Star Wars Confirms L3-37's Presence in Original Trilogy

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Star Wars Tweet Confirms [SPOILER]'s Presence in Original Trilogy

By Matt Morrison

Published Jun 3, 2018

A tweet from Star Wars' Twitter account confirms a fan-theory that a character introduced in Solo: A Star Wars Story was in the original trilogy.

Warning: This article contains SPOILERS for Solo: A Star Wars Story.

A tweet from the official Star Wars Twitter account has confirmed the presence of a character introduced in Solo: A Star Wars Story in the original trilogy. The idea had been proposed online in the wake of Solo's release, but Lucasfilm had been mum on the subject of the character's existence in the earlier movies... until now.

Set between the events of Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope, Solo: A Star Wars Story focused on the origins of the smuggler-turned-Rebellion hero Han Solo. The film explored Han's formative years and how he progressed from being a streetwise car-thief to an ace smuggler. Solo also depicted several of Han's past adventures which had been referred to in the earlier Star Wars films but never depicted on-screen. These included his breaking the record for traversing the legendary Kessel Run and how he came to acquire the Millennium Falcon - the ship that would become nearly as legendary as Solo himself - in a card game with master gambler Lando Calrissian. But that's not all it did.

The official Star Wars Twitter account posted a tweet recently that quotes a line from C-3PO in The Empire Strikes Back. The quote centered around the protocol droid's comments upon the strange method of speech utilized by the Millennium Falcon's navigational computer: "I don't know where your ship learned to communicate, but it has the most peculiar dialect." Take a look:

What had been a throwaway line to explain C-3PO's difficulty in interfacing with the computer (despite his mastery of six million forms of communication) in a high-pressure situation in The Empire Strikes Back took on a new meaning in Solo: A Star Wars Story. The film introduced a new robot character named L3-37, or L3 for short, which is a custom droid assembled from the parts of several other robots; L3 was the co-pilot and navigator for the Millennium Falcon and an associate of Lando Calrissian.

The events of Solo saw L3 mortally wounded, as the movies' heroes made their escape from Kessel before attempting their legendary run. In order to escape from an Imperial blockade and survive traveling through the middle of a choppy part of space, Lando uploaded L3's memory core into the Millennium Falcon's navigation computer so that it could draw upon her knowledge. Based on L3's dominating personality, it's not too hard to imagine her taking over the Millennium Falcon completely and Han Solo not noticing due to all of the other quirks the ship had.

This was actually a Star Wars fan theory that had been foreshadowed long before the movie came out. And while it was confirmed on-screen, it's nice to see Lucasfilm also confirmed it off-screen. In any case, it is a nice touch that shows the care that the writers of Solo: A Star Wars Story took in trying to draw upon the continuity of the classic Star Wars movies in telling their story.