A new Star Wars canon novel fleshes out the confrontation between Han Solo and Greedo, detailing some interesting personal history between the two. One of the most famous scenes in A New Hope is when the Rodian bounty hunter encounters everyone’s favorite smuggler in the Mos Eisley cantina, under the impression he’s about to take Han in to Jabba the Hutt. Of course, the interaction ends rather poorly for Greedo, who ends up blasted into a crisp at the booth. Regardless of which version of Star Wars you watch, this sequence always plays out the same. Greedo is dead.

Since Greedo had but a fleeting appearance in the films, the character is ripe to be explored further in the plethora of non-movie materials that are part of the franchise canon. It’s for this reason he shows up quite a bit in From A Certain Point of View, which is a collection of short stories set during A New Hope, told from the perspectives of background and supporting characters. Greedo gets his own chapter, fittingly called “The Luckless Rodian,” where his fateful meeting with Solo reads as a scorned man out for revenge. As it turned out, Greedo was motivated by more than money to kill Han, who had stolen Greedo’s love.

As Greedo plays out the day’s forthcoming events in his head, he recalls a woman named Uncelta (a new character that’s never appeared in any content before). The text makes it clear Greedo definitely had feelings for her (they were possibly in a romantic relationship), but she fell for the roguish charm of the Millennium Falcon pilot, ruining everything. A couple passages directly reference this backstory:

This is a rather amusing, if somewhat clichéd, detail that recontextualizes the aforementioned New Hope scene in a fun way. It shouldn’t come as any surprise Han was a bit of a womanizer in his younger days, and it’ll be interesting to see if this revelation is built upon elsewhere down the road. It doesn’t sound like Uncelta will be a character in Ron Howard’s young Han Solo movie, but she could show up in a comic book or another novel. All that was said about Uncelta in the short story was her name, so there is freedom there for another author to come in and add to this bit. Greedo apparently was quite enamored with her, and was heartbroken beyond belief when Uncelta picked Solo over him.

“He [Greedo] would never understand what Uncelta had found so appealing in Solo all those years ago. The smugger had always been a worthless excuse for a man, while Uncelta had been everything Greedo had cherished in a woman.

Greedo would have loved her as she deserved to be loved. Not dallied with her like that Corellian scumbag had chosen to do.”

While not as alarming a revelation as Yoda’s desire to train Leia over Luke or the truth behind R5-D4’s bad motivator, this chapter in From A Certain Point of View is another illustration of how the non-movie materials can enhance films that already stood strong on their own merits upon rewatches. Layers have been added to a secondary New Hope player, and this only scratches the surface of Greedo’s portrayal in the book. There’s no in-universe explanation for how he missed a direct shot at Han in the booth, but it’s always fascinating to learn more of his backstory.

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Source: Star Wars - From A Certain Point of View

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