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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 pos-
ture overcompensates. Her long dark braid is wrapped in thick ribbon: bright,
blood-red. Her eyes cut across the page, directly toward the viewer.
QUEEN
OF EMPTY
SPACE
There is no central thesis left
for Star Wars. It’s just too big,
a single root system hold-
ing up a thousand trees. It’s
a locus of pop-culture fasci-
nation 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 Ami-
dala died.
store, from TIE Fighter–printed shoes to Death Star picnic blankets. About 800 pieces of Star Wars merch can be purchased at Disney’s online
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GENEVIEVE VALENTINE
(@GLValentine) is a novel-
ist and comic book writer.
́
BY Genevieve Valentine
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“I WILL NOT CONDONE A COURSE OF ACTION
THAT WILL LEAD US TO WAR.”
—PADME AMIDALA IN THE PHANTOM MENACE
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 cos-
tumes 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 short-
hand 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 por-
trait 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.
́
THE FULL STORY
OF PADME AMIDALA
ISN'T FOUND IN
THE MOVIES—BUT
IN THE FRAGMENTS
LEFT BEHIND.
