The first three movies released in what has now been christened either the Star Wars Saga or The Skywalker Saga – these are now, of course, episodes four through six – are so imaginatively and expansively created that it is hard to imagine how you could possibly add anything further to them.
And yet, as is ably demonstrated by Star Wars: From a Certain Point of View and now The Empire Strikes Back: From a Certain Point of View, there remains limitless scope for broadening the near-perfect narratives of these three films.
Or at least augmenting them since there is no need to tamper with what are the closest to cinematic perfection ever watched by this reviewer and the best you can hope to do is to pull back the curtain a little and see what else was happening just beyond the range of George Lucas’s vision.
Which The Empire Strikes Back: From a Certain Point of View does beautifully with the five stories chosen for this review, from the forty contained in the 550-page short story collection by authors like Delilah S. Dawson, Mike Chen, Amy Ratcliffe and Hank Green, showcasing just what was happening while the Empire stormed across the icy wastes of Hoth, Lando Calrissian discovered that you can’t do deals with fascists and escape unscathed and Luke found out there is lot more muddiness and mental anguish in becoming a Jedi that he bargained for.
It is, as its predecessor volume was, a vividly exciting excursion into the lives of people who aren’t Luke, Leia or Han, but whose importance to the saga is vitally important and whose stories deserve to be told in a fuller way that has previously been the case.
Take, and this might surprise for she has a name, the Tauntaun that carried Han Solo out into the diabolically frigid extremes of Hoth at night.
Her name is Murra, and while all you may know of her is that she carried Han Solo out on his mission to find a missing Luke (who was riding her daughter Riba) and died for her service from exposure, only to be hollowed out so Luke and Han could survive sub-zero temperatures, in the hands of Delilah S. Dawson (responsible for longer Star Wars tales such as Star Wars: Phasma (2017) and its sequel Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge: Black Spire (2019)), who penned the story “She Will Keep Them Warm”, she becomes a fully-rounded matriarch of an enslaved clan.
Yes, even the squeaky clean and shiner-than-thou Rebels are capable of egregious breaches of a creature’s rights, and while they pale next to the manifest sins of the Empire, their use of the Tauntauns is demonstrated to be a thing of sorrow in some ways to Murra and her clan who have lost the freedom they once had to roam where they willed during the day and to shelter as a family at night in the caves of the planet.
Imprisoned they may be in a way, but they are treated well for the most part, with Dawson poignantly detailing the relationship between Murra and Leia who finds some respite from her demanding role as the figurehead of the Rebel Alliance in rare spent with Murra, who may not understand her new masters but who appreciates that she is at least loved and cared for.
We are even given an insight into the politics of Tauntaun life, with Murra required to fend off a challenge to her leadership of her beloved herd even as she is called into action to find a missing Luke.
It’s a rich and affecting story that brings alive a character many might simply have dismissed as a means to an end but who is integral to saving the life of the man upon whom future victory against the Empire rests.
In a similar way, “Bespin Escape” by Martha Walls takes us down into the lower levels of Bespin City, a so-called neutral city which in The Empire Strikes Back ends up being appropriated by the Empire as so many things and people have been before, where we meet the Ugnaught, a race of porcine humanoids who hail from the planet Gentes but whose reputation for hard, unstinting work has seen become the backbone of mining operations in Bespin.
But when the Empire comes to Bespin, the Ugnaught, who have suffered at the hands of the Emperor and his cruel minions before, see the writing on the wall and decide they need to flee.
Well, some of them do anyway but others, for a variety of reasons, hesitate and it is at this point, when fleeing becomes a do-or-die proposition (or more an escape-or-be-enslaved proposition) that we meet Lonaste and his clan who must make a last minute attempt, against opposition within and without their people to stay free of the Empire’s reach.
It’s a gripping tale of survival that sustains some real humanity and urgency, but again, it adds to the film which refers to them in an exchange between Leia and a Stormtrooper but doesn’t do much more than that. (We have, of course, now got to know the Ugnaught better via The Mandalorian.)
A similar thing happens in “Vergence” by Tracy Deonn where we get to know the consciousness behind the Dark Side Cave or the Cave of Evil on Dagobah in which Luke is sorely tested by his greatest fears and discovers that he may have more darkness in him than he ever imagined (and where, it turns out, Yoda, has spent a great deal of time gaining valuable insight).
It’s a fascinating look at an aspect of the film that many would not have considered too much beyond the fact that it scares the bejesus out of Luke, and is yet another fine and in some ways poetically affecting example of the way in which The Empire Strikes Back: From a Certain Point of View adds immeasurably to the story of what is now film five in The Skywalker Saga, enriching our enjoyment of a movie that is immensely rich in and of itself but which becomes ever more so after reading this rich treasure trove of stories.