“Like poetry:” Lucas, Legacies, and Working Backwards 

By Anna Heneise

When asked about how the original trilogy connected with the prequel trilogy, George Lucas infamously said, “It’s like poetry […] they rhyme.” Whether you find this phrase ridiculous or inspiring, the fact stands that Lucas designed past and present to mirror each other. Luke Skywalker is a Jedi like his father before him. Leia Organa is a princess and a senator, the daughter of a queen and a senator no matter who she considers her parents to be. Obi-Wan Kenobi and Han Solo are about as opposite as two characters can be, but Han’s story of gaining family and faith parallels Obi-Wan’s story of losing them. 

Perhaps the defining feature of a story is its structure; both the medium it is told in and how that medium informs the interplay of beginning, middle, and end. A crucial skill for a storyteller is knowing how to set up characters and arcs and themes correctly at the beginning so their conclusions properly pay off at the end. Part of the reason prequels and sequels to established and popular media are often received with disinterest or disfavor is because a good story is in many ways self contained. The beginning reflects the ending, and we the audience do not need a second beginning, or a second ending. 

Part of what makes the Star Wars prequels so enduring— despite the initial backlash— is they were constructed not as a prequel to Luke Skywalker’s story, but as the beginning of Anakin Skywalker’s story; as the beginning of the story of the Empire. They are not extraneous to the established universe, but essential to understanding it. At the same time, they enrich Luke’s story retroactively. The full weight of what it means for Luke to claim Jedi heritage, for Darth Vader to betray his master for the sake of his son, for the Empire to fall, is not felt until the audience sees what choices and catastrophes led Anakin Skywalker to this moment. Without Anakin’s past, we do not understand the shape of Luke’s legacy. 

Star Wars is, in many ways, about what is passed from one generation to the next. It is about legacies; about what a person chooses to do with their legacy. A fact of its creation that both complicates and enriches this theme is that Star Wars was built backwards. Precious little Star Wars media ventures farther out than a hundred years after the death of Darth Sidious and the fall of his Empire, but endless movies and video games and TV shows and comics and novels explore the hundreds of thousands of years of history that led to its rise. 

We know how this story ends. We have always known how this story ends. What we are still reckoning with is how it began. 

By all rights, this approach to storytelling should not work. Many critics would agree that it doesn’t, but the sway Star Wars holds over popular culture persists regardless. Some of this surprising success can be traced back to Lucas’ assertion of poetic inspiration. The prequels— and indeed most Star Wars media— build off the rhythm of the originals. 

When conceptualizing the originals Lucas invented much of Darth Vader’s backstory. He knew the shape of the rise and fall of the Empire, of the love affair that resulted in Luke and Leia, of the many millennia of conflict between the Jedi and the Sith. All of these elements were incorporated into the payoff of the originals, and creating the prequels was a matter of putting them all down on paper and fine tuning the setup. Creating the prequels was also a matter of recognizing what other elements of the originals could be interpreted as payoff and therefore could be provided with adequate setup and further incorporated into the universe. One of those elements turned out to be Boba Fett. 

Three legacies and their individual and interconnected stories make up the bulk of the Star Wars original trilogy, rebel era, and prequel trilogy: the Jedi lineage of Yoda, the Sith line of Bane, and— in a departure from both the story of Force sensitives and the extensive planning Lucas did for his Jedi and Sith conflict— the legacy of the Mandalorian Jaster Mereel. 

Inspired by the original concept for the character of Darth Vader, bounty hunter Boba Fett made his debut in 1978 in The Star Wars Holiday Special. Two years later, he made his actual debut in The Empire Strikes Back, establishing himself as a cutthroat mercenary and a close associate of Darth Vader. There were hints and suggestions of a past fighting in the clone wars, a bloody backstory befitting a bounty hunter, but nothing concrete until the prequels, where Boba was given a family and a legacy to accompany it. Or, where Boba became the legacy his family was constructed around. 

Jango Fett and the GAR, Jaster Mereel and the Mandalorians— the role Boba played in the narrative of the original trilogy determined the narrative role of every Mandalorian created after him yet existing before him. Boba Fett works closely with Vader? The Mandalorian Empire had a history of allying with the Sith against the Jedi. Boba Fett is a bounty hunter? So was his father, and his father’s mentor, and so are most Mandalorians when they’re not fighting their own wars. Boba Fett never removes his helmet? Armor and the respectful handling thereof is an integral aspect of Mandalorian culture. 

It is rare a prequel is successful in making a supporting character richer, but now every action has a double meaning and carries historical precedent. Anakin Skywalker was a general in command of a clone battalion. Darth Vader has some kind of arrangement with the Prime clone’s son. What do they know about each other? What kind of understanding do they have of the other’s origins? What could at best be described as a business relationship when first created is now one of the franchise’s most intriguing unanswered questions. 

Knowing how a story ends is often the first step to planning the beginning, but Lucas and the hundreds of creators who came after him who have been telling the stories of Jedi and Sith and Mandalorians in a galaxy far, far away for almost fifty years now have taken this principle to a new extreme. The creation of the Mandalorian identity in particular exemplifies the skillful extrapolation employed to turn three movies into a massive franchise. The reason it succeeds as well as it does is the incorporation of that second principal. That rhythm. 

Star Wars is about legacies, and because it is about legacies it is about cycles; how they are created and how they are broken and how they are interconnected. Especially how they are interconnected. 

The conflict between the Sith and the Jedi is very literally black and white. The Jedi are the good guys, the Sith are the bad guys, and this galactic unrest is the result of their opposing ideologies clashing— revenge and forgiveness, selfishness and selflessness, power in control and power controlled. Adding a third party to this two-sided conflict creates complexity, and also creates casualties. Boba Fett is a bounty hunter who works for the Sith because his father was a bounty hunter who worked for the Sith. Boba Fett is a bounty hunter who works for the Sith because his people and his father were killed by Jedi, and because his clone siblings were the weapons used to kill the Jedi. 

Through the ways Boba’s backstory was expanded, the Fett legacy was retroactively placed in parallel with the Skywalker legacy. Jango Fett and Anakin Skywalker were the tools used by Sidious to carry out genocide against the Jedi, and now Boba and Luke must live in the reality their parents created, must navigate this loss and decide if they will continue or reject their parent’s legacies. Boba chooses to work for the Sith and to hunt Jedi like his father before him. Luke chooses to become and to remain a Jedi like his father did not. 

There are criticisms that can be leveled at the storytelling in Star Wars, many of them perfectly justified. It is clumsy at times, and inconsistent, and built on biases that modern sci-fi is now having to reckon with. But rarely does such a sprawling series so skillfully capture the nature of inheriting a legacy— the expectations and obligations, the parallels between past and present, the way a legacy comes with as many feuds as it does friends, the way a personal vendetta can shape politics and ruin lives for centuries to come. The choices. All of this complexity developed as speculation, as extrapolation, as an elaborate game of ‘what if.’ 

Working backwards is not usually a recommended storytelling technique for many good reasons, but the trick Lucas found maybe wasn’t so much working backwards as it was establishing a pattern in the present that could be traced into the past indefinitely. If not a poem, then a history.

Science fiction is political, and a study of politics is a study of history. Connections that we do not see immediately are unearthed with further study, cycles that exist in our own lives can be understood through studying their impact on others. The nature of what we inherit can be understood through studying the context in which it was first created and passed on. Those who understand their history have a choice in repeating it.