There Might Be a Mistake in the ‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens’ Crawl
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away someone might have made a copy editing mistake while typing the Star Wars: The Force Awakens crawl. Or maybe it’s not a mistake at all and actually reveals a huge spoiler about the Skywalkers.
If you haven’t seen The Force Awakens yet and want to avoid even the most minor of spoilers from the crawl, you should probably stop reading now. For the rest of you, it appears that the Force Awakens crawl could have a possible punctuation error, or reveal that Luke and Leia have a major secret no one saw coming. Now this is super nit picky and probably reveals a minor mistake by someone who forgot to brush up on their grammar. But hey, I’ll entertain the wildest of theories.
One editor over at Mic.com noticed that a sentence in the film’s opening crawl doesn’t correctly identify Leia’s sibling according to proper English grammar guidelines. Here’s the part we’re talking about:
With the support of the Republic, General Leia Organa leads a brave resistance. She is desperate to find her brother Luke and gain his help in restoring peace and justice to the galaxy.
Everything looks fine, right? Well, not totally. As any grammar hound will point out, the second sentence is missing a pair of commas around “Luke.”
The sentence should properly read: “She is desperate to find her brother, Luke, and gain his help in restoring peace and justice to the galaxy.” Since Luke is Leia’s only brother, his name should be enclosed by commas following “brother” since adding his name isn’t necessary to the meaning of the sentence (remember, according to grammar). If the sentence simply read “her brother,” that would be enough to identify him. But J.J. Abrams and Lawrence Kasdan likely included Luke’s name in the sentence to give the audience additional information to better follow the story, especially for those unfamiliar with the franchise who might not know who Luke and Leia are. The addition of commas would also make reading the crawl more clunky and flow less smoothly, so leaving them out is likely a stylistic choice. But there is one other (very far reaching) possibility that those commas were left out for a reason: Leia has another brother.
Mic’s senior copy editor Kaitlyn Jakola explained on the site that “Without the offset commas, they’re suggesting that it’s necessary to specify which brother.” That means the lack of commas opens up the possibility that Luke is one of multiple brothers to Leia. If we want to take this wild theory to the extreme and assume that Abrams and Kasdan intentionally left off the commas, then we can only guess Leia has another brother out there she probably doesn’t know about. Mic suggests Anakin could have had another child with an unknown woman after Padmé Amidala died giving birth to Luke and Leia. That’d mean the Skywalker twins have another half-brother out there, leaving a lot of territory for the next set of Star Wars films to explore. But is it likely? My guess: no way.
If the theory is true, I doubt Kasdan would let such a major reveal get teased in something as silly and minor as punctuation. But the addition of another Skywalker sibling would only add unnecessary plot twists to a story that is just fine on it’s own. We’re already theorizing Rey’s parentage, so why throw another wrench in the mix? Plus, Star Wars took place a “long time ago,” way before English grammar rules were created. And in a world with Jedis, who says grammar matters anyway? If only I could go back in time and tell that to my 7th grade English teacher.