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Tuesday's segment ended with Luke finally beginning to understand the ways of the Force, thanks to Yoda's teaching and training. But "he still has a long way to go before he can overcome the concentrated evil of the Emperor and Darth Vader." That's where we pick up the story …

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Lucas emphasizes Luke's great susceptibility to evil in numerous instances where Luke's impatience and anger defy the wisdom of Yoda. As Yoda initially points out, Luke is impatient like his own father was, the Jedi knight Anakin Skywalker, who was seduced by the dark side and became Darth Vader (as we come to learn in The Empire Strikes Back). The most striking example of Luke's vulnerability comes in his imagined confrontation with Darth Vader, in which Luke lops off Vader's head but sees behind Vader's mask his own face. It is a potent reminder—and an uncharacteristic departure from the surface simplicities of melodrama—that the enemy lies as much within us as without, and that poses a daunting moral and spiritual challenge.

Luke's apprenticeship ends when he chooses to interrupt his training with Yoda to rescue his friends Leia, Chewbacca, and Han, who have fallen into Vader's clutches. The difficulty with this decision, which is opposed by both Yoda and Obi-Wan, is that, with his training only partially completed, Luke must confront Vader without being fully prepared. In fact, Darth Vader has captured Luke's friends for the very purpose of using them as bait to lure this young apprentice into an encounter; he knows that Luke is his son and is "strong with the Force," and he wants to interrupt Luke's apprenticeship before his power and skills increase. When their meeting finally takes place, the match between them is close, for Luke has become a skilled and wily opponent. Vader succeeds only when he literally disarms young Luke and then, as the two stand on a windblown parapet, tries to lure him to the dark side by revealing that he is in fact Luke's father.

Horrified at the revelation that this monster of evil is his father, Luke chooses death rather than to embrace evil, a potential for selflessness that forecasts the climax of The Return of the Jedi. That choice is a tribute to Luke's fast-growing maturity, especially when contrasted with the petulance of the young man who is initially worried about being late for dinner. Luke's self-sacrificial end is averted, however, when he is miraculously rescued—again, thanks to the power of the Force—by another one who, unbeknownst even to herself, shares in the lineage of the Force.

Nor did Lucas disappoint in the third episode of the initial trilogy. In The Return of the Jedi (1983), Lucas pulls off stunning surprises that retroactively illuminate and enrich the whole of the trilogy. Not only does that primary issue of Luke's maturation and fate, and of the Rebellion, arrive at a crisp resolution, but many related uncertainties are resolved and themes come to happy fruition. Lucas does this all in very plausible ways that no one anticipated. Indeed, only at the very end—that is, in the last ten minutes of six hours of film—does the ultimate focus of the saga become entirely clear.

There has been enough, to be sure, to whet audience curiosity about what will happen next; but in The Return of the Jedi, Lucas's intergalactic leap in plotting gives his story a depth that moves it from amusing and affecting kid stuff to a mythic religious tale of lasting appeal. Finally, at the end of a long pilgrimage, Luke Skywalker gets it right, and that makes all the difference. Indeed, the conclusion of The Return of the Jedi explodes with a depth of meaning that no one thought possible. One way of getting at that is to examine the history and implications of Lucas's selection of a title for the last installment of the trilogy.

For a long time during production and pre-release hype, the movie was entitled The Revenge of the Jedi; indeed, posters with that title adorned the walls of many movie theaters. That seemed to be an unexceptional choice: the usual Hollywood formulaic happy climax, a standard "kill 'em all," justice-is-done conclusion. It fit well enough with what most viewers wanted and expected from the story Lucas had told up to that point: the good guys vanquish all the bad guys, sending Darth Vader and the Emperor to painful death and perdition. Still, to those who had been paying much attention to the struggles of Luke Skywalker and to the theology and code of the Jedi as laid out in The Empire Strikes Back, that "get even" recourse just did not make sense. After all, at the heart of the Jedi code lay a kind of quasi-pacifism: the Jedi never sought vindication, aggression, or revenge but used the Force only for defense. The Jedi used the Force to wish the world well and to protect its inherent goodness from destruction by evil. The apprehensions of devotees about the seeming departure from the theme of the saga that was implied by the title of the third episode were partly dispelled when, not long before its release, Lucas changed the title to the one we now have, and what a difference that makes.

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