Ackbar’s It’s A Trap Moment Steals Lando Calrissian’s Thunder

As iconic and memetic as Admiral Ackbar’s “It’s a trap!” line from Return of the Jedi was, it came at the expense of stealing Lando Calrissian’s thunder. Both Ackbar and Lando are given plenty of time to shine in the movie and end up contributing a lot to the final battle against the Empire. That being said, the beginning of it is largely seen as belonging to Ackbar, even though that’s not entirely true.

In the climax of Return of the Jedi, the Rebel Alliance make their final assault on the second Death Star, hoping to destroy it while it’s still in the middle of construction. Unfortunately, the Death Star’s shields were still up due to the Rebels’ assault on the generator being thwarted, and the Empire was able to intercept the Rebel fleet and attack them. Admiral Ackbar, realizing the situation, states the obvious by uttering his iconic and memetic line of “It’s a trap!”, cementing his place in Star Wars history for decades to come.

While Ackbar’s popularity is well-deserved, it comes about as a result of him overshadowing a moment from Lando where he also discovers that they’d fallen into a trap. It’s impossible to predict which moments in a story will stick with people and how much they’ll blow up, so no one is truly at fault for the “It’s a trap!” line becoming as big as it did. Still, it’s undeniable that the popularity of the line came about from obscuring some of Star Wars‘ Lando’s own contributions to the battle.

When the Rebels arrive at the Death Star, Lando is leading the charge in the Millenium Falcon when Nien Nunb tells him that he can’t get a reading on the Death Star’s shield, indicating that the signal is being jammed. Lando starts saying that the Empire would only be jamming the signal if they knew they were coming, and as he does, he realizes that they’d fallen into a trap and tells the fleet to retreat, although the Empire was already upon them at that point. It’s only after that point when Ackbar finally says his famous line.

Lando was the one to initially alert the Rebel Alliance to what was going on, and he did it with a degree of subtlety that didn’t downplay the urgency of the situation. Ackbar, by comparison, simply stated the obvious about them being caught in a trap as soon as it had become obvious to the rest of them. The fact that he was so dramatic about something so obvious is undoubtedly a contributing factor to why the scene managed to stick with so many people for so many years, but it still resulted in Lando’s intuition at the beginning of the climactic battle being largely unrecognized by people.

That being said, Lando was still a major help in the final battle. Once the shield generator was destroyed, Lando led the Rebels into the Death Star for the final assault, and he was the one who shot the main reactor to make it explode, thus ending the battle and marking the end of the Empire. All in all, while Lando’s initial contribution to the climactic battle of Return of the Jedi ended up going unrecognized, he still managed to leave a mark by the end of it all.