Why Han Solo said “I’ll see you in hell” | Hell in Star Wars Explained

Han Solo says “I’ll see you in Hell” in The Empire Strikes Back and I’ve been thinking about it ever since…

Han Solo says “I’ll see you in Hell” in The Empire Strikes Back and I’ve been thinking about it ever since. Like, ever since watching the Original Trilogy on VHS as a kid, it’s stuck out to me. It’s such a throwaway line in the grand scheme of the scene, but it has such big implications for a universe and franchise I love so much.

Because in a galaxy far, far away, what does Hell mean? Is there a Hell? Does Han Solo, of all people, praise Jeebus? The answer, at least when Empire came out, is no, probably not. It’s a turn of phrase, used to make him look all rugged and tough as he throws caution to the wind to save his best bud Luke from becoming Wampa dinner. You’d have to be a pretty big dweeb to get hung up on this one line that never plays into any of the other movies.

But here’s the thing, I am that dweeb. And after scrolling through page after page of Wookiepedia, I found out that this one throwaway line inspired a mythology within the Star Wars Universe that would mean that not only Hell existed, but Han Solo would know all about it.

We’re going to jump between Legends and Canon stories a bit, so bear that in mind. But this is the story of Chaos, Star Wars’ answer to Hell.

So the idea of Chaos goes back to The Dark Empire comic series, a Dark Horse run from the early nineties written by Tom Veitch, and in the various sourcebooks and roleplaying supplements that surrounded it. The 90’s were such a good period of extended Star Wars lore. With no movies for the better part of 20 years, we had novels like Heir to the Empire and entire multimedia campaigns like the Shadows of the Empire project to keep us going. Also probably other things that didn’t with the word ‘Empire’, but I digress.

They mention a specific named region of the Star Wars afterlife that Corellians called Hell. The proper name for it is Chaos, sometimes also referred to as the Void, but it’s collectively understood to be a pretty bad place. A dark region of the Netherworld of the Force where the spirits of deceased Sith Lords and Dark Jedi end up.

The Netherworld of the Force is the Star Wars afterlife, and it shows up in both Legends and Canon timelines. George Lucas actually conceived it as far back as the rough draft screenplay for Return of the Jedi, though it didn’t make it into a film officially until Revenge of the Sith where Yoda mentioned it to Obi-Wan in their final scene together. The basic idea is this, when you die in the Star Wars galaxy, your individual consciousness dissolves back into the Cosmic Force. It’s peaceful and comfortingly utopian, but you do sacrifice your sense of self.

The Jedi found a way around this, or rather Qui-Gon Jinn did, with some significant help from the Force Priestesses in The Clone Wars. His discovery, which he spent his afterlife passing on to Yoda and eventually Obi-Wan, was that if you had genuinely and completely let go of your ego and every attachment in life, the Force would hold your individual consciousness intact after death. Bingo, you’ve got Force Ghosts. That’s where they come from. The only catch is that it only works if you truly don’t need it to work. You can only keep yourself by being willing to give yourself up first. You have to surrender yourself, and fight the urge to cling on.

The dark side, which is built from its very foundations on clinging, on consuming the will and life force of others, on the absolute refusal to release anything, is therefore cosmologically terrible at this. And that’s where Chaos comes in.

Chaos is a place of self-inflicted punishment. Not fire and brimstone or little red guys, but something psychologically nastier than that. The basic idea is that the Force can’t cleanly absorb a closed fist. So that closed fist goes somewhere else. Somewhere dark and unresolved, shaped exactly like all the things it couldn’t let go of, with nothing and no one left to take it out on. The Dark Empire sourcebook described Palpatine’s final fate in the Netherworld specifically as “disembodiment in darkness, perpetual madness as if to always live with an open wound, terror without respite.” And that’s a hell of a lot more satisfying than “Somehow, Palpatine has returned.”

Palpatine ends up in Chaos at the end of Empire’s End, the final chapter of The Dark Empire trilogy, drawn there by a dying Jedi who grabs hold of Sidious’s departing spirit on his own way out and takes it down with him. It’s one of the best deaths in all of Legends, and I’m still a bit salty they didn’t work something like it into the new canon. The man who spent his entire existence engineering his own immortality, body-hopping between clone vessels, architecting escape plans for his own soul, ends up in a void with no body, no power, no Empire, and apparently no coherent self left to experience any of it. Whatever the Emperor feared most about death, Chaos is it.

In Naboo mythology, Chaos was imagined as a dark pit held shut by six impenetrable gates. The reactor core of the Theed power generator, the room where we got the second most satisfying sound effect in Star Wars history, sits behind six laser gates. Whether it was intentional worldbuilding by the designers or a happy accident I couldn’t tell you, but I choose to believe someone put it there deliberately and said nothing, just left it for us dweebs to find. Ol’ Sheevy grew up on Naboo. He knew that legend. Make of that what you will.

Chaos was specifically part of Corellian culture, a culture that Han would’ve grown up in. Not just an abstract Force concept, but a word Corellians used, embedded in their mythology and their everyday speech. Garris Shrike, the bounty hunter who raised Han as essentially a child slave on Corellia, once threatened someone with “all the hells there ever were,” because Corellian tradition held there were nine of them, with Chaos being the most prominent and the most written about. Someone in that galaxy categorised eternal damnation into nine distinct varieties. Dante could never.

So when a perfectly reasonable deck officer named Tigran Jamiro tells Han his tauntaun will freeze before the first marker, and Han looks at this man and says “then I’ll see you in Hell” and rides off into a blizzard, he’s not making a theological statement. He’s being Han, picking up an idiom like you would ‘Lord knows’ or ‘God willing’ without thinking too much about it.

But the extended universe spent decades making it mean something. Writers building out Corellia, sourcebook authors expanding Force mythology, Tom Veitch scripting Palpatine’s final fate in a Dark Horse comic in 1995, all of them contributing to a galaxy that had, quietly and without anyone fully intending it, built an actual Hell for that line to point at. A real place, with a real name, populated by real people who absolutely deserve to be there.

When Lawrence Kasdan was scripting Empire in 1979, he wrote a cool tough-guy line. The expanded universe wrote the cosmology underneath it.

Han didn’t mean it. The galaxy did.

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Tom Baker

I like Star Wars, heavy metal and BBQ Pringles.

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