WARNING: The following article contains spoilers for director Rian Johnson's Star Wars: The Last Jedi, in theaters now.


Gwendoline Christie’s Captain Phasma was one of the breakout characters of Star Wars: The Force Awakens. The chrome commander of the First Order’s Stormtroopers might not have had a major role in the film, but her armor was so visually striking that comparisons to the original trilogy’s Boba Fett were unavoidable. Some of those comparisons even came from filmmakers, who sought to create a character that would enjoy the same level of popularity as the fan-favorite bounty hunter. Unfortunately for Phasma fans, Star Wars: The Last Jedi dispatched Christie’s character in a similarly inglorious fashion. It wasn’t quite slipping down the gullet of a sarlacc, but it might as well have been.

The result is that Phasma feels like an underutilized character whose backstory was outsourced to canonical comics and accompanying novels. Her final fight with Finn in The Last Jedi lasts only a few moments and is hardly the climactic showdown audiences expected. In fact, the mainline Star Wars films have done nothing to prove how cool Phasma really is. As it stands, her two big scenes so far have involved her getting thrown down a garbage chute after committing treason and losing a fight to a former Stormtrooper wielding a Z6 baton. Similarly, her fiery death seemingly comes out of nowhere.

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If that sounds familiar, it’s because Boba Fett shared a similar fate. The iconic bounty hunter was introduced in the Star Wars Christmas Special (no joke, he first appeared as an animated character), but thankfully came to prominence in Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. Once a go-to mercenary for Jabba the Hutt, the clone warrior eventually falls under the contract of the Sith Lord Darth Vader. Boba Fett is eventually able to kill two birds with one stone, capturing a carbonite-frozen Han Solo with Vader and transporting the smuggler back to Jabba in short order. Soon afterward, he’s getting digested by a sarlacc.

Phasma in Star Wars: The Last Jedi

 

Which isn’t to say that was the end of Boba Fett’s story. Lucasfilm eventually acknowledged the massive popularity of the character, revealing his origins in the Star Wars prequel trilogy and making him an integral figure in the Star Wars: The Clone Wars animated series. Boba Fett’s adventures even continued after that. George Lucas himself always assumed the character had escaped the sarlacc pit, a revelation that is technically no longer canon since the character has yet to appear in any official Star Wars material since the Expanded Universe was purged. So, the character’s fate has been pushed to the edges of the Star Wars universe, a fate Christie's Phasma might share as well.

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That wouldn’t be so frustrating if Phasma’s story hadn’t been such an integral part of The Force Awakens. Much like the Galactic Empire, the First Order is not an organization that suffers insubordination lightly, and Phasma is one of the First Order’s greatest traitors. She allowed a strike team of Resistance members to infiltrate the Starkiller Base and then she gave them the codes to lower the planet-sized world destroyer’s shields. Phasma might be pulling the strings in The Last Jedi, ordering the execution of Finn and Rose, but it likely should have been her head on the First Order chopping block for her unspeakable treachery.

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Her sudden and repercussion-free reappearance is explained in Marvel Comics' Star Wars: Captain Phasma miniseries. If you're unfamiliar with the comic, then you were likely taken aback by the chrome commander striding confidently through the halls of Supreme Leader Snoke’s Supremacy. The Marvel comic reveals what happened to Phasma after she was dumped down Starkiller’s garbage chute, and it’s actually a fascinating story that greatly expands on Christie’s character, who, in the films, is little more than an imposing metallic enforcer.

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The comic explains that Phasma’s primary drive is survival, not unquestioning devotion to the First Order. That’s why she deletes all record of her transgressions and then commandeers a TIE fighter (and its pilot) to track down the only person in the galaxy who knows her secret. The miniseries sees Phasma and the pilot searching for Sol Rivas, a First Order officer who fled the erupting Starkiller Base after seeing evidence of Phasma's crime. Her search brings her to a remote world where she’s able to rally the local population to her side; it doesn’t end well for them.

Last Jedi Phasma

The comic doesn’t delve too deep in Phasma’s origins -- that’s left to Delilah S. Dawson’s novel Phasma -- but it doesn’t need to. The comic answers one of the major, lingering questions from The Force Awakens: Why did Phasma lower the shields? Without this nugget of information, Phasma’s sudden reappearance just makes it look like the First Order has started going easy on traitors. Her betrayal isn’t even acknowledged in a offhand comment. Apparently, audiences are just meant to accept that she’s back, and that that's fine because her armor is cool. In practice, it looks like Phasma has just shown up for her own funeral.

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Phasma’s death even shares similarities with Boba Fett’s, which is that it can be undone at a moment’s notice. The Last Jedi establishes that her armor is blaster-proof, after all. It wouldn’t be a crazy feat of retconning to say it’s fireproof, too – just give her a scar where her helmet broke. If that’s the case, though, future Star Wars films should do justice to Phasma, a character whose capacity for cunning and manipulation go far beyond her skill with a blaster. The Last Jedi is a film about moral grays, and there’s few characters who exemplify that mindset as well as Phasma. Pulling herself out of the burning wreckage of an enormous frigate is a bit more of a feat that blasting one’s way out of the belly of a desert-dwelling sand monster, but maybe Phasma should get the justice Boba Fett deserved.

Star Wars fans can always hope. It’s what we’re good at.


In theaters now, director Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi stars Daisy Ridley as Rey, John Boyega as Finn, Oscar Isaac as Poe Dameron, Adam Driver as Kylo Ren, Mark Hamill as Luke Skywalker, Carrie Fisher as Leia Organa, Andy Serkis as Supreme Leader Snoke, Domhnall Gleeson as General Hux, Kelly Marie Tran as Rose Tico and Laura Dern as Vice Admiral Amilyn Holdo.