There Are Only Four Star Wars Movies, and One of Them Is the Holiday Special

I Was Just Trying to Drink a Beer

There is a very specific kind of YouTube thumbnail that feels designed to provoke an argument with somebody who is not actually in the room. “EPISODE II WAS SECRETLY A MASTERPIECE” is exactly that kind of thumbnail. Maybe it is. Maybe there is a brilliant forty-five-minute defense of Anakin’s dialogue, sand, visual rhyming, political subtext, and whatever else people have excavated from those movies over the last twenty years. I genuinely admire the dedication. I just don’t want to participate in it.

The problem is that once I saw it, my brain started doing what it does and I ended up back in my preferred version of Star Wars, which is much smaller and, frankly, much stranger. For me, Star Wars is Episode IV, Episode V, Episode VI, and The Star Wars Holiday Special. That’s it. Everything else is optional mythology, supplemental material, or evidence that somebody discovered an unlocked filing cabinet at Lucasfilm and said, “We should probably turn all of this into a trilogy.”

The Holiday Special absolutely counts, by the way. Not because it is good. It is not good. It is so far beyond ordinary badness that “good” and “bad” stop being useful categories and you have to start discussing it more like an archaeological site. It also gave us Boba Fett on screen before The Empire Strikes Back, which means it has earned permanent protected status in my personal canon whether anyone likes it or not.

The Empire Is Evil, Fine, You Got Me

I originally wanted to make the argument that the original trilogy never explicitly tells us the Empire is evil and the Rebels are good, and then I remembered that A New Hope literally opens by calling it the “evil Galactic Empire.” So fine. That part of the argument dies immediately. George Lucas put the label right there in the crawl. I’ll take the loss.

Also, obviously, the Empire does plenty to earn the description. Tarkin destroys Alderaan. Palpatine is not exactly an enlightened public servant. Vader handles workplace disputes by choking people from across the room, which is probably not in the Imperial employee handbook but seems to be tolerated anyway. I am not making the “actually the Empire did nothing wrong” argument because that argument falls apart roughly around the time an inhabited planet explodes.

What I do think is interesting is that “the Empire is evil” does not automatically mean “the Rebels are good in every meaningful sense.” Those are not the same statement, and the movies mostly get away with collapsing them into one because we spend so much more time with the Rebels. Luke is our point of view. Leia is our point of view. Han becomes our point of view. We like them, so the people shooting at them become the bad guys, and the people they shoot become acceptable casualties.

That works emotionally. I’m just not sure it works morally.

The Rebels Are Terrorists, and That Does Not Automatically Mean They Are Wrong

The Rebel Alliance is an armed organization trying to overthrow the galactic government through sabotage, espionage, theft of classified military information, attacks on government installations, and organized violence. That is a rebellion. Depending on who owns the news channel, that is also terrorism.

I don’t mean that as a cheap “gotcha.” I mean that the word itself is political. One government’s terrorist is another population’s freedom fighter, and sometimes both descriptions are technically accurate at the same time. The Rebels can be justified in fighting a tyrannical government and still do things that are ugly, destructive, or morally complicated.

That is actually more interesting to me than pretending one side is pure and the other side is evil because the soundtrack told us so. Real conflicts are not clean. People who fight terrible systems can still become comfortable with violence. People serving terrible systems are not all equally responsible for what those systems do. Once you start thinking about the people outside the main cast, the entire thing gets messier very quickly.

Which brings me to Luke Skywalker, galactic war hero and enthusiastic destroyer of extremely large workplaces.

Luke Skywalker Killed a Lot of People

Luke destroys the Death Star and the movie gives us exactly the emotional response it wants. The station explodes, everybody cheers, John Williams detonates the brass section, and Leia gives the surviving heroes medals. It is one of the most satisfying endings in movie history.

It is also a mass-casualty event on a scale that the movie has absolutely no interest in discussing.

The Death Star is obviously a legitimate military target. It has already destroyed Alderaan and is actively preparing to destroy the Rebel base, so I’m not suggesting Luke should have called Tarkin and asked whether they could resolve the situation through arbitration. Blowing it up makes complete military sense.

But who exactly died when Luke fired those torpedoes?

Not “the Empire.” People died. Pilots, gunners, technicians, communications staff, maintenance crews, logistics workers, medical personnel, administrative staff, officers, and probably an unbelievable number of contractors. Somebody kept the doors working. Somebody repaired the lifts. Somebody stocked food. Somebody probably had a miserable shift replacing lighting panels in a corridor ten kilometers away from anything remotely important.

How many of those people personally supported blowing up Alderaan? How many were conscripts? How many joined because military service was the best job available on whatever planet they came from? How many were nineteen years old and had absolutely no idea what Tarkin was doing at the top of the command chain?

The movie does not ask because that is not the story it is telling, and I’m not criticizing it for that. I just think the story becomes more interesting once you acknowledge that the people in the background are still people even when the camera does not care about them.

War gets very clean when everybody who dies is wearing the same helmet.

Then They Built Another One, Because Apparently Nobody Learns Anything

Return of the Jedi somehow makes the same question even more uncomfortable because the second Death Star is still under construction. That means there are not just military personnel on the station. There are people building the thing.

Somebody is installing conduit. Somebody is programming control systems. Somebody is troubleshooting a door that keeps reporting a sensor fault. Somebody has spent four months trying to get Imperial Procurement to authorize a replacement actuator and is becoming increasingly convinced that the Empire will collapse before the part arrives. That person is probably correct.

Again, the second Death Star is an active military target. It is capable of destroying capital ships and is part of a deliberate Imperial trap. Destroying it is completely understandable. I’m not trying to turn the Battle of Endor into a labor-law hearing.

I just find it interesting how quickly the story trains us to stop seeing the people aboard as people. Once they are inside the enemy superweapon, they become part of the scenery. We celebrate when the station explodes because our heroes survive and the Emperor dies, but somewhere in that fireball was probably a guy who took a six-month electrical contract because the pay was good.

That does not make the Rebels wrong.

It just makes the galaxy more human.

The Entire Galaxy Has a Political Seizure Every Few Decades

This is where later Star Wars starts making the whole political structure look increasingly ridiculous to me.

The prequels give us the Republic. There is a Senate. There are elected representatives. There is bureaucracy, diplomacy, law, Jedi peacekeepers, trade disputes, committees, committees about committees, and enough formal government to make even a planetary superweapon look efficient by comparison. Then Palpatine engineers a crisis, accumulates emergency power, and transforms the Republic into the Empire.

Fine. Democracies can collapse. History is full of governments that slowly hand power to the person who eventually destroys them.

Then the Empire becomes so oppressive that a rebellion forms. The rebellion defeats the Empire and establishes another Republic. Also fine. That is how revolutions work sometimes.

Then the sequels happen and somehow, within the lifetime of the same people who fought the original war, we are back to another huge authoritarian military power fighting another scrappy resistance movement.

So the rough political history of the galaxy becomes: Republic becomes Empire, Empire creates Rebellion, Rebellion becomes Republic, Republic somehow produces First Order, First Order creates Resistance.

At some point I would like someone in this galaxy to consider trying something other than “one enormous centralized galactic government controlling everything” followed by “armed revolution when that government inevitably becomes terrible.”

Maybe that is the actual problem.

Maybe trying to govern an entire galaxy from one political center is fundamentally stupid.

Nobody seems interested in testing that theory, though. They just keep building another government, another military, another rebellion, and eventually another spherical object that needs to explode.

The galaxy is not experiencing political progress. It is running an oscillator.

Obi-Wan Kenobi May Be Maintaining the Oscillator

Once I started thinking about that political pendulum, Obi-Wan became suspicious.

The prequels turn Obi-Wan into a government general. He is not some detached wandering philosopher. He serves the Republic, participates directly in its wars, and fights separatists who are trying to break away from that government. He is part of the machinery of the Republic right up until Palpatine takes control and the entire thing collapses.

Then he disappears into the desert for twenty years.

Eventually he finds Luke, the bored son of one of his former military colleagues, gives him a laser sword, tells him his father was a war hero, and basically recruits him into another armed movement trying to overthrow the government that replaced the one Obi-Wan used to defend.

That is a very strange political career.

I am starting to think Obi-Wan is not merely witnessing the galactic pendulum. I think he may be one of the people keeping it moving.

I like imagining that somewhere in his little hut on Tatooine there was a wall covered in maps, old Republic documents, photographs, bits of string, and a note beside Luke’s picture that just said, “WAIT UNTIL HE IS BORED ENOUGH.”

Because Luke is not exactly difficult to recruit. The kid’s main complaint at the beginning of A New Hope is that nothing ever happens and he wants to go somewhere. Obi-Wan appears with a story about his heroic father, a mysterious weapon, and the promise of adventure, and Luke is basically one family tragedy away from joining an insurgency.

Luke did not need a political manifesto.

Luke needed transportation.

What Exactly Does Luke Do If There Is No War?

This is where the whole thing gets psychologically interesting to me.

Luke’s entire adult identity is created by conflict. He starts as a bored farm kid and almost immediately becomes a pilot, Rebel hero, Jedi apprentice, galactic war figure, and eventually the person who confronts Darth Vader and the Emperor. His purpose is enormous. Everything matters. Every decision affects the fate of the galaxy.

Then the war ends.

What does Luke Skywalker do on Tuesday?

That is not really a joke. I think that is a genuine problem for people whose identities are built around crisis. If every meaningful thing you have ever done happened because the galaxy was on fire, peace can become strangely empty.

The same applies to Obi-Wan and maybe even to the Jedi as an institution. They call themselves peacekeepers, but their mythology depends on conflict. Their heroes are defined by intervention, danger, sacrifice, combat, and restoring balance after something has gone terribly wrong.

Maybe the Jedi do not create the crises.

But their purpose only becomes visible when crises exist.

If there is no war, Luke is a former farm kid with telekinesis.

If there is no rebellion, Obi-Wan is an elderly man living in the desert with an unusually dangerous antique.

Maybe that is why the Force itself is described in terms of balance rather than permanent victory. Perhaps the universe never actually wants one side to win forever. Power accumulates, somebody resists, the pendulum swings back, and everyone acts shocked when the cycle starts again.

At some point somebody builds another Death Star.

The Force Makes More Sense to Me as Psychology Than Morality

The Light Side and Dark Side terminology does not exactly encourage subtle interpretation. Light is good. Dark is bad. Congratulations, everybody understands the symbolism.

But what I actually like about the original trilogy is that Yoda talks about the danger in psychological terms. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hatred. Hatred leads to suffering. Luke’s danger is not that he is selecting the wrong cosmic faction from a menu. The danger is that fear, anger, and certainty are changing the way he uses power.

That is much more interesting to me.

Power itself is not morality. What matters is why you use it, how you use it, and what possessing it does to you. Luke can be fighting an evil government for completely defensible reasons and still become dangerous. Vader can spend decades doing monstrous things and still make one final decision that matters.

I have a hard time believing that every person who accesses the “Dark Side” must automatically become malicious any more than I believe every person associated with the “Light Side” must automatically be benevolent. That feels too simple for the universe the original trilogy accidentally creates.

The Force makes more sense to me as something that amplifies what is already happening inside the person using it.

That is scarier, and therefore much more interesting.

Now We Need to Talk About the Holiday Special

The Holiday Special counts.

I will not negotiate this.

It is objectively terrible in ways that almost become difficult to describe because ordinary bad filmmaking still follows recognizable rules. A bad movie usually has bad acting, bad writing, bad pacing, bad effects, or some combination of those things. The Holiday Special feels like somebody briefly discovered an entirely different branch of cinema that evolutionary history wisely abandoned.

And I love that it exists.

The thing aired before The Empire Strikes Back and gave Boba Fett his first on-screen appearance in the animated segment. That alone gives it historical importance. But even without Boba Fett, I think it deserves preservation because it captures a very strange moment when Star Wars was already enormously popular but nobody had yet decided what Star Wars was supposed to be.

There were no decades of franchise rules yet. There was no enormous cultural machine carefully guarding tone and continuity. Apparently the answer to “What can Star Wars be?” was still allowed to include “two hours of Wookiee domestic life, variety-show music, instructional programming, and whatever Grandpa is doing with that headset.”

That is culturally important.

Not good.

Important.

There is a difference.

The Wookiees Have an Entire Conversation and Nobody Helps Us

The special introduces Chewbacca’s family, which is already a wonderfully strange decision. His wife is Malla, his son is Lumpy, and his elderly father is Itchy. Then the special just starts letting them talk to each other in Wookiee.

For a while.

Without subtitles.

There is no Han Solo standing nearby translating for the audience. There is no convenient protocol droid. You are simply in a Wookiee house listening to Wookiees discuss Wookiee problems and the production assumes you can work it out through gestures, tone, facial expressions, and possibly divine intervention.

I cannot imagine a modern franchise production doing this. There would be subtitles. There would be exposition. Somebody would explain the emotional stakes. Test audiences would be asked whether they understood Lumpy’s motivation.

The Holiday Special does not care.

It gives you untranslated Wookiee family drama and essentially says, “You’ll figure it out.”

And somehow, I admire that.

It is incomprehensible, but it is brave.

Grandpa Wookiee Discovers the Internet

Then we get to Itchy and his entertainment headset.

I have never found a dignified way to describe this scene and I am no longer convinced one exists. He puts on a virtual-reality device and Diahann Carroll appears, speaking and performing directly to him in a sequence with a very specific energy.

Nothing explicit happens. This is network television in 1978.

But “Wookiee porn” remains an unfortunately efficient description.

The scene feels like somebody accidentally predicted private browsing before home computers were common enough for the joke to exist. Grandpa has found a device, put on headphones, entered his own little private world, and is extremely invested in whatever is happening in there.

This exists in Star Wars.

The same fictional universe that gave us Darth Vader, the Millennium Falcon, Jedi Knights, and the destruction of Alderaan also gave us Chewbacca’s elderly father using futuristic technology for vaguely erotic entertainment.

I do not know what to do with that information except preserve it for future generations.

We Also Get to Watch an Instructional Video

At some point the Holiday Special decides that what Star Wars desperately needs is the experience of sitting through an assembly or instructional program.

Most movies aggressively remove this kind of thing because watching somebody follow technical directions is usually not considered compelling storytelling.

The Holiday Special disagrees.

So we watch it.

The amazing thing is not even that somebody wrote the scene. Movies contain bad ideas all the time. The amazing thing is that the scene survived every stage between somebody typing it and millions of people watching it on television.

Somebody wrote it.

Somebody approved it.

Somebody filmed it.

Somebody edited it.

Somebody watched the finished cut and said, “Yes, this remains necessary.”

That level of institutional commitment to a terrible idea is almost inspiring.

Then Everybody Starts Singing

The Holiday Special also contains several musical performances because at some point Star Wars collided with a 1970s television variety show and nobody managed to separate them again.

Jefferson Starship appears because apparently somebody knew Jefferson Starship. Bea Arthur sings in the Mos Eisley cantina. Carrie Fisher sings about Life Day. Harvey Korman appears in multiple roles, including as a four-armed cooking-show personality.

Every time the special begins approaching something that resembles a plot, another completely different television program seems to break through the wall.

This is part of why I think it deserves to be remembered. There are thousands of bad productions that disappear because they are merely incompetent. The Holiday Special is unforgettable because it is uniquely wrong.

It fails in directions nobody else thought to try.

That matters.

Interesting Failure Is Still Interesting

Modern franchise entertainment tends to be terrified of interesting failure. A movie can be mediocre. It can be safe. It can rearrange familiar pieces and produce exactly the emotional response expected of it. What it rarely gets permission to be anymore is completely, bafflingly strange.

The Holiday Special has no such restraint.

It contains terrible ideas, fascinating ideas, weird technical experiments, long stretches of untranslated dialogue, musical performances, comedy sketches, a surprisingly important animated segment, and a piece of technology that makes everyone who watches the scene independently invent the phrase “Wookiee porn.”

That is an unbelievable cultural artifact.

I would rather have one Holiday Special than ten perfectly competent franchise entries that nobody remembers six months later.

Failure tells you where the boundaries are.

The Holiday Special did not find the boundaries.

It drove through them at speed.

Then Han and Leia Somehow Raised Darth Vader Again

The sequel trilogy creates a different kind of problem for me.

Ben Solo is the son of Han Solo and Leia Organa. His uncle is Luke Skywalker. His grandfather is Darth Vader.

And somehow this child grows up idolizing Vader.

Not Anakin Skywalker.

Vader.

The mask, the voice, the armor, the intimidation, the authoritarian nightmare version of the man.

How?

Did nobody explain how Vader’s story ended?

Leia is his daughter. Luke was physically present when Vader rejected Palpatine and died saving him. Han spent years fighting the regime Vader helped enforce. Between those three people, Ben had access to probably the most comprehensive anti-Vader history lesson in the galaxy.

And yet somehow he ends up keeping Vader’s melted helmet around and promising to “finish what he started.”

Finish what?

Vader’s final major decision was realizing that most of what he had started was catastrophic.

I keep imagining a conversation between Kylo Ren and the ghost of Anakin Skywalker where Ben proudly announces that he wants to be like his grandfather and Anakin has to spend twenty minutes explaining that he was miserable, manipulated, mutilated, trapped in a mechanical suit, responsible for enormous suffering, and eventually killed his own boss to save his son.

If your grandson looks at that biography and says, “Yes, that sounds aspirational,” the family may have skipped a few important conversations.

Maybe Try Literally Anything Before Raising Another Vader

This is what gets me about Han and Leia’s parenting situation. They know exactly what happened to Anakin. They know he was powerful, angry, manipulated, emotionally unstable, and eventually transformed into one of the most dangerous people in the galaxy.

Then they have a powerful Force-sensitive child who begins displaying serious problems.

Maybe this is the moment to do absolutely anything differently.

Therapy would be a start.

Honest family history would help.

Maybe do not let the child construct an entire mythology around Grandpa Vader without constantly reminding him that Grandpa Vader hated being Grandpa Vader by the end.

Instead, the solution somehow becomes sending him to Luke, another person whose entire adult identity was built through war, rebellion, mystical destiny, and unresolved family trauma.

That seems risky.

What makes it especially frustrating is that Vader’s actual story should have been the perfect antidote to Kylo Ren’s obsession. Darth Vader is not ultimately a story about how cool evil is. It is a story about what fear, obsession, anger, and manipulation can do to somebody until they barely recognize themselves anymore.

And even Vader eventually turns back.

Kylo worships the part of his grandfather’s life that his grandfather himself rejected.

That is almost interesting enough to make me forgive the setup.

Almost.

Starkiller Base Is New If You Do Not Know Where the Name Came From

Then there is Starkiller Base.

Which is basically a Death Star that ate a planet.

Fine. We have already established that nobody in this galaxy can resist building giant superweapons.

But calling it Starkiller Base is funny if you know the history of Star Wars at all, because “Starkiller” is older than the version of Luke Skywalker we actually got. The name goes back into the early development of Star Wars, before the characters settled into their final forms.

So when Starkiller Base gets presented as this huge new sequel-era thing, I cannot help hearing somebody proudly announce that they invented a new name after finding it in George Lucas’s attic.

That is kind of the sequels in miniature for me.

Desert protagonist.

Droid carrying important information.

Masked dark-side villain.

Massive authoritarian military.

Scrappy resistance.

Superweapon.

Except now the superweapon is bigger.

And after all of that, I am still stuck on the political question.

WHAT DID EVERYONE DO FOR THIRTY YEARS?

Leia, you won.

Luke, you won.

Han, you got a medal.

The Empire fell.

How are we already back to a small Resistance fighting another giant authoritarian military power?

Did anybody govern?

Did everybody go home after the celebration and forget there was supposed to be a next step?

Maybe Episode II Really Is a Masterpiece

Maybe I am wrong about all of this.

Maybe someday I will click that YouTube thumbnail and discover that Attack of the Clones was secretly an extraordinary meditation on institutional decay, emotional repression, authoritarianism, forbidden love, and the psychological hazards of sand.

I remain open to evidence.

Just not tonight.

I was trying to drink a beer.

So I am returning to my much smaller Star Wars canon, where Luke Skywalker is a bored farm kid recruited into an armed rebellion by a former government general who may secretly be maintaining a galaxy-sized political oscillator, the Rebel Alliance has a casualty problem nobody wants to talk about, Darth Vader is an emotionally destroyed wizard who eventually realizes he made a very long series of terrible decisions, and the Force works better as psychology than as a cosmic good-and-evil scoreboard.

In this version, the galaxy is messy. Heroes can do terrible things for defensible reasons. Villains can change. Governments can become the thing they fought. Rebellions can inherit the same hunger for centralized power they opposed. People build myths about their families that are completely disconnected from what actually happened.

And somewhere in the middle of all of that, Chewbacca’s grandfather is watching something questionable through a VR headset.

That is Star Wars.

At least the version I want.

Now if you’ll excuse me, it’s almost Life Day.