What Is Star Wars' 'Bad Feelings Club' & Which Ahsoka Character Recently Joined?

With any franchise that spans decades, there are bound to be recurring themes and ideas. One of the most humorous in the "Star Wars" fandom is the phrase "I have a bad feeling about this," a seemingly simple line of dialogue that first emerged in "Star Wars: Episode IV — A New Hope" when Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) and crew approach the Death Star in the Millennium Falcon. Han Solo (Harrison Ford) says something similar later in the same film: "I got a bad feeling about this," when the main characters are stuck in the trash compactor.

From there, the phrase or a variation of it has been repeated in every other "Star Wars" movie — including "Episode VIII — The Last Jedi" (BB-8 says it in binary while the good guys evacuate D'Qar). "Ahsoka" carries on the tradition by having Jacen Syndulla (Evan Whitten) say, "I've got a bad feeling" in Episode 4, "Part Four: Fallen Jedi," making the character the newest member of the Bad Feelings Club. It's arguably the longest-running inside joke in the franchise, and once you're aware of it, there's no way to avoid noticing it.

While "I have a bad feeling about this" has become synonymous with "Star Wars," "A New Hope" isn't the first movie in which the phrase can be found. One of the astronauts in "2001: A Space Odyssey" says "I've got a bad feeling about him" in reference to the supercomputer HAL. That film came out in 1968, nine years prior to the first "Star Wars."

So was George Lucas intentionally paying homage to an influential work of science fiction? It's possible, but the phrase appears even earlier than that — in 1965's "Battle of the Bulge." Half of "Star Wars" is "Wars," after all, and the epic war film has a scene in which a United States Army sergeant says "I got a bad feeling about this" right before a major massacre.

However, without Lucas directly commenting on where the line came from (if anywhere), it's more than likely that it was a common saying he happened to use and that he wasn't referencing anything. Now, though, when someone says, "I have a bad feeling about this," most people immediately think of a galaxy far, far away.