When Han Solo, played by Harrison Ford, meets bounty hunter Greedo at the Mos Eisley Cantina in “Star Wars: A New Hope,” the encounter ends with a dead man. Greedo is shot by Han – unchallenged so far. However, exactly how this happened is the basis for a major dispute.
In the original version, which hit theaters in 1977, Han Solo appears to shoot the menacing Greedo just before he has a chance to pull the trigger himself. When George Lucas made further revisions for a special edition of his films in 1997, he added a first shot of Greedo, which Han narrowly misses. So the popular smuggler just reacts and shoots second. This was the start of the famous ‘Han Shot First’ debate. It never came to a halt – even through several further revisions of the scene for a DVD release in 2004, for the Blu-ray in 2011 and most recently its streaming start on Disney+ in 2019.
But what many of you probably don’t know. Whether Han shot first is debated not only by millions of “Star Wars” fans in our world, but also in the fictional saga itself.
“Han Shot First” as a conspiracy story in the saga
The highly entertaining book “The Legends of Luke Skywalker” was published in 2017. In it, the crew of a freighter passes the time with stories about the legendary rebel hero Luke Skywalker. You exchange stories about adventures you’ve heard. The screenplay gives novelist Ken Liu the opportunity to develop exciting short stories that are told in a canon setting, but are not necessarily canon themselves. After all, the people on the spaceship continue to argue about whether it all really happened that way. Luke is sometimes mistaken for a fraud who uses only good sleight of hand to fake the Jedi powers he learned from Yoda.
At one point they also talk about one of Luke’s companions: Han Solo. The story of a former smuggler who discovered his heart of gold out of love for a princess and therefore joined the rebellion? Many consider this incredible. A character named Togruta then even says that he has heard rumors that Han is a very bad finger. He even shot first during an argument. Another agrees with him: that’s exactly how it happened. But we don’t know anything about that today. Because in the official versions of the New Republic, anything that would make Han Solo seem less heroic was removed.
In the world of “Star Wars” the version that Han shot first after Greedo already tried to kill him, so according to the official version of the New Republic. But some people have heard that the smuggler had no problem pulling the trigger first (and was therefore guaranteed to be the only one if he was hit).
After all, we know this at the latest from ‘Solo: A Star Wars Story’. There, Han, played here by Alden Ehrenreich, learns the important lesson of not trusting anyone, not even the person who gives him this advice. When his mentor Tobias Beckett (Woody Harrelson) betrays him, Han does not wait for possible consequences. Instead, he doesn’t give Beckett a chance and shoots himself.