Keeping ‘Star Wars’ Big Twist a Secret Was My Greatest Dad Moment

The following post contains SPOILERS for The Empire Strikes Back. If you have managed to go this long without learning the film’s ending — or you are an eight year old child who has been shielded from this information by an extremely hard-working father — please stop reading right now.

I don’t remember a world before I knew Darth Vader was Luke Skywalker’s dad.

I was born in 1980. I experienced the original Star Wars on TV and VHS, after the entire original trilogy’s release. The film I remember watching most at that age is Return of the Jedi, where Luke’s lineage is an integral component of the story, not a rug-pulling development.

If Luke’s relationship with Vader was ever a surprise to me, its discovery left no impression whatsoever. I’m certain I knew about the twist before I watched The Empire Strikes Back itself from reading one of my many Star Wars books. (The two likeliest culprits are either The Empire Strikes Back book-and-record combo or Marvel’s book-length Return of the Jedi comic-book adaptation, both early childhood favorites.)

Books are many kids’ gateway to Star Wars. They certainly were for my kids. Long before they were old enough to watch any of the films, they started receiving Star Wars children’s books. Some adapt specific movies. Others use them as the foundation for new kid-friendly stories. They were even gifted graphic novels like Jeffrey Brown’s Darth Vader and Son, which imagines Vader struggling to parent the young Luke Skywalker through a series of comical exploits.

That comic is delightful — and one gigantic spoiler for The Empire Strikes Back. I didn’t want them to miss out on fully experiencing the twist because of a book, the way that I did. Unlike Darth Vader, I was going to be a good father to my children. So when my kids first expressed an interest in Star Wars, I decided I would do whatever I could to let them find out about Vader and Luke the way George Lucas originally intended.

That was almost five years ago. So for the last half a decade, I have engaged in the longest deception of my life: Keeping Star Wars’ big secret from my kids.

(Uh, sorry whoever bought my eldest daughter Darth Vader and Son. This is my way of telling you that she never read it.)

READ MORE: Wait, C-3PO Has a Silver Leg?!?

It wasn’t always easy. It’s only when I started actively trying to hide Luke and Vader’s connection that I realized just how ubiquitous this knowledge is in popular culture. People wear “Who’s Your Daddy?” Darth Vader T-shirts. They make Vader action figures with a removable helmet. Countless other TV shows and movies reference it.

The Vader reveal is an in-joke, meme, and one of the most famous quotes in cinema history all rolled into one. Want to preserve Darth Vader’s secret identity? You can forget about ever jokingly announcing “I am your father” to your kids in a James Earl Jones voice. If you do, they’ll want to know what the hell is wrong with you, and then you’ll have to explain the origin of the phrase and give the whole game away.

Things started to get really tricky when my daughters were around five and three years old and their friends began showing up to school with Star Wars backpacks and Mandalorian lunch bags. Sadly, our society frowns upon threatening kindergarteners with physical violence when they talk about Darth Vader (at least according to my kids’ principal). So unless I was ready to commit to a full-blown Dogtooth-like hermetic existence, my kids were going to learn about this pop culture juggernaut whether I wanted them to or not. It was up to me to guide them through it the right way.

Once they heard about Star Wars, and saw how passionate other kids at school were about it, they were understandably curious to watch some for themselves. At that time, we saw the first Star Wars, but not the second. (I told them it was too intense at that age and they could watch it in a couple years.) We also started reading a lot of Star Wars books at bedtime — but not the ones that I read as kid that ruined the surprise for me.

In fact, before I read any Star Wars book with my kids, I read it on my own first to make sure it was spoiler-free. That turned out to be a smart move, because some were not, including a few unexpected ones. The Golden Book Star Wars: I Am a Jedi, for example, introduces the concept of Jedi through heartwarming stories of multiple characters from throughout the Star Wars saga. For some reason, that includes spilling the beans about Vader and Luke. What the hell?

One day the girls pulled I Am a Jedi from their collection of Golden Books, and asked to read it at bedtime. Knowing the slim, adorable-looking volume was tainted with poisoned fruit from the proverbial Tree of Knowledge, I quickly improvised. I surreptitiously held the Vader pages between two pages and when we got up to them in the book, quickly flipped by them entirely. They never noticed.

My daughters’ interest in Star Wars lasted for a while. (They especially liked playing with my own childhood Star Wars toys, which I had thankfully saved all these years). But like so many of my kids’ childhood passions (dinosaurs, baking shows, brushing their teeth) eventually it burned out and they moved on to other things. Within a couple years they outgrew Golden Books entirely, Star Wars or otherwise, and I no longer had to improvise a condensed version of I Am a Jedi. My old Star Wars action figures started coming out of the toy bin less and less. Darth Vader’s secret was frozen in carbonite.

Or it was until my wife and I started planning our first family trip to Disneyland, and my daughters took a somewhat inexplicable interest in the park’s Star Wars themed area, Galaxy’s Edge. The more I showed them what you could do there, the more excited they got. They are totally infatuated with getting to pilot the Millennium Falcon. They want to drink blue milk and take a selfie with Chewbacca. My oldest, who doesn’t know R2-D2 from Arthur the Aardvark, became obsessed with the idea of building her own droid at the Droid Depot, and began requesting money from her relatives in lieu of birthday presents in order to pay for one.

I wasn’t wild about her doing that without at least understanding why people might want to build and own their own Star Wars droid. Plus, having been to Galaxy’s Edge a few times, I wanted them to fully appreciate how well it captures the flavor of the movies. I’m not ashamed to say I love going there — mostly because when I was my kids’ age, all I wanted to do was to live inside the world of Star Wars. Galaxy’s Edge is so impressive that for an hour or two it actually conjures a little of that childhood fantasy into our world. (In the past, I’ve written about its elaborately themed — and surprisingly good — tie-in food and drinks.)

So I made a deal with my oldest daughter: You can use your grandparents to crowdfund your droid-building fantasies if you watch some Star Wars movies with me first. If you love them, great, build a R2-D2 or BB-8. (Or a C-series, I guess? Sigh.) And if the Star Wars movies don’t do anything for you, you can then decide to put that money to better use elsewhere.

I honestly wasn’t sure how watching the movies would go. My oldest daughter likes fantasy stories, and she loves anything where an adult falls down and suffers an injury to their groin and/or butt. (What can I say? She’s my kid.) But she’s not particularly interested in science-fiction or spaceships or astronauts or anything like that. I honestly thought there was a really good chance we’d watch the first Star Wars, shrug her shoulders, and we’d call the whole droid thing off.

Instead, she loved it. Both kids did, in fact. And they immediately wanted to watch the next film. Which meant it was finally time to spring the big surprise on them.

If anything, their reactions to The Empire Strikes Back were even more passionate than they were to Star Wars. They got deeply invested in Han Solo and Leia’s burgeoning relationship (although they weren’t keen on, in their words, all the “smoochie kisses”). They were fascinated by Yoda speaking in riddles to Luke. (“There is no try? What is he talking about?!?”) And when Vader dropped his big bombshell on Luke … their reaction did not disappoint.

Naturally, I recorded the big moment. Here it is:

I love how my daughter processed that shocking twist — and how her first reaction was disbelief. (If you listen carefully, you can hear that she says “That’s not possible” seconds before Luke replies to Vader with almost the exact same phrase.) She genuinely thought Vader might be messing with Luke.

Although it’s been somewhat forgotten 40+ years later, many Star Wars fans in the early 1980s shared her reaction. After all, why would Obi-Wan lie and tell Luke that Vader killed his father? Surely Vader was playing Jedi mind tricks on his adversary.

Preserving this twist was a huge pain in the butt, and it was absolutely worth it. And not just for that initial mind-blown response. After Empire ended, my daughters and I had a long and thoughtful conversation about this subject; about why adults might lie to kids to keep them from a painful truth — like, say, willfully obscuring a massive twist in a media franchise for years — and whether that is the right or wrong thing to do.

It was a really awesome discussion, and a true moment of connection between me and my kids. A full-blown dad win! If any parent is contemplating whether they should go to all this trouble for their own kids, I would 100 percent recommend it.

As soon as the movie ended, the girls begged to watch Return of the Jedi. And when we did, they were almost as shocked to learn Luke and Leia were twins. I hadn’t even considered the possibility that this would be an equally surprising twist, but it was for them. Honestly, I wish I had taped that reaction too. I’ll make sure the camera’s rolling when we finally make it to Galaxy’s Edge.