'The Last Jedi' Hid a Classic Star Wars Easter Egg in a Really Sneaky Way

Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi bucked a lot of longstanding Star Wars traditions, but one series mainstay wasn’t missing from Episode VIII, as many fans originally feared. Somebody did utter a classic line that has been in every single movie, but chances are you didn’t catch it this go-around because Johnson’s all about subverting expectations.

This post contains mild spoilers for The Last Jedi.

The phrase “I have a bad feeling about this” is probably the second or third most-iconic line in all of Star Wars, coming in after Darth Vader’s “I am your father” and, arguably, Admiral Ackbar’s “It’s a trap!” In A New Hope, both Luke Skywalker and Han Solo say the pessimistic phrase during their encounter with the Death Star. Princess Leia says it inside the space slug in Empire Strikes Back, and C-3PO and Han both say it in Return of the Jedi. Obi-Wan Kenobi says it twice in the prequel trilogy, while Anakin Skywalker says it in Attack of the Clones. More recently, Han said it again when the Rathtars get loose in The Force Awakens, and Cassian cuts of K-2SO when he starts to say it in Rogue One.

In The Last Jedi, though, we don’t hear anybody explicitly say “I have a bad feeling about this,” which would seem to be breaking the longstanding tradition. However, Rian Johnson confirmed that somebody does say it, the only problem is that we don’t speak droid.

Huffpost spoke with Johnson after seeing the movie and he confirmed that BB-8 tells Poe Dameron that he has a bad feeling about in his droid bleeps and bloops as the pair fly into battle against the First Order in The Last Jedi’s opening scene.

“”Happy beeps, buddy! Happy beeps!” Poe responds as BB-8 anxiously chirps.

“Good catch,” Johnson told Huffpost.

“It seemed like a fun character to deliver that line,” he continued. “I think originally I had Poe respond, ‘Oh, I got a good feeling about it. Keep your chin up.’ And then I made it a little less explicit just to make it more fun.”

While filming Star Wars movies, the droid’s bleeps and bloop begin as actual, understandable lines, just so that the human actors opposite the droids know how to respond to what is otherwise an indecipherable code. So, The Last Jedi did technically contain the famously line, but it was technically there in the truest sense of the word. If the ever-subversive Johnson hadn’t confirmed BB-8’s translation, we might not have known for sure that the line was there. Also, BB-8 is a droid, so the line was ~technically~ delivered.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi is now in theaters.