Characters In Solo: A Star Wars Story With More Meaning Than You Realized

Against all odds, Solo: A Star Wars Story just made a Kessel Run straight into our hearts. Despite all the doubts clouding the new cast of young actors, the film manages to stay true to the Star Wars spirit while delivering a fresh basket of adventure, all centered around everyone's favorite nerf herder.

For all the new faces on the screen, many of Solo's characters are old mainstays in the Star Wars universe with their destinies already laid out. We know Lando betrays Han on Cloud City, we know Han eventually meets Leia, has a kid, and gets lightstabbed. And we know Chewbacca hates Porgs.

But what about everyone else who shows up in Solo: A Star Wars Story? True to form, the movie is a menagerie of aliens, droids, and rebel scum, and believe it or not, a few of those characters come into play in other Star Wars stories. Here are all the characters in Solo: A Star Wars Story with more meaning than you realized. Oh, and spoilers ahead, obviously.

One of Star Wars' biggest mysteries has always been how exactly the Millennium Falcon's computer works. Is it really all the work of a skilled pilot, or is there something more going on there? Way back in The Empire Strikes Back, C-3PO mentions that the Falcon has "the most peculiar dialect" after trying to communicate with it.

It looks like we finally have our answer, as well as a new character who's apparently been in all the main Star Wars films: L3-37, Lando's cantankerous, activist droid. By herself, she's a unique piece of work. As Solo co-writer Jon Kasdan explained, "She's a self-modified droid. The idea is that she's sort of a mutt, if you will, of various parts of different kinds of droids who has improved upon herself."

But when Han, Lando, Chewie, and Qi'ra are trying to navigate the Maelstrom, they have no choice but to plug L3-37's severed head into the Falcon's computer. And, as far as we can tell, they leave it there, giving the ship L3-37's thoughts and personality. Wonder if it still has a thing for Lando in The Empire Strikes Back?

By now, most people know that Solo: A Star Wars Story features a surprise cameo by a character from The Phantom Menace, and we'll get to that in a moment. But what you may not have realized is that there were actually two Phantom characters onscreen in Solo (plus a mention of a third, Aurra Sing, who Beckett apparently pushed off a cliff).

The character of Weazel, played by Star Wars mainstay Warwick Davis, is one of Enfys Nest's marauders in Solo. As it turns out, he's taken a long journey to end up as one of Nest's rebels, considering he used to work for Jabba the Hutt on Tatooine. In The Phantom Menace, Weazel (again played by Davis) appears as one of the spectators of Anakin's pod race who bet that Anakin would come in first.

The Official Guide to Solo: A Star Wars Story seems to confirm it as the same character, saying that he was once a petty thief who worked for the Hutt gang in Mos Espa. What's he been up to in the meantime? Probably regretting that bet he made on Anakin after he turned out to be a Sith Lord and all.

We know most of these characters will run into Leia at some point in the future, but there was one character who's also had a bizarre run-in with the Alderaanian princess — Chanteuse.

Don't recognize the name? She was the lounge singer who appeared for a few seconds on Vos' ship the first time Han goes aboard, and she was pulled directly from the pages of the Marvel Star Wars comic books. In one issue, Leia and Luke infiltrate a gala in a space station above the world of Kabray. There, Leia is mistaken for a singer who goes by the name "Chanteuse of the Stars" and is forced to sing for the visiting dignitaries to avoid blowing her cover.

As it turns out, Luke picks that exact moment to get into a fight with a hulking Lahsbee, and the only way for Leia to save his life is to mesmerize the beast by continuing her song. It was a weird chapter in the Skywalker saga, and we're honestly kind of glad this character made its way into Solo in name only.

One of the coolest additions to Solo was Enfys Nest and her band of Cloud-Riders, a pirate gang that seemed to show up at every job Han pulled. As it turns out, these guys hark back to the Marvel line of comics as well. In Star Wars #9, Han is called out to Aduba-3 to stop the Cloud-Riders' raids on a local village. There, he goes blaster-to-blaster with the airborne marauders.

The story is obviously different from what happened in Solo, but co-writer Jon Kasdan confirmed that the name for the Cloud-Riders came directly from that comic issue, along with the design ideas for the gang's swoop bikes. For fans of the now-retconned Legends extended universe, it's nice to know that the filmmakers are still poking around in the archives. With this as a precedent, who knows what other defunct Legends concepts could still make it to the big screen?

Solo had a big surprise waiting near the end in the form of Darth Maul, who you may remember as the red-faced Sith who took out Qui-Gon and then got a free case of the halvsies courtesy of Obi-Wan in The Phantom Menace. He got Snoked before getting Snoked was cool.

So first of all...what? How's that guy still around, when he clearly bet it all on a lightsaber duel and only got 50-50 odds? Well, Darth Maul is, if nothing else, a slippery sucker, and fans of the animated series The Clone Wars may recall that Maul survived being cut in half and falling into a giant hole. Later, he got himself a fancy new pair of robo-legs and became a space gangster and the leader of the criminal organization called the Shadow Collective.

So how does all this fit into Solo? Well, clearly Maul is connected to the Crimson Dawn, the criminal organization Dryden Vos works for in the film — as evidenced by his appearance and the fact that Vos' ring opened up a direct connection to the former Sith.

Whether Maul pulls all the strings for the Dawn or Vos simply reports to him is still unclear, but Vos mentions that he can't steal the coaxium from Kessel because he has an alliance with the Pyke Syndicate, who run the mine. In Star Wars canon, the Pyke Syndicate are members of Maul's Shadow Collective, suggesting that the Crimson Dawn is just another criminal organization working for Maul's bigger gangster group.

Either way, Maul is clearly at the top of the pecking order, and he's bound to be a force to be reckoned with in a future film.

Similarly, the movie's ending makes it clear that we haven't seen the last of Qi'ra. As one of Han's many (many) betrayers, she certainly has her place in Solo, but as an ally of Maul...well, things just got a lot more interesting.

One theory has her becoming a Sith, but that's not likely since Maul himself technically isn't a Sith anymore — in fact, he kind of has a grudge against Darth Sidious and tries to kill him every chance he gets. But he still has all the training, plus his sexy double-bladed lightsaber. From the looks of it, whatever Maul gets up to, Qi'ra is going to be right by his side. And if he's taken such a liking to her, it's always possible that Qi'ra has a touch of the Force in her, which would make her a formidable opponent in the future. Only time will tell.