Justice For Han has finally arrived with Fast & Furious 9 when it was revealed the character somehow survived his death in The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift. However, returning director Justin Lin has stated his confusion over why his apparent murderer Deckard Shaw was welcomed as part of the “family” by Dom at the end of The Fate of the Furious.
Lin helmed the series’ third through sixth installments, and set off the plot of the seventh with the retcon that the collision that ‘killed’ Han was intentionally caused by Shaw in retaliation for the team’s hospitalizing of his brother. He was himself subsequently retconned into a misunderstood character set on a path of crime after being framed, after the series producers realized it’s far more lucrative to have Jason Statham as an antihero rather than a full-on villain. Of the blithe disregard for logical animosity, Lin had this to say:
“Somebody asked me about Han and Shaw. I was like: ‘Wait, what? Shaw is at the barbecue in 8?’ Really, I was so confused. One of the big reasons to come back was I felt like we needed to correct something. ”
Han’s death was certainly a misstep seeing as he’s one of the franchise’s most interesting characters, with audience reaction to him being so positive that its timeline was willingly screwed into near-incoherence just so he could continue being featured. He first appeared in Lin’s 2002 solo feature debut Better Luck Tomorrow, a crime drama about young and overachieving Asian Americans who become involved in criminal activities that gradually escalate, and was the previous life Han alluded to in Tokyo Drift that he escaped from by traveling to the Japanese capital, the link confirmed by Lin and actor Sun Kang having both previously stated that he’s that same character.
As Shaw won’t be appearing in Fast & Furious 9, after having been migrated to the spinoff series Hobbs & Shaw as Dwayne Johnson and Vin Diesel can’t play nice together, any potential awkwardness caused by Dom and the gang working with the man thought to have killed Han is rendered moot. However, even if it had been incorporated, brushing past it would have been far from the most ludicrous thing to have happened in this increasingly demented saga.
