Mark Hamill’s recent reply to a tweet has fans wondering if there is love in Luke Skywalker’s story. Star Wars fans have an idea who they think it should be.
Maybe Luke Skywalker deserves better than he’s gotten onscreen. Calm down critics of The Last Jedi, we’re not talking about his death. We are, however, talking about his life, specifically, in the love category.
Luke’s been portrayed as many things onscreen and across multiple media platforms; a moisture farmer, an adept pilot, a space god with a laser sword and son to the most iconic villain ever created. The closest romantic entanglements for our hero have been being put in the friend zone by his sister before he was her brother and a special closeness with an alien providing him nourishing milk on a lonely island. It’s been a long cold dry spell for our warrior monk but Mark Hamill hints/hopes that will change.
Twitter handler @CMBennettSi recently posed an innocent question which led to the current exchange:
Maybe he did between Ep. 6 & 7. Many untold stories there.
— Mark Hamill (@MarkHamill) August 13, 2018
The exchange caused a bit of a stir and has some fans putting on their tin foil hats, scanning every piece of throwaway dialogue, comic book and watching the sequel trilogy in slow motion in an attempt to find clues to Luke’s love life. We know in the Legends series, which I like to call the Zahn timeline, (Star Trek gets a Kelvin timeline, right?) Luke does indeed find love in the arms of Mara Jade. A highly skilled force sensitive operative who was once tasked with murdering him, but relationships can only go up from there. Eventually, they marry and have a child named Ben. Of course, in our timeline, Ben was swapped out as a Skywalker for a Solo who eventually changes his name to Kylo Ren.
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No matter how confusing this is, Mara Jade was a fan favorite from the outset of Timothy Zahn’s books and helped rekindle some of the interest in Star Wars, years after the original trilogy was complete and the story was, supposedly, finished cinematically. Fans seemingly want to find a Jade angle, welcoming her as they have Grand Admiral Thrawn in the Rebels series. Zahn, himself, has explained it is highly unlikely she ever make it into current cannon.
This hasn’t stopped the rumor mill from churning, which was on high Mara Jade alert when Keri Russell came into the fold. Unless J.J. Abrams is really looking to undo the controversial twist in The Last Jedi, and have her as Rey’s mother. This poses problems within itself, would Luke be Rey’s father with her as some long-lost lovelorn child from a summer of love on a foreign planet? Why wouldn’t he feel that connection at some point?
It’s all very unlikely that Luke’s onscreen persona will ever have a love interest, you know, being he’s dead. It’s also hard to believe that the films will ever make mention of it.
Maybe in future canon, far away from the misty Ahch-To air, we’ll find Luke’s force ghost speed dating at Drax’s Diner, just a sparkly old ghost looking for the right girl to take long walks in the sand amongst double sunsets.
Star Wars Episode IX is scheduled to come out December 2019.