Jason Fry's Dorkery

Folks seem to like Star Wars The Force Awakens: Incredible Cross-Sections, the book I wrote and Kemp Remillard illustrated. Which makes me happy!

But one new detail on the Millennium Falcon has a few folks drawing a different conclusion than what I had in mind. So let me address that.

Yes, the Falcon’s crew quarters now includes a galley, and I noted in Incredible Cross-Sections that the space was reconfigured as a wedding gift for Leia Organa.

But no, the idea wasn’t that Princess Leia – General Organa, for Pete’s sake – would obviously need a kitchen to potter around in, or feel the instinct to hang up her blaster and start cooking for her new husband and his Wookiee pal.

That wasn’t the idea at all.

As I imagined it, the galley isn’t there for Leia to cook in – it’s there so someone else could use it to make something that Leia might want to eat.

Bear with me for a little review of Falcon lore. 

Floor plans of the Falcon from the early days of Star Wars publishing included a galley, but there isn’t one in recent original-trilogy diagrams of the ship – and I’ve enjoyed torturing my fellow Falconologists Ryder Windham, Chris Trevas and Chris Reiff about that. Once I learned there would be changes to the Falcon’s layout for Episode VII – such as the bunk where Chewie convalesces – I was determined to restore the galley to what I saw as its rightful place. But in-universe the change would have to have been made after the Battle of Endor, and I needed a reason for it.

Which got me thinking about The Empire Strikes Back. Since the Falcon had no galley then, I imagined that the slow crawl from Hoth to Bespin – which probably took a few months – left Han, Chewie and Leia eating whatever horrible stuff had been in the Falcon’s stores. Horrible stuff they’d have to eat off Tupperware while crammed around the gaming table, no less. 

Leia’s a military leader, so I don’t see her as finicky. But she grew up as a member of the royal house of Alderaan and served in the Imperial Senate. Those months eating Corellian TV dinners and reheated Wookiee goulash on the Falcon had to rankle – and I imagined that later they’d become a humorous bone of contention between her and Han.

Plus the Falcon is Han’s home – as we all cheered to hear him tell Chewie back at Celebration.

Put those things together and I had an in-universe rationale for the galley’s addition. It was a gift from Han meant as a humorous make-do for months of terrible food, and an awkward attempt at making his rusty, decrepit home a bit more welcoming. But I always imagined Chewie would be the one doing the cooking – something about that image strikes me as funny. Or perhaps Han bought the galaxy’s grouchiest food-preparation droid, who turned out to have glitchy programming anyway.

I don’t know, maybe Leia Organa’s a master chef. But I didn’t imagine her doing anything in the new galley beyond making herself the occasional cup of space coffee. After all, she would have been too busy saving the damn galaxy.