A common device in many narratives is the plan that goes sideways and the protagonists have to improvise to make it work. Maybe they have to cut the wire to the alarm to get into the diamond vault, but… there’s no wires. They’ve moved them, or replaced it with a new system! Now what?
Where this device falls apart is when the author doesn’t give any thought to how the plan would have gone if it went as originally intended. On a recent re-watch of Star Wars I got to thinking about this. How would each of the Star Wars Original Trilogy movies have played out if the plan went without a hitch?
Star Wars
I’m going to analyze the plot as originally written, not taking into account that certain story elements were later changed, such as Vader being Luke’s father, or the events of Rogue One.
Leia is trying to get away with the Death Star plans when she’s captured by Darth Vader and has to smuggle the plans out on R2-D2, setting the story in motion. What if Vader takes a wrong turn at Albuquerque and doesn’t catch up to Leia’s ship in time?
Leia gets to Tattooine. She tracks down Ben Kenobi and heads out with him to Alderaan. They analyze the plans and discover the weakness. Meanwhile Vader and the Death Star are pottering about trying to find the plans and the Rebel base. The Rebels launch an attack on the Death Star and ultimately fail because they need someone who uses The Force to hit the exhaust port. The Empire figures out the weakness ( “We’ve analyzed their attack, sir, and there is a danger…”) and puts safety measures in place (a screen door over the exhaust port). The Death Star is now an invulnerable tool used by the Empire to bring every system under their control, and eventually crush the Rebellion.
It’s not entirely clear why Leia needed Ben Kenobi. The politics of the original film are quite vague. That’s another blog post altogether. It’s implied in the original story that he’s pretty smart about battles in general and maybe could have advised them in the attack. Maybe he would have told them “Yo, this isn’t going to work. You need space magic to hit that port.”, but would that have mattered? They likely would have said “Ok, but you’re like 70 and can’t fly a ship and there are no other Jedi left, so, we kinda gotta give this a try.”
Remember, we’re analyzing the plot as originally written, we can’t take into account concepts that were later retconned. “Oh, but Obi-Wan was there guarding Luke. He would have insisted they take Luke along!” No. No. He wasn’t there guarding Luke. Luke was just the child of a friend of his. And until Obi-Wan knew what was needed to blow up the Death Star he probably wouldn’t have thought “You know, just in case, let’s dick around here, while the Empire is hot on Leia’s tail, and convince this teenage boy to head up into space with an old man.”
The Empire Strikes Back
This movie doesn’t really have a plan that goes awry. Vader’s plan to lure Luke to Bespin more or less succeeds. It only falls apart after the fact, with Lando rebelling and Luke refusing to turn to the Dark Side.
You could argue the plan to assault the base on Hoth went awry when the Rebels were alerted and enabled the energy shield, but that’s hardly a complex plan. The Empire ambushes the Rebels, destroys the base, roll credits.
Return of the Jedi
Well, it was all leading up to this. Where do we begin with Luke’s plan to rescue Han from Jabba’s Palace? When was it meant to succeed? Was it ever meant to succeed before Luke went on a murder spree on the sail barge? It kind of feels like Luke designed it to end the way it ended, but that’s kind of insane to think about, so let’s go step by step.
Phase 1 – Demand via Hologram
Lando infiltrates Jabba’s Palace. Presumably he’s feeding Luke information and doing some behind the scenes manipulation. Luke then issues an ultimatum, via hologram, to Jabba to surrender Han Solo and in exchange gifts him C-3P0 and R2-D2.
This is the closest this plan has to a point where it would mostly be a success.
Jabba, remembering that Jedi are quite formidable, says “I believe that this boy is a Jedi and I don’t need that kind of trouble. Thaw out Solo and hand him over when Luke arrives.” Leia and Chewbacca never need to do their thing. Luke shows up and leaves with Han. Lando sneaks away one night, or puts in his two weeks notice so he can at least get medical coverage until he lines up his next job. C-3P0 and R2-D2 are now stuck in Jabba’s Palace. But they are slaves, after all, and Luke made a fair trade.
But Jabba didn’t bite and says he won’t give up Han. On to Phase 2.
Phase 2 – Leia Breaks Han Out
Leia shows up, disguised as a bounty hunter, with Chewbacca in tow. She offers up Chewbacca in exchange for some scratch. There’s a minor failure point here, that Jabba might say “No, your demands are too high, I don’t want Chewbacca for that price”, but if Leia’s goal is to infiltrate the palace, she would have taken even a pittance just to get in the door, so I really don’t think this is a potential point of failure.
Chewbacca is taken away and following a night of drunken debauchery Leia sneaks over to Han and breaks him out. Jabba is none the wiser and they make it out the front door with little resistance.
Yay? Lando is till incognito so he can just slip out. But Chewbacca is now in prison and the droids are still there. Do they now need a complex plan to break out Chewbacca?
A little addendum to the plan requiring Leia to be captured and be in a position to murder Jabba… did they also plan for his current sex slave to be eaten by the Rancor? What if that didn’t happen? Maybe Leia just gets thrown in the dungeon? Something to think about; watch Leia’s reaction while shit is going down during the battle on the Sail Barge. She doesn’t look like someone who is “in on the plan”. She seems a little concerned and then takes action.
But that didn’t happen so on to Phase 3.
Phase 3 – Second Demand and Point Blank Murder
Chewbacca, Leia, Han, and the droids are all now prisoners/slaves to Jabba the Hutt. Luke saunters in, unarmed, and makes a second demand of Jabba to release his friends. The plan could succeed here. Maybe Jabba sees Luke in person and goes “It’s clear you’re pretty determined, so, have them and get out of my sight.”, but by now Jabba has the upper hand and from his perspective Luke is a complete dumbass. So he says no. Luke pulls a gun from someone and tries to assassinate Jabba.
Luke puts a blaster bolt between Jabba’s eyes, killing the slug instantly. Luke is surrounded by Jabba’s men, who don’t realize yet that Jabba is dead, and pummel Luke into paste. Now everyone except Lando is captured and/or dead. There’s a mad struggle for power within Jabba’s organization and the remaining prisoners are used as bartering chips to curry favor with varying factions until they are all split up or executed.
“What about the Rancor?” The rancor, or Luke’s lack of knowledge about it, might not be relevant. I assume Luke’s actual plan was to get captured there, since this whole thing only makes sense if it ends the way it ultimately ends in the film. His failed attempt to shoot Jabba gets him thrown in the dungeon and then he and his companions are sent to the Sarlacc pit. Plan succeeds. Luke was banking on the attempt to shoot Jabba being enough to convince him to send everyone to the pit. The rancor doesn’t factor in.
Phase 4 – No. No. In the pit!
Luke and his pals are all lined up in the desert and are set to be thrown into the Sarlac pit. The only way this part of the plan even succeeds is if everything goes exactly as it does. If one single thing is off the entire thing falls apart. The way to make this work is to take some wild leaps in plot logic and assume that Lando was manipulating things behind the scenes (there is some Legends material that states this is the case) . Lando got R2-D2 assigned to the sail barge. Lando determined the order of the prisoners (since he was on the skiff with everyone) and Lando ordered them, for some reason, to unbind Luke’s hands before throwing him in the pit (he was bound in the previous shot, and then you see him rubbing at his wrists as the plank is extended, implying the cuffs had just been taken off).
All-in-all this is pretty forgivable as most movies seem to have these insane contrivances where things line up exactly to allow some very specific plan to execute (The Dark Knight, anyone?).
All Forgiven
I know I’ve been a little hard on the writing here, but the end result is one of the best executed action sequences in any Star Wars movie. What makes the battle on Jabba’s Sail Barge fantastic isn’t the cinematography, music, editing, or stunts, it’s that we’re seeing an actual character moment play out. The last time we saw Luke Skywalker in action he was getting his ass beat by Darth Vader on Cloud City. Wounded, defeated, he chose to die rather than betray who he was. He was in that situation because of his love for his friends. Now here he is, back, confident, powerful, again sacrificing everything for his friends, but this time succeeding, unlike on Cloud City. This is not the same Luke Skywalker from the previous two films. This is Luke Skywalker, Jedi Knight. This is, technically, the end of Luke’s arc. The fact that he will resist the Emperor’s temptation is a foregone conclusion, which kind of hampers the ending of the film, if Darth Vader’s redemption wasn’t such a powerful moment.
My point is, when a character payoff is right, a little sloppy plotting is all forgiven (Dark Knight, anyone?)
Armchair Screenwriter 
I’d say your analysis of the RotJ sequence is pretty accurate, but I have some quibbles about the plot of the original Star Wars.
First of all, is Leia headed for Tatooine before her ship gets ambushed by the Empire? I always assumed she was on her way to Alderaan, and when she got ambushed while flying past Tatooine she had to do some quick thinking along the lines of, “Drat! My ship’s under attack! Who do I know in this area I might be able to get a message to? Oh, didn’t my dad say he had a friend names Obi-Wan Kenobi who lived around here? Better send this droid out to look for him!”
Secondly, you seem to be implying that not having a Force-sensitive pilot to attack the Death Star with is an example of poor planning on the Rebels’ part. But the Rebels didn’t know that only someone with Force sensitivity could hit the exhaust port. I think that fact could itself be seen as an example of the plot going sideways. The plan: have a regular old pilot blow up the Death Star. The complication: It turns out a regular old pilot can’t do the job; we need someone with the Force!
Fortunately, circumstances work out so that even when the plan goes awry, the heroes are given the tools they need to fix it. Leia’s ambush just happens to take place in proximity to Tatooine and Obi-Wan Kenobi. Obi-Wan and the droids just happen to fall in with Luke Skywalker. As often happens in stories of this genre, the plan gets some help from Divine Providence, or the Force, or whatever you want to call it. But the initial plan wasn’t bad, just vulnerable to changing circumstances and unforeseen contingencies.
Was that your point all along? That the plan in Star Wars compares favourably with the plan in Return of the Jedi? If so, I’m with you, but your phrasing makes it sound more like you’re criticising it.
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Thanks for the reply!
In Leia’s full message she says:
“General Kenobi. Years ago you served my father in the Clone Wars. Now he begs you to help him in his struggle against the Empire. I regret that I am unable to present my father’s request to you in person, but my ship has fallen under attack, and I’m afraid my mission to bring you to Alderaan has failed…”
She was explicitly there to get Obi-Wan, at her father’s behest. And that’s just going on what’s in the original film. In Rogue One they follow through on this and have a scene where Jimmy Smitts says “my daughter, Princess Leia, is going to Tattooine to get the former Jedi, Obi-Wan Kenobi!” Ok, no, he doesn’t say exactly that, but he does say that’s what’s happening. 🙂
I did not say that lack of a Force sensitive pilot was poor planning on the part of the Rebels. I didn’t even imply as such. The short version is; that I said they likely would have attacked, even if they knew they needed a Force sensitive pilot, out of desperation.
The long version is; I said that it’s likely Obi-Wan would have analyzed the attack and said “Your computers can’t hit that. You’ll need space magic.”
Obi-Wan lacked the ability to analyze the technical readouts himself, otherwise he would have done it in his little hut on Tatooine in the original plot. He needed the help of Rebel engineers. Following along with the alternate plot of Leia finding him, Luke is ignored altogether, and they just head off to Alderaan, which isn’t destroyed because the Empire has no reason to use the threat of its destruction as leverage to make Leia talk. Obi-Wan either analyzes the plans there with some engineers or they whisk him off to the moon of Yavin where they do it… not relevant either way.
Best case scenario he says “You’ll probably need space magic. Turns out my old friend Anakin’s son lives not too far from me on Tatooine. Let’s go get him.” Maybe the Rebels do agree to this plan and they go find Luke. Now they need to convince him (and his Uncle, who didn’t get burned up by Storm Troopers) to go fight in a war. Luke was eager to leave, so maybe he goes against his uncle’s wishes and takes off with them. That’s still our best case. And since the Empire doesn’t end up tracking the Millennium Falcon to the Rebel base, maybe they don’t find it? So the Rebels just fly off into space to find the Death Star (side trivia: that’s exactly what they did in the rough cut, there was no threat of the Death Star destroying the Rebel Base). Knowing that Luke is their guy to do the job, they focus all their efforts on protecting him and he gets the job done.
Kind of lacks the punch and tension of the original story, but I can see how this plan would work.
More than likely though; it would have gone as I predicted. Leia and her father insist they have to listen to Obi-Wan’s advice, but the Rebels are like “This planet killing machine is going to kill billions of people. We have to take our chance.”
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Okay, my bad. I missed that part of Leia’s speech about bringing Obi-Wan to Alderaan.
I guess my question about your Star Wars analysis is, what point are you trying to make? You frame the analysis by saying that the “plan going sideways” trope doesn’t work if the author doesn’t put any thought into how the plan would have worked out as originally intended. You make a convincing case that the plan in RotJ wouldn’t have worked out (or wouldn’t have worked out as well) had things not gone exactly as they did, and that this sequence could therefore be seen as an example of sloppy writing (even if the end product is pretty entertaining!) What point are you making about the original Star Wars? Is it an example of bad writing or good?
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My point was, ultimately, to make fun of Luke’s plan in ROTJ and how poorly conceived it was from a writing standpoint. And if I wasn’t so lazy; I would have continued this with one about how Palpatine’s plan never makes any sense, at any point, in the prequels.
The plot of the original Star Wars is very well written. If things went to the original plan, and the Rebels ended up failing, it would have been due to something beyond their control, not because the writer didn’t know what he was doing. The plan makes sense in the context of the universe. It’s a stronger story because the setbacks lead to the plan’s success, and not entirely for plot convenience or lazy screenwriting.
In ROTJ the plan succeeded because the movie had to happen.
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Okay, makes sense now. Thanks! 🙂
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