After a fan jokingly questioned Luke Skywalker’s ability to properly fly an X-Wing without having any prior experience, Mark Hamill himself has now chimed in to explain the matter.
Star Wars fans tend to give Rey a hard time for being a “Mary Sue,” which means essentially knowing how to do everything without training first. And that’s not an invalid claim in the context of the Sequel Trilogy’s narrative. From the moment we set eyes on her, she shows an impressive aptitude for almost anything that comes their way. Whether we’re talking about flying the Millennium Falcon through a crash-landed Star Destroyer, bypassing the ship’s compressor to Han Solo’s bewilderment, or even using the Force despite the fact that she lived most of her life unaware of its existence, the protagonist has always been an adversary to be reckoned with.
But when it comes down to it, Luke’s hero journey was similar to that in a lot of ways. The young Skywalker not only held his own against trained Stormtroopers, but he also singlehandedly destroyed the Death Star in the Battle of Yavin. How do they achieve these miraculous feats, you ask? The Force, duh, though some still aren’t convinced. For instance, a fan recently took to Twitter and questioned Luke’s flying chops by sharing the following:
I'm ready #spaceforce! Ready as Luke was to hop into an X-Wing with no training whatsoever but somehow still flew it through trenches and blew up a whole space station @HamillHimself pic.twitter.com/q5qKZhh261
— Cassie Blanca 🏳️⚧️ (@hashtag_cassie) December 8, 2020
Of course, the Last Jedi himself soon responded the only way he knew how, explaining:
Whadda ya mean "no training whatsoever"? I used to bullseye womp-rats in my T-16 back home! #TrueStory https://t.co/FvBy3a0plJ
— Mark Hamill (@MarkHamill) December 9, 2020
While the thought of a young Luke inside a T-16 skyhopper obsessively trying to shoot down Tatooine’s womp-rats is hilarious in and of itself, we can’t help but wonder if that’s really why he was such a skilled pilot. But to make matters simple, let’s all agree that this is canon now that Mark Hamill has deemed it so.
