George Lucas Reveals Why ONLY Luke Saw Anakin's Force Ghost
8,190In the return of the jedi, we got my favourite scene in all of Star Wars, the celebration after the death start 2 blew up, with Luke hanging his arm on the tree as he gazes off into the distance to acknowledge his father Anakin Skywalker, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and Yoda. Many, and I mean many, have theorized that Leia saw them too, and that even Han saw them, as we can see him staring in the background when Luke faces the ghosts.
The real answer, is that no one but Luke saw them. I’ll read the quote from George in a bit which actually goes into more detail about others things too, which is great. So to Leia, Han and everyone else there, Luke was just staring into the forest, probably relaxing that the Empire had now been destroyed, or at least, started to fall apart entirely with the death of palpatine and Darth Vader.
Here’s the quote from the making of the return of the jedi from George Lucas, Lawrence Kasdan, and Marquand:
Lucas: But I still tend to want to bring Ben into it. He’s one of the main characters and he’s still a strong presence. I sort of agree with Larry that the best way to handle that is to let him stay in another world and to say there is nothing more that he can do now and that Luke is a Jedi now and that his job is done. It could be a goodbye scene to Ben, which is, “I am never going to appear before you again …” Kasdan: You want to bring him shimmering back at the end? Lucas: We can do that. They are guardian angels who are standing there; Luke has the power to see
them. Marquand: That’s nice. That works. Lucas: They become the Force. The concept is that when you die, your energy drains into the Force, which is made up of all living beings. We are just personifying it a little bit, which I think is all right. The biggest thing is that we give Alec a good scene to get him to do it, a chance to act. The problem with Empire was that he doesn’t act; he just tells Luke something.
And the rest of the chapter goes on about how George needs to find a good acting script for Alec Guiness to come back as Obi-Wan Kenobi as in the empire strikes back, he didn’t put his acting to the test, and rather just told Luke not to leave Dagobah.
So as we can see, Luke was the only one able to see the ghosts of anakin ben and Yoda, why this is, well I think it’s because of his connection with all three, but most importantly because of his knowledge that Ben spoke to him through the force, Yoda vanished into his cloak, which apparently, in canon, was actually Qui-Gon’s robe. Now we can also assume that Luke, being Anakin’s son, was more in tuned with the force than Obi-Wan, who required training from Yoda on how to commune with Qui-Gon Jinn, as we heard at the end of Revenge of the Sith, teach you to commune with him, I will.
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