When she was first revealed prior to Star Wars: The Force Awakens, most people thought Captain Phasma, the silver-armored, super-badass head of the First Order’s stormtroopers, would be a major force (haha) in the film. And then, she sort of wasn’t. But when she returned in The Last Jedi, we thought “Yes! Now she’s gonna take charge.” And then she kind of didn’t. So that was fairly disappointing, but we have a theory, based on context clues and a deleted scene, that we might not have actually seen the end of Captain Phasma after all, on this week’s Nerdist News Edition!
The deleted scene in question–one of 14 tied to the home release of Star Wars: The Last Jedi–has a very different version of the confrontation between Phasma (played by Gwendoline Christie) and Finn (played by John Boyega), in which Phasma surrounds Finn with some First Order troopers before Finn lets the cat out of the bag that it was Phasma, with a gun to her head, who put in the codes that lowered Starkiller Base’s shields, allowing the Resistance’s fighters to eventually blow it up. Thinking quickly, she turns on her own men before engaging with Finn in a duel.
If we’re being totally honest, this would have been a much cooler scene. There’s a lot of context for it in Star Wars‘ canonical ancillary material, which also makes us think she’s not actually dead, despite us seeing her fall through fiery machinery after Holdo did her lightspeed battering ram thing. For starters, Rian Johnson called Phasma the “Kenny of the Star Wars universe,” for how much she doesn’t die when she should. And then in Delilah S. Dawson’s novel Phasma, she betrayed her own brother and helped Hux’s dad destroy her people, and later helped Hux kill his father to rise through the ranks of the First Order.
In Kelly Thompson and Marco Checchetto’s prequel comic before The Last Jedi, we find out how she escaped from Starkiller Base before it exploded, erasing the record of her treachery in the process. She even tracked down the one First Order officer who knew about it, and sacrificed an entire alien race to take him out. She’s ice cold. Her whole ethos boils down to one speech bubble, where she says “I’m a survivor. No matter what the cost.” I mean, if there’s anybody who could come back yet again, it’d have to be her, right?
But what do you think? Could Phasma be back for Episode IX, or was her less-than-stellar appearance in The Last Jedi her real for real end?
Images: Lucasfilm, Del Rey, Marvel Comics
Kyle Anderson is the Associate Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Twitter!
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