For more than a year now, we have greeted each drib and drab of Star Wars news with growing impatience, glancing at the clock and ostentatiously tapping our wrist, in the hopes of activating the cyborg headband drilled into the skull of our favorite intergalactic administrative aide. “#BringBackLobot” has been our most constant refrain, and now it seems as though someone is on our side who conceivably has the power to get it done: Damon Lindelof tells Digital Spy that he hopes to someday make the Lobot film that so many have called for—first as a joke to fill column space, then as the rallying cry that united a world.
“My hope is that, like, once they’ve run through everybody else in 20 or 22 years, they’ll be looking for someone to write the Lobot movie,” Lindelof says. “I wanna know how he’s ended up working with Lando and exactly what that apparatus does and how he lost his hair. And, you know, I always root for the bald guy.” (P.S. Lindelof is bald.)
This is our design. This is our Lobot.
Of course, fans who are familiar with Lobot or have access to Wikipedia already know that Lobot was the son of a slaver and a petty criminal who was captured in Bespin, then forced into indentured servitude. He lost his hair when he had his head shaved so that apparatus could be implanted into his brain. Exactly speaking, that apparatus allows him to communicate with Cloud City’s central computers. And he ended up working with Lando when Lando won control of the city in a gambling match. That is the “how” and “what” of Lobot.
Still, in the hands of Damon Lindelof, perhaps we may finally learn the “why.” Lindelof could turn the deceptively simple story of a cyborg slave into a more universal meditation on man’s own slavery to the “apparatus” of faith, which allows us to talk to the “central computer” in the clouds—even as it also controls us completely—while asking why we will never get any closer to understanding where the “Bot” ends and the “Lo” begins. And let’s face it: It’s probably either this or nothing.