Did George Lucas want Luke Skywalker to survive 'The Last Jedi'?

Four months and change after the release of The Last Jedi, we're still not quite done processing its most shocking moment: the heroic death, from long-distance Force projection, of Jedi Master Luke Skywalker.

Least of all Mark Hamill, who for all his amiability seems to enjoy armchair quarterbacking director Rian Johnson's decision to kill off Hamill's most famous character. To watch The Director and the Jedi, a surprisingly affecting documentary on the just-released Last Jedi Blu-ray, is to see an actor torn between his desire to make the best movie on the one hand and grief for his alter ego on the other. Tellingly, there's no resolution to this conflict in the documentary.

Now, in an interview with our sister publication IGN, Hamill makes a rather pointed claim: that Star Wars creator George Lucas intended Luke Skywalker to survive through the entire sequel trilogy, through Episode VIII and into the as-yet-unnamed Episode IX. He says Luke had a specific role that will, tragically, now go unfilled.

"I happen to know that George didn't kill Luke until the end of IX, after he trained Leia," Hamill said. "Which is another thread that was never played upon [in The Last Jedi]."

So is he right? Was Luke supposed to live? Did Johnson thwart George Lucas' wishes? The question is more complicated than it seems -- and to answer it, we're going to have to take a deep dive into Star Wars history.

Here's the problem with Hamill's claim: He doesn't specify when he learned this news from Lucas. (We've reached out to the actor to clarify.) The answer matters because George Lucas changed his mind. About everything. A lot.

Perhaps the Episode IX plan is something Lucas told the actor idly about his long-term plans during the filming of the original saga between 1976 and 1983. In which case, it's important to remember that the creator went through near-constant iterations of the Star Wars saga -- starting with the four very different drafts of the Star Wars screenplay.

Darth Vader wasn't Luke's dad in the first Empire Strikes Back script; Luke's Skywalker's secret sibling was first supposed to be hidden on the other side of the galaxy, not Leia at all. (Why do you think Luke and Leia had that now rather icky kiss in Empire?)

Lucas basically wrote and rewrote Star Wars lore casually, at will -- "on the back of a napkin," as Lucasfilm animation director Dave Filoni puts it. And while Lucasfilm lore tells of an ancient three-ring binder in which Lucas had plotted out nine (or sometimes twelve) movies, Lucas himself refuted the existence of any real sequel trilogy plot after he filmed the prequels.

"There will definitely be no Episodes VII-IX," he told Total Film magazine in 2008. "That’s because there isn’t any story. I mean, I never thought of anything!"

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Another possibility: Hamill may be referring to the three sequel trilogy script treatments Lucas whipped up once he'd changed his mind in 2011. Which happened, not coincidentally, after he'd learned Disney CEO Bob Iger was interested in buying Lucasfilm. (The $4 billion sale was agreed upon a year later.)

These sequel trilogy treatments, which have still never seen the light of day, were designed to tease. Lucas even refused to show them during the Disney-Lucasfilm mating dance until Iger's lawyers insisted. The treatments had "potential" from a "storytelling perspective," Iger said mildly. Yoda might have put it differently: page-turners, they were not.

By the time J.J. Abrams came on board to craft The Force Awakens with Lawrence Kasdan, starting in 2013, Lucasfilm and Disney executives had decided to dispense with Lucas' treatments and start from scratch. Abrams and Kasdan's brief was to write a Star Wars movie that contained all the scenes that would delight them as fans.

However, starting from scratch doesn't mean Lucas' treatments were entirely thrown out. Thanks to revelations in the official Lucasfilm book The Art of The Last Jedi, we now know that his idea for the movie that became The Force Awakens involved Luke as an old hermit training a young female apprentice.

In other words, the spark that lit the flame that became The Last Jedi was lit by George Lucas himself. When Abrams and Kasdan felt it was better to open the trilogy with a movie driven by Luke's disappearance, the idea was simply shuffled one movie down the line, and became the basis for Rian Johnson's script.

Now, would Lucas have ended the movie by killing Luke? Maybe, maybe not. Arguably, the question is moot given that he was seeing it as Episode VII rather than VIII. It was an opening romp rather than a darker middle chapter.

Indeed, Lucas was reluctant to kill major characters. Constructing Return of the Jedi, he told Kasdan: "you don't kill people, it's not nice!" (His co-writer eventually got his way, and we got to see the death of Yoda.) Yet by the time Lucas came to write the prequels he was slaughtering Jedi (and Jedi younglings) left right and center.

The one constant throughout his career is that Lucas was always enamored with his latest plan. This was true from his last-minute decision to kill Obi-Wan on the set of Star Wars (pissing off Sir Alec Guinness with his indecision) to his changing Anakin Skywalker's motivation for turning to the Dark Side at the very last minute in post-production on Revenge of the Sith.

So yes, we don't have the slightest clue what Lucas intended for Episode IX, even in his 2011-2 scribbles. But we do know that whatever it was, he only intended it for a hot minute -- and would likely have changed his mind a dozen times had he actually shepherded it to screen.

The Creator may have ended up reaching the same realization as Rian Johnson: Luke dying for a noble cause, becoming the ultimate hero of galactic legend, was a very fitting way for him to go out. (Little noticed in Hamill's statement: he does confirm that Lucas wanted to kill Luke off, it was just a question of timing.) George Lucas is not immune to the Force of good story logic, and to think otherwise is vanity.

Sorry, Mark Hamill. But we all know you're coming back in Episode IX anyway -- as the galaxy's sassiest Force Ghost.