The Absolutely Horrible Fate Of Greedo After Han Shot First

Not For A Weak Stomach

By Culture SlatePublished 2 years ago • 5 min read

Okay, so... look, *quiet sigh* we're all going to [Spoiler Alert] die someday. There will inevitably be a question on what is going to happen to your body unless you died fighting six bears and juuust couldn't quite knock out that last one who is now extremely bitter and more than a little annoyed. Or something like that. The same holds true for Star Wars characters when the story decides to focus on that a bit. Qui-Gon and Darth Vader/Anakin Skywalker were given respectful funerals as the attendees solemnly looked on. Obi-Wan famously vanished when he was (about to be? Depends on who you ask) hit by Darth Vader's lightsaber, leaving an empty robe behind that Darth Vader probably put into a footlocker while he tried to figure out what to do with it. It was no doubt destroyed along with the Death Star. Biggs, Porkins, and the other Rebel pilots who died during the attack on the Death Star did not need burials since they were more or less evaporated.

Then there was Greedo.

The first major look we get into Han Solo's character is when he was confronted by the hilariously incompetent Rodian bounty hunter Greedo.

Seen here all dressed up and ready to go.

We learn that Han was in some deep debt with a gangster. He got a price on his head as a result, and he had no problem shooting an opponent under the table after delivering a cool one-liner. He was now established as a real rogue who was not always on the right side of the law, which made his heel turn at the end of the movie all the more meaningful. Han's confrontation with Greedo was more than just a scene when Han shot some weird alien.

Now, you would be forgiven if you largely forgot about Greedo for the remainder of the movie and even beyond. It was not like he ever came up again. He got mere two minutes of screen time, and his purpose was to help establish the character of someone far more important.

David Bischoff did not forget. Oh no. He did not. Maybe he should have. You see, he asked the question, What happened with Greedo's body after Han blasted him to crisp?” Surely the proprietor of the cantina did not just leave him there. He answered it in the 1995 short story “Be Still My Heart: The Bartender's Tale” found in Tales from the Mos Eisley Cantina.

Ignoring the fact that the title makes it sound more like a pulpy romance about a tired, handsome bartender who wants more out of life, and finds the charming, quirky girl who finally gives him meaning that you would find marked down to ninety-nine cents in the bargain bin at a used bookstore, it answered the question nobody was asking. We all probably assumed that the bartender or whoever just had Greedo tossed into a mass grave or something like that. Silly us.

Bischoff added a bit of a...creative flair to that answer. In the fifteen-page short story, we follow Wuher, the grumpy bartender who demanded that C-3PO and R2-D2 leave the cantina. He wanted to make the perfect drink for Jabba the Hutt. He met a droid called C2-R4 who begged him to save him from Jawas. However, Wuher refused at first due to his hatred of droids. Later as he was trying to figure out what to do with Greedo's body, he discovered that C2-R4 had a feature that made him into an efficient meat grinder. So he fed Greedo's body, piece by piece Fargo style into C2-R4, and used the resulting ingredient to make a drink that gained Jabba's approval. From then on, Wuher would come to like droids.

So that... answered that question?

Let's put aside the bafflingly dark storyline (and I'm not totally convinced we should) what happened when Jabba wanted another serving of that drink? If it was as amazing as he declared it to be, a Hutt who indulged in his every whim would surely want more. Even if Wuher had some leftovers, what happened when Jabba asked for another one, but Wuher was all out of that one special ingredient? Did he just shrug and say "sorry" to a Hutt who did not like to hear that kind of thing, or did he... get more? Attend the tale of Sweeny Wuher, I guess.

Overall, the story played out like some trashy fanfiction by a fifteen-year-old trying to be edgy on FanFiction.net. Nobody was asking the question of what happened to Greedo's body, and we certainly did not want the answer of "ground up to make a cocktail." Star Wars has its dark moments, it is true, but that is one story I don't see Disney adapting for its latest miniseries.

I hope.

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