EMPIRE STRIKES BACK

Manual control

After a hard day's killin', Luke gets ready to leave with the rest of the Rebel pilots. Note that Luke does not answer Wedge's farewell, "See you at the rendezvous". Wedge, and presumably everybody else, thinks Luke is heading to the "rendezvous" with the rest of the troops. Actually, Luke is sneaking off on his own, disclosing neither his intentions nor his destination to anyone. Later he doesn't share with his friends where he was or what he was doing. hmmm...

Apparently Luke leaves the back way off the sixth planet because he doesn't run into any Imperial ships. Maybe they're all busy chasing transports or the Millenium Falcon. R2 is quick to spot Luke pulling some weird shit here:

Notice that the screenplay directly translates R2-D2's beeping here as the exclamation "What?!" when Luke says they won't be regrouping with the others. R2 is one of Leia's personal spy droids. It's no coincidence that R2 is always Luke's astromech, it's Leia's way of keeping tabs on Luke and that he remains as safe as possible in any space battle. How much does R2 know about Luke's true identity?

R2 then asks Luke a question. It's shown to us via one of the X-Wing's displays, but I've never found a clear enough image of it to decipher the message.

This interaction is really weird. Is this what it sounds like? Is R2-D2 trying to wrest control of the ship away from Luke to return him to the Rebels? He seems to be and he's trying to use a mind trick as well. The screenplay states he uses a "soft, carefully phrased stream of whistles". Luke's not as suggestable as he used to be, eh R2? Luke laughs at R2's attempt and assures the droid in a confident and crazy tone that he'd "like to keep it on manual control for a while". Yikes. This is actually an oddly tense scene.

The X-Wing is shown zipping off, but we don't see it enter hyperspace. We never see it come out of hyperspace when going to Bespin, either. Just where the hell is Dagobah, anyway? It's implied that it's in another solar system. So why not show us the hyperspace transition? I suppose it's not fair to say it's 'implied'. I think that it's just easily misinterpreted because we're told about the "Dagobah system" and we naturally assume that "system" means solar system. Luke later has no problem catching up with Leia and friends, who do not have access to hyperdrive until after they leave Bespin.

It's apparent that the events in this movie, up until leaving Bespin, all take place within the same solar system, Hoth. This is not a big revalation, even to the Paradigm. It's just another case of information that's in these movies but easily missed or misapplied.