Admiral Akbar’s traps were humane — could catch both squirrels and planets. Here was Akbar in the woods, down on one knee, his voice gently scraping along the edges of David Attenborough hues, placing a cracker with a bit of peanut butter on it in the trap’s silvery heart. Reluctantly condoned at first — he could still recall the meeting where he slowly tapped his fingers on his desk — he knelt in the woods imagining how the image would be disseminated far and wide. Whatever he used to gargle before bed smelled of old egg shells, he thought. He looked at the crew in his immediate vicinity and did his best to hide a smile.

When others sought to give him voice or speak for him, they gave him a breadth of syntax in Basic one did not always expect to find — he was fluent in the language, but he was an expert in its silences and how those silences could form curlicues. That was his forte. The others seemed to literally be putting words in his mouth.

He was supposed to explain how the technology worked so that a trap could catch both squirrels and planet-sized objects and still be humane. He was supposed to muse out loud about his early days on Mon Cala.

But — as the cameras rolled — he found that there was only one thing he wanted to say.