Return of the Jedi has always been a film with a ragged reputation among Star Wars devotees. We’ve gone back and forth for decades over whether it deserves the ire and frustration aimed in its direction by a certain stripe of fan, but you can’t get around one all-important factor in Star Wars experiences—how old you were for your first viewing of any given installment. Given that, we’re no closer to solving the conundrum of its position at the bottom of many Star Wars movie ranking lists.
Still, it seems to me that any appreciation of Episode VI’s cinematic quality gets lost in this shuffle, and today, I’d like to remedy that injustice. So let’s do it: Let’s talk about what makes Return of the Jedi a brilliant piece of movie myth-making.
We all ready for this?
So… here’s the thing.
Yeah, I lied. I’m going to talk about how great C-3PO is, namely in the aforementioned film. That was my whole sinister plan from go.
You have been misled, and I’d apologize, except I don’t feel even a little bad. One of the best things about Star Wars is droids—we’re all aware of this boon, but the droids who often get the most accolades and attention are the ones that function as some combination of pet and Swiss army knife. Astromechs are the primary group fitting that bill, and folks are fully able and willing to tout the virtues of BB-8, Chopper, and their ilk. This is Star Wars, of course, and that means that most of the Swiss-army functionality of these droids is bound up in wartime operations, meaning that droids with any attributes that can’t be honed for violence are made generally less appealing to the audience. (K-2SO isn’t an astromech, but he’s sardonic, loyal, and can surely kill people, so he’s an easy fit to this theme. Add in a voice actor with Alan Tudyk’s credentials and you’ve got a character that is pretty much universally beloved despite being a bit less puppy-like.)
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This has always bugged me because the grandfather of this archetype, R2-D2, was introduced as one of a pair. And, in fact, you can’t really have the original Star Wars trilogy at all without the back-and-forth banter of his self-proclaimed counterpart, a golden protocol droid who has been mind-wiped so many times that it’s baffling his personality is so consistent. C-3PO is every bit as reliable and skilled as R2, but he’s saddled with idiosyncrasies designed to make the audience less overall fond—namely, he’s neurotic, chatty, and afraid of death.
When put in such straightforward terms, the dislike or even lack of appreciation seems a little less reasonable, doesn’t it? After all, whomst among us hasn’t been one or all of these things at one point or another. And, more to the point, why are folks so annoyed at the idea of a droid designed for communication and political intrigue not being as capable at guerrilla warfare as his constant companion, the starfighter mechanic with ability to jack into enemy computers at whim? Is no one else perceiving a bit of an imbalance here?
This is without bringing up the fact that Threepio is much better at subterfuge than any of the organic beings around him give credit for—he ably lies frequently in the first film, to both Owen and Luke as well as a bevy of stormtroopers on the Death Star, when it suits the situation. If we add in that handy deleted scene from Empire Strike Back where he rips the caution sticker off a Hoth base door, leading a group of unsuspecting troopers into an encounter with a wampa, or the way he often instructs Artoo into more effective modes of helping their Rebel friends, C-3PO has the resumé for a variety of spy work that goes unremarked upon and unnoticed… to the point where he’s frequently left out of plans the Rebellion is demanding his participation on.
What’s the reasoning? Because there doesn’t seem to be one aside from the fact that Threepio vocally panics when he perceives danger. It’s not always convenient, to be sure, but most of the time it doesn’t do anything but aggravate Han Solo while he’s piloting. And Captain Solo is pretty much always grumpy when he’s piloting.
Another thing that aggravates Han is the fact that C-3PO isn’t as mobile as a human, which is, uh, pretty damn cruel while also not being a thing Threepio can do anything about. Either upgrade the guy’s chassis or learn to curb your frequent threats that you might leave him behind because he’s physically incapable of running, dude. It’s not cute.
There’s another factor to this that always seems to slide by folks, namely the fact that Threepio is there because Artoo wants him around. Though the dialogue suggests that Threepio believes himself to be in charge and making choices for the both of them, Artoo has countless chances to leave Threepio behind and generally chooses not to, or is visibly saddened when they’re separated. And it seems likely that the astromech’s reasonings here are twofold: There is a genuine love and companionship between the two, but also, Threepio’s strength is specifically suited to one of Artoo’s primary needs: communication. While it’s never entirely clear person to person, most humans don’t understand droid languages; they seem to generally infer things based on tone or urgency. Meaning C-3PO is one of the only people around who can carry on a full conversation with R2-D2—and as Artoo always has a lot to say, this would be invaluable to him on a practical, but also likely an emotional, level.
When you remember that Threepio and Artoo were patterned after comedic cinema duos, the noted preference for one over the other gets even more weird. Sure, they don’t spend the entire original trilogy side by side, but saying that you adore R2-D2 more than C-3PO is like saying you want Laurel and not Hardy. Wooster without Jeeves. Penn and no Teller. You’d only ever get half the gag that way, friends. From a fully functional standpoint, it just doesn’t work.
So there you have it. Acknowledging that these are only my Exhibits A-F in an entire alphabet’s worth of evidence, C-3PO is under-sung as a hero in these films, and this is largely the fault of the humans around him. Well, that and audiences that generally don’t look kindly on characters who don’t handle disaster with cool, collected calm—which I’ve never understood, though I get that this might be a me thing. If I were about to die and felt like no one around me was taking that problem seriously, I would absolutely gripe and moan and wail about it.
I realized a while ago that one of the reasons—of which there are many—that Return of the Jedi always resonated a little extra for me is that it’s the only film where C-3PO is permitted to show his natural strengths. Thrust into yet another op where he’s only told half the story, Threepio readily translates all of Jabba’s Huttese demands to his companions, gets rescued from a sand dune following the crime lord’s dispatch, then gets sent with Rebel forces to Endor for a mission that they hope will end the Empire’s reign for good.
Endor. You know, the moon made of forest, where you should absolutely take a gleaming golden droid while everyone else in dresses in camo. (It was a regular occurrence in the Legends novels and in shows like Rebels to paint droids when you needed them to blend in during missions, and the fact that it’s never considered in the films has become retroactively hilarious.) While the insistence that the Ewoks immediately deem him a god is cringeworthy as an enactment of a trope that isn’t made less racist merely by replacing native human cultures with furry bears, once we move beyond those beats in the script, what happens? What, in effect, turns the tide of the war?
C-3PO tells the Ewoks a story.
It’s long been one of my favorite scenes in the entirety of Star Wars as a whole. C-3PO is performing his job just as he’s intended to—he’s facilitating communication between groups who would otherwise be unable to connect. But Threepio takes this impulse one step further. He doesn’t simply relay plans and events to their new allies; he improvises a performance with sound effects and pantomime, he gives their narrative stakes and history. In this moment, C-3PO is acting in the role of a diplomat or ambassador, but also an artist, and he does a brilliant job of it.
Up until that point, the importance of communication in Star Wars had often been elided, something that characters tackled by seeming to understand a variety of languages that they couldn’t speak, or the sort of problem only moisture farmers had to contend with—you know, little people with little problems on the galactic scale. But Return of the Jedi finally acknowledged the need for a droid with C-3PO’s skillset, the importance of communication as anything but a “soft skill.” Their derisively nicknamed Golden Rod was always the one talking to ship computers, translating Artoo’s thoughts, offering his services even when they were deemed needless and frivolous against a background of constant terror.
But without those “frivolous” abilities, you can’t make the allies you need to win this fight. And it only took them the entire trilogy to remember it.
Keeping in mind that there was no way for the Rebels to know they were going to encounter the Ewoks, it would have made more sense for them to leave him behind. Imagine their collective relief when they realized long after the Battle of Endor that without bringing him along, the whole plan would have fireball-crashed like those speederbikes. It does make you wonder, what was the purpose of having C-3PO with their group at all? And to that, I stand by my previous assessment: He’s there for R2-D2. The astromech has a very specific, essential role within their little band, but when they call Artoo to the shield bunker to open the doors, Threepio is right there, padding along beside him: “We’re coming!”
They never called for him, but he knows who he’s there to support. The importance of communication yet again, though this time it’s the sort we never see. And when Artoo gets fried by enemy fire, who’s the first (only) person to comment on his valor? We should all be so lucky to have our own emotional support protocol droid.
Just a little something I’ve been thinking about as Return of the Jedi has come up over the last few weeks. And if it’s stuck in my head, I thought I could stick in few more heads to even things out. It takes a lot of assets to bring down Empires. Never forget that language, connection, and a good story are all tools in those arsenals.
And maybe start giving a certain frantic golden droid his due.
Emmet Asher-Perrin is always this emotional over C-3PO, sorry. You can bug them on Twitter and read more of their work here and elsewhere.
