The latest Star Wars movie drops this week and the internet is abuzz with speculation about how The Rise of Skywalker will end the nine-part family space saga. Given the sense of ownership fans have for the franchise, the producers might consider including a fan or two in one of their future films. Someone, say, like me. Fortunately, I’ve written some notes for my Star Wars spin-off.
FADE IN: A long time ago, in a pipe dream about 15 minutes ago…
Anyone who’d pitch a Star Wars flick based on themselves would hail from the oilier side of the galaxy. I accept this. There you’ll find me as Lando Calrissian’s PR guy, having discredited myself as a reporter at the Dagobah Post Dispatch (we’ll get back to that). I’d have my own humanoid protocol droid (“E-3PO,” the snarky silver one from The Empire Strikes Back) and maybe a pet Ewok with a drinking problem (for comic relief).
Things are copasetic, that is until house-sitting Lando’s bachelor pad gets out of hand. Let’s just say a small house party for a couple of hundred close friends turns into mayhem when some Wookies crash it. Meanwhile, the ravishing adopted daughter of Grand Moff Tarkin, makes off with my boss’s prized Kyber Crystal (it enables practitioners of either side of the Force to raise the dead). But we don’t know this yet. No one knows this, which is why it’s just sitting on Lando’s fireplace mantle.
So, I’m basically screwed when the boss comes back, unless … She calls. Tarkin’s daughter is blackmailing me for the crystal. She agrees to meet me and my droid at some fancy Coruscant bar to discuss a price. She brings her partner in crime, Boba Fett. Our negotiations don’t go well (Fett just nods his head a lot and shoots stuff). E3 panics and farts a smoke bomb. We run. They follow. We get in the Millennium Falcon (Lando left the keys) and they get into Fett’s ship. Space chase!
E3 and I crash Lando’s beloved Falcon on some desert shithole called Tatooine. There, we evade capture by disguising ourselves as Jawas. “Aren’t you a little tall for a Jawa?” asks a plucky gun moll we meet at a nightclub while on the lam (Note: At some point, Fett should fall into the Sarlacc Pit again and say “Deja vu all over again!”).
I try to light the gun moll’s hookah (chivalry’s not dead) but learn that I’m messing up her investigation—it turns out she’s an undercover space cop. And probably a princess, too. BUT NOT MY SISTER. She’s been tracing a conspiracy to bring Darth Vader back from the dead. And they need the Kyber Crystal. Hijinks ensue and I make the Kessel Run in 11 parsecs (that’s right, 11—suck it, Solo) and I blow up the third Death Star (“Third time’s the charm”) and then I kill the resurrected Darth Vader with—get this—Ben Kenobi’s lightsaber (the irony!) and then the gun moll tells me—wait for it—the lightsaber was her dad’s. Chills, man.
By the end of this adventure they’ve shined up E3 and repaired the Falcon, my Ewok gets sober and I put the Kyber Crystal back on the mantle just as Lando opens the door. “Why, you slimy, double-crossing, no-good swindler,” he says, then gives me a big hug. The Force is with me. Always.
