As Luke reflected on his encounter with the mind witch, he recalled that it hadn’t been the first time he’d confronted an apparition of Darth Vader. Not long after he’d destroyed the Death Star, he’d been recovering from an ill-fated meditation exercise when he’d dreamed of a duel with Vader. Ben Kenobi had appeared in the dream too, and when Luke awakened, it was with the certainty that Vader had survived the Battle of Yavin. Later, after the Battle of Hoth, he had faced yet another phantom, in a cave while he’d trained with the Jedi Master Yoda on the swamp planet Dagobah.

Luke had also had very real confrontations with Darth Vader on Monastery and Circarpous V—but all those experiences paled compared with his duel with Vader at Bespin, in Cloud City’s reactor shaft.…