This article contains spoilers for Darth Vader #11.

Star Wars has just revealed Emperor Palpatine retrieved Luke Skywalker's lost hand after The Empire Strikes Back—possibly to try to clone Skywalkers. When Luke Skywalker confronted Darth Vader on Cloud City in The Empire Strikes Back, he suffered one of the most terrible defeats of his life. He learned everything he had believed was a lie, and that his father Anakin Skywalker—hero of the Clone Wars—had in fact been seduced by the dark side, becoming Darth Vader. Luke lost his lightsaber, and his hand as well.

But what happened to that lost hand? Star Wars has recently revealed who found the lightsaber in canon, but the hand has been something of a mystery. In the old Expanded Universe, Emperor Palpatine's agents somehow recovered it and transported it to one of Palpatine's secret bases on the planet Wayland. There, it was discovered by the insane Jedi Master Joruus C'baoth, who used it to create a twisted clone of Luke (named Luuke, because writer Timothy Zahn came up with the idea of adding a vowel to a clone's name to differentiate them from the original). But, of course, this story is not canon, so fans had simply assumed the hand was lost.

Related: Why Luke Joined Palpatine In Star Wars Legends (But Not In ROTJ)

Darth Vader #11, by writer Greg Pak and artist Raffaele Ienco, finally appears to reveal the truth. Darth Vader has traveled to the hidden Sith redoubt of Exegol, where he confronts his master and learns of secrets of the Sith even he has previously been unaware of. This is the same facility viewers saw in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, but here the cloning operation is at its height, and every clone canister is filled. Palpatine calls this facility his "scalpel of creation," boasting he can use it to make anything. As he says those words, Vader's eyes linger on a severed hand.

Darth Vader severed hand

While it's conceivable this could have been Anakin Skywalker's hand, Palpatine probably hadn't begun collecting body parts at the onset of the Clone Wars—simply because if he had, you'd expect to see a lot more limbs from Anakin. No, this is most likely Luke Skywalker's hand, retrieved from Bespin and taken to Exegol so the Emperor can experiment with it. It's amusing to see the Disney canon borrow so directly from the old Expanded Universe.

Naturally, this raises the question of just why Palpatine would want to collect Luke's hand in the first place. The most logical reason is that he intends to create clones, but for a far darker purpose; no doubt he considers the possibility of transferring his dark spirit into a clone of the Chosen One's son, in order to increase even his prodigious Force power. In the end, though, either that process doesn't work or the Emperor's vanity means he chooses to possess a clone of himself instead. It is, however, amusing to imagine there might be a clone of Luke Skywalker running around the Star Wars galaxy, just as one of Emperor Palpatine's own defective clones escaped Exegol and had a daughter.

More: Emperor Palpatine’s Entire Backstory, Timeline, & Manipulations Explained

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