Padmé Amidala, Queen of Empty Space

1.

In the concept sketch, Padmé Amidala stands in profile. The stiff brown tunic and pants—the clothes she’ll die in—are a far cry from the regalia worn by the Queen of Naboo. Her pregnancy is far enough along to hinder her, and her posture overcompensates. Her long dark braid is wrapped in thick ribbon: bright, blood-red. Her eyes cut across the page, directly toward the viewer.

2.

There is no central thesis left for Star Wars. It’s just too big, a single root system holding up a thousand trees. It’s a locus of pop-culture fascination because it both is and is not pretty much anything you need. By now, purchase patterns at Star Wars theme parks are sent to the same offices where story decisions are made.

The sheer scope of the canon—films, comics, TV, toys—makes an endless appetite for stories. Just look at Willrow Hood, a Cloud City refugee with two seconds of screen time in The Empire Strikes Back. In 1997, a Star Wars trading card game gave him a name; a few years later, the ice cream maker Hood carried in that short scene was officially canonized as a database that saved the Resistance. He has an action figure. (Jon Favreau, on the set of The Mandalorian, posted an Instagram photo of a grimy ice cream maker, teasing that its role isn’t over.)

In a canon with so much room, there are always more stories to tell. And the most appealing of these might be the fractal what-ifs: What got left behind? What looked good until something else looked perfect? Beneath them, in a place that’s hard to define, are the stories that aren’t told, for which it’s just too late.

That’s where Padmé Amidala died.

3.

The biggest battle in Star Wars is between its mythic arcs—the heroes’ journeys—and its political stories. Padmé fell on the political side so squarely that the prequel trilogy expended significant visual and narrative energy trying to drag her toward the mythic, where Anakin Skywalker was waiting.

She never got there. Her realm was that of the negotiation and the vote, and nothing was able to bring her into line with the adventure and the myth. A war couldn’t do it; courtship with a Jedi couldn’t. Even her costumes couldn’t pull her into legend. (Designer Trisha Biggar drew on myriad sources for Padmé’s wardrobe—Mongolia, Japan, China, the Hopi—feeding a wider discussion about what it meant to use cultures as a visual shorthand for something alien. Even here, for Padmé, it was politics.)

Her problems were just too complicated for the Force. When she was the teenage Queen of Naboo trying to fend off a hostile blockade of her planet, Senator Palpatine used her desperation to engineer his rise to power. After he began using his position as chancellor to dismantle the rule of law, her fight against him was stymied by the erosion of democracy, until there was nothing left but an Empire. Once the mythic showdowns took over, Padmé all but vanished from the narrative of the last prequel film, crushed by the future that was barreling down on her, begging her husband not to do the terrible things we already knew he was going to do.

But it wasn’t always so. In an interview at Academy of Art University in October 2016—since removed from YouTube—artist Iain McCaig detailed the early stages of production and a potential moment George Lucas had considered for Revenge of the Sith. “[Anakin] leaves. Moments later, in come the Separatists and right behind his back, [Padmé] is starting the Rebellion to overthrow him,” McCaig said. “Because Padmé can see that he is becoming a monster.”

It wasn’t the first time fans had heard evidence of a path not taken. In The Art of Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, below the portrait of sharp-eyed Padmé with the bright red ribbon in her hair, a note by McCaig describes some queen who never was: “The moment Padmé realizes Anakin can’t be saved, she should do the thing that she needs to do—out of love. She should kill him.”

We know Padmé saw what her husband was; that much survived. The surprise is that, in a story that never got told, she did something about it.

4.

In deleted scenes from Revenge of the Sith, Padmé meets a few sympathizers from the Galactic Republic, which is faltering toward fascism. They form a coalition of planets concerned about democracy. Padmé leads the delegation to deliver their demands to Chancellor Palpatine; behind him, Anakin.

This story stretches back to The Phantom Menace, when Palpatine convinced young Queen Amidala to call a vote of no confidence in the Senate. Despite the shattering consequences, it’s a story the movies somehow couldn’t tell. A 14-year-old queen made one misstep and doomed the galaxy for a generation; it’s almost too painful to face such a mistake. What would she have thought once she realized what she’d done? As the Senate applauded its emperor, did she think the galaxy got what it deserved? What calculations would she have to make to justify her love for Anakin? What does it mean for a story to worry so much about Anakin’s gullible hatred and leave all this behind?

5.

The novels, comics, and TV series offer Padmé plenty to do. Spy on aristocrats. Defend the innocent in court. Demand the Senate stop commissioning soldiers and alleviate some suffering instead. In this expanded universe, she and Anakin fight—each other, or side by side. She uses any gambit within the rule of law, and when the law stops working, she goes around.

The storymakers must know how inert she seemed in Revenge of the Sith. They give her canon space wherever they find it. The one thing they cannot do is turn back time and put a knife in Padmé’s hand. Some things it’s too late to alter. Some stories stay untold.

6.

Amid the things that can’t be undone, there are endless Star Wars stories. (Willrow Hood’s ice cream maker is still poised for a more satisfying narrative than Padmé.) If there’s one franchise that knows the value of ghosts, it’s Star Wars. And Padmé casts long shadows over the canon.

One shadow looms over the new trilogy: Anakin and Padmé’s impossible love story echoes through their grandson Ben, whose obsession (at first antagonistic, later mutual) with Rey reshuffles half a dozen facets of the first star-crossed love story. Rey is a scrapper from a sandy nowhere, in dire straits until a high-stakes emergency intervenes, and strong enough in the Force to make everybody nervous. Ben Solo grew up with a politician and was sent through the proper channels to get training for his abilities. It’s Ben who gets paranoid, kills his competition, changes his name, and flees to the fascists. Rey, who had only as much time to contemplate justice as starvation allowed, still dreamed of the Resistance before it ever landed at her door. And her loyalties run deep. She fell in love with Ben in The Last Jedi, enough to give herself over to the First Order, trying to get Ben to change his allegiance.

He does. He kills his emperor for her; he and Rey fight side by side. But hunger wins out, and he was Kylo Ren a long time. He claims Supreme Leader, one hand out for Rey. She begs him—once: “Don’t go this way.” Then she fights him, and she flees.

That’s the other shadow: all that fighting. Politics gets heavy, and the psychological tolls are too close to the real. Trade blockades and murder by committee isn’t the struggle people come to see. Everyone understands that loyalty will spur a hero to draw their sword against a sworn enemy; Padmé railing against a darkness with a hundred thousand hands is too much to think about. Even in Rogue One (the rare Star War where heroes make tough moral decisions), the Empire lurks on every corner, an enemy so obvious there’s no question what needs doing.

Whatever the outcome in The Rise of Skywalker, it will happen in a world where fascists are fairly easy to recognize and where everyone—even, occasionally, Kylo Ren—understands they’re in the wrong. (It’ll happen in a movie that had to leave a story behind. With the loss of Carrie Fisher goes whatever burden Padmé’s daughter, Leia, a political royal who fought her mother’s losing battles for so many years, was originally meant to carry in these last hours.)

The fights will happen without much political background noise. We do not yet know if any of the heroes have made catastrophic mistakes, but we understand any risk taken in the name of a good cause; the movies have made it clear enough that the law won’t save you once the emperor comes. We know it—but we go to Star Wars for a myth. Some things have to be settled by the sword. Someone has to be right.

7.

There’s another piece of concept art in The Art of Star Wars. In the murky glow of Mustafar, Anakin stands with his back to us, saber drawn, black robes swamping the foreground—a familiar moment that made it to the screen. The part that didn’t: Facing us, staring him down, is Padmé in a burgundy cloak. Out of the shadows her face is sharp, tired. Determined. In her hand she clutches a dagger: bright, blood-red. She has recognized the danger. She’s about to make a choice.

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GENEVIEVE VALENTINE (@GLValentine) is a novelist and comic book writer.

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