There was more to the events of Solo: A Star Wars Story than the scenes that made the screen, and we’re not just talking about the excluded parts that Phil Lord and Chris Miller shot. For one thing, Han’s demotion from pilot to frontline canon fodder for the Empire gets little explanation beyond a few words of dialogue, but thanks to the new Solo comic, we now have a fair bit more context for this change in department.
Before Alden Ehrenreich’s character is moved to the muddy battlefield of Mimban, it seems that Solo was considered the best pilot in the academy. Han’s mistake, however, was to modify the engine of his TIE fighter. The tinkering caused the ship to lose control on a mission and inadvertently take down some of his fellow soldiers’ fighters, and when Han’s superiors found out about this, they kicked him into the murk of the ground-level fight as a virtual death sentence. From here, the film takes over, showing us how Han came to meet his Chewie and his other new friends, though this reckless streak evidently stayed with him.
This is just one of numerous recent cases of Solo’s tie-in releases filling in the blanks. Other examples that garnered some attention in these last few months come from the flick’s novelization, which explains Qi’ra’s rise through the ranks of the criminal underworld, as well as L3-37’s surprisingly creepy fate. And if the film left you intrigued to learn more about its characters, then these non-cinematic sources might be your best options, since the chances are looking slim of the movie ever landing a sequel.
But while the cast of Solo: A Star Wars Story may have been grounded after their first outing, the main saga continues with Star Wars: Episode IX, out on December 20th, 2019.