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Throughout the course of The Empire Strikes Back Luke Skywalker spends an awful lot of time either alone or with just one companion, and only ever with a few at most. In this movie he is the most isolated main character of any Star Wars film.

If we follow Luke's scenes throughout the course of the movie we can see just how isolated he is from the beginning right through to the very final shot before the closing credits.

1. Luke on patrol alone with his Tauntaun
2. Luke's Tauntaun is killed by the Wampa and Luke is now alone with the Wampa
3. Luke escapes the Wampa and is visited by the ghost of Obi-Wan Kenobi
4. Luke is rescued by Han Solo
5. Luke is alone in the Bacta Tank during his initial recovery
6. Luke convalescing, during which he has at most three visitors at one time
7. During the Battle of Hoth Luke shares his Snowspeeder with the gunner Dak Ralter
8. Dak is killed and Luke spends the rest of the battle fighting the enemy on his own
9. Luke has a conversation with the 2-1B medical droid about the evacuation of Echo Base
10. Luke travels to Dagobah with R2-D2
11. Luke with Yoda on Dagobah (and sometimes Yoda and R2-D2)
12. Luke finds himself alone in a spooky cave with an apparition of Darth Vader which turns out to have his own face. This is pretty much the epitomy of being alone since he turns out to be essentially with himself again.
13. Luke with Ben's ghost and Yoda
14. Journey to Bespin: Luke and R2-D2
15. The Bespin duel: Luke and Darth Vader
16. Luke dangles from the Cloud City weather vane, alone again.
17. The rescue from Cloud City: Luke is now with five companions onboard the millennium Falcon (Lando, Leia, Chewbacca, C-3PO and R2-D2), the most in the entire movie. However, Luke is not seen in the same room as them all.
18. Alone with 2-1B Medical Droid who tends to his hand.
19. Alone with Leia on the hangar bay of the medical frigate looking out in to the emptiness of space. As such, The Empire Strikes Back ends with a very large visual statement about being alone in the universe.

If we discount the scenes with ghosts, droids and monsters and only count humans as being actual company, Luke is completely on his own for 12 of the 19 scenes in which he appears.

Luke isolation in this movie is perhaps due to the way that Lucas employs the quest motif. Essentially, Luke is sent on a quest by a good wizard to gain the powers he needs to defeat an evil wizard and he must discover his identity along the way. Luke is given a quest which involves a journey and unlike Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings Trilogy where companionship is a major (and quite nauseating) theme, Luke is given this quest to undertake alone. Consequently, Luke's part in the plot and his trajectory throughout the movie is completely separate from (and only ocassionally intersects with) that of the other main characters.

The theme of isolation on the one hand helps link Luke to other Jedi exiles, hermits and loners such as Obi-Wan in A New Hope, Yoda in The Empire Strikes Back and at a push even Quinlan Vos. On the other hand and more importantly it is part of a theme of isolated Jedi which runs through the second movie of every trilogy when we remember Obi-Wan Kenobi's solo mission in the Attack of the Clones which takes him to Kamino and then to Geonosis.

This pattern of isolation is continued in the second movie of the third Trilogy (The Last Jedi). Here we find Luke (like Yoda before him) as an aging Jedi exile on a mostly deserted planet who not only does not want guests or apprentices, but when he actually does get involved in the action finds a way of doing so whilst not giving up his solitude. Our hearts rise when we see Luke step out and confront Kylo Ren's approaching forces on Crait partly because it seems that Luke has overcome his unsociable seclusion and come back into the world. Our hearts shrink back a little when we find out that Luke has simply projected some sort of Force hologram of himself into the battle and thus when the effort kills him we feel just that bit less sympathy for him.

See also Luke Skywalker and the World Turned Upside Down in The Empire Strikes Back.

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All Star Wars action figures, vehicles, collectibles and Star Wars toys shown on this website are the 3.75 inch scale and from my own private Star Wars collection unless otherwise stated. Where possible original vintage accessories have been used but in some instances I have placed Kenner Star Wars figures with either reproduction weapons and accessories or for Hasbro figures close approximations have been used. This is mostly the case for modern Star Wars lightsabers where the correct item can be very difficult to identify on some ocassions. Vintage Star Wars action figures are shown with their original weapon or accessory when I have them. When a vintage Kenner action figure is shown with an accessory which is not original I have tried to point this out where possible.

All of the Star Wars action figures shown were purchased second hand, usually incomplete, and in bulk. They have been reunited with their original weapons and accessories where we could get hold of them.

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