the inside man. If this works, they exfiltrate quietly. Jabba was awake; they're caught. 

Phase three is Luke himself as last resort. He walks in, reveals he's a Jedi, tries the mind trick, and is prepared to escalate. The lightsaber stashed with R2 is the ace in the hole — when everyone is condemned to the Sarlacc and concentrated on the sail barge, R2 launches it to Luke and the heroes turn the tables.

The load-bearing claim in the charitable reading is that the "failures" aren't failures: each blown phase still advances the board, getting all the players inside and ultimately out at the Pit of Carkoon, away from the fortified palace, with the weapon present. Some readings push this further and argue Luke needed Leia's capture. The supporting textual evidence people cite is that R2 holds the lightsaber back during the rancor fight and only deploys it at the barge — implying that moment, not the rancor, was always the intended endgame. 

Where I'd push back on calling any of this "canonical": the rancor was plainly not planned (Luke is just surviving), the mind trick failing on a Hutt is a genuine setback rather than a feint, and the layered-intent version requires assuming Luke foresaw specific failures the film never shows him anticipating. The most defensible statement is that Lucas intended to portray a now-confident Jedi running a graduated infiltration with a weapon pre-positioned via the droids — the precise "he planned every capture" choreography is fan apologetics, not established canon.

Get that, anonymous friend, who I am sure is reading this? It is fan apologetics, not established canon.

Intrigued by the role of Bib Fortuna, I asked it about that too:

Mostly real, with two embellishments and one outright error. The core comes from a genuine Legends source: "Of the Day's Annoyances: Bib Fortuna's Tale" by M. Shayne Bell, in the 1995 anthology Tales from Jabba's Palace. Going through the claim piece by piece: 

Bib survived the barge and got disembrained by the monks — accurate, but not "promptly." In Legends he escapes the sail barge explosion on a private skiff and returns to the palace. He then tries to seize Jabba's empire and actually wins a scuffle over the remaining possessions — he's the apparent victor for a stretch. Then the B'omarr monks emerge from the cellars and forcibly remove his brain. So there's a takeover-and-battle phase first; it isn't immediate. (In the X-Wing comic Battleground: Tatooine, his disembodied brain later gets subordinated to a rival Twi'lek, Firith Olan, and eventually transplanted into a fresh body.) 

Luke negotiating with Bib for Han — partly real, "secret meetings beforehand" is a stretch. The story does have Bib dealing with Luke, who wants to arrange Han's return. So a Luke–Bib negotiation exists in Legends. But "secret meetings beforehand" oversells it; the summary frames it as the business surrounding Luke's approach, not a clandestine pre-arranged back-channel. The kernel is true, the cloak-and-dagger framing is your friend's gloss. 

Bib using Luke to overthrow Jabba — grounded but extrapolated. Bib's overthrow motive is dead-on for Legends: he's characterized as the man with more plots against Jabba than anyone, "somehow involved in every plot against Jabba," positioned to inherit the empire no matter who lands the killing blow. So "Bib wanted to overthrow Jabba and install himself" is solid. The specific claim that he was sizing up Luke as the instrument for that coup is a reasonable inference but not something the text establishes — that's your friend connecting dots. 

"Weird Force monks that can only commune fully when their brain is in a spider-walker" — this is wrong. The B'omarr Order isn't a Force tradition. They're an ascetic religious order pursuing enlightenment through total separation from the material world — they remove their own members' brains and put them in nutrient jars so the mind can contemplate the cosmos undistracted by the body and senses. Nothing Force-based about it. And the mechanism is backwards: the enlightened state is the disembodied brain in the jar. The spider-walker (a BT-16 perimeter droid) is just a chassis that lets a brain-in-a-jar move around the physical world when it needs to — it's mobility hardware, not a communion-enabler. If anything, leaving the jar to ride a walker is a concession to the material plane, not the path to fuller communion. 

So your friend has the right story and most of the beats, invented a "Force monk / commune via walker" cosmology that isn't there, and slightly novelized the Luke angle.

Pro tip: it really helps if you say 'The B'omarr Order isn't a Force tradition' using the voice of the fellow in the Simpsons who tells Marge that 'Some guys at MIT are sending us a list of reasons why Captain Picard is better than Captain Kirk'.