After a nice long break to recover from the insanity of the Death Star plans (which I recently adapted into a short video for Star Wars Minute), we now return to our regularly-scheduled program, wherein I explicate the handful of offhand references in the original trilogy that the Expanded Universe couldn’t help but explain multiple times over. This time around:
22. What happened with the bounty hunter Han “ran into” on Ord Mantell?
By my count (and one thing I learned from the Death Star piece is that there’s a fair chance I’m missing someone), there are seven different encounters on Ord Mantell between Han and at least one bounty hunter between A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back. In researching this piece, one interesting thing I noticed is that, counterintuitively, about half of these weren’t even directly the result of Jabba’s bounty, but were instead brought on by Han’s position in the Rebellion. This is neat because it sort of contradicts the context of Han’s line in Empire but at the same time reinforces the idea that he’s ready to move on. Like lots of stuff in this period, some of the dating is fuzzy, but I’m going to attempt to run through them all chronologically, starting with… Read More