Black Knight, White Princess, and Pawns

A Labor Pool Overseer aboard the starship Tantive IV activates the ship's droids, including C-3PO and R2-D2. The pair are told to report to Captain Antilles. Threepio is excited: he longs to return to work as an interpreter and aide to humans and hates the drudgery of starship work. Antilles issues them a Command Control Instruction, ordering the droids to conceal the presence of Princess Leia Organa at all costs. Furthermore, Leia is designated a command control voice: the droids will now obey her every order. Leia immediately has Artoo to go onto the ship's hull to the navicomputer sensors and report to Threepio: both are to pretend to be performing a repair on the ship's systems, to provide an alibi for the ship's presence in the Toprawa system.

As the droids get into position, the Tantive receives an encrypted transmission from rebels on the planet's surface. They begin to send up the data containing the Death Star plans. While the transmission is underway, the Imperial Cruiser Devastator approaches. An imperial officer orders the Tantive to submit to a search. Antilles attempts to stall them until the transmission is complete. Then he orders the ship to engage its hyperdrive. R2-D2 re-enters the airlock just in time. But instead of returning home, Leia orders the Tantive to go to Tatooine, where she is to find Obi-Wan Kenobi and solicit his help.

But Devastator pursues the ship through hyperspace to Tatooine. Antilles speculates that someone on board must have smuggled in a homing device. Before Leia can locate General Kenobi, the Tantive IV is attacked and badly damaged and its communications are jammed. With no other way to get the data tapes off the ship, Leia resorts to loading the data into Artoo-Detoo's own memory banks. She gives the droid another command control instruction to take an escape pod down to Tatooine and bring the Death Star plans to General Kenobi. The ship launches other pods so that the one carrying the droids attracts less attention. Imperial troops board the Tantive. They quickly overwhelm the crew, and Antilles surrenders. But when Darth Vader comes aboard and demands to know where the plans are, Antilles allows himself to be killed rather than tell Vader anything.

Meanwhile Leia records a holographic message, transfers the plans into Artoo, and gives him instructions to find Kenobi. Artoo boards an escape pod with Threepio, launches it, and steers toward the planet's surface. Imperial troops capture Leia and bring her to Darth Vader; when she likewise refuses to tell him anything, he has her taken away for interrogation later. When he learns that an escape pod had been jettisoned, Vader infers that the plans were aboard and orders an intensive search of the planet.

Like the first two episodes of the Star Wars radio drama, "Black Knight" begins with scenes that take place before the start of . These include a conversation that the droids have with their labor pool overseer, the flight of the Tantive IV to Toprawa to receive the stolen Death Star Plans, and a chase through hyperspace to outrun Darth Vader in the Devastator. Midway through the episode, the drama catches up with the film and depicts the same events as its opening sequence: the boarding of the Tantive by imperial Stormtroopers and the droids' escape to the surface of Tatooine.

Along with the previous episode, "Points of Origin," "Black Knight" gives a detailed account of how the Rebellion captured the Death Star plans and transmitted them to Princess Leia aboard her starship. The battle at Toprawa would later be shown in more detail in the the books Jedi Dawn (1993) and Rebel Dawn (1998), and in 2000 Lucasfilm identified the battle as the starting point of the Rebellion era. Other works in Star Wars Legends would tell versions of this story that were contradictory in places, so much so that Pablo Hidalgo commented that "...if you had to throw a dinner party and invite everyone who had ever stolen the Death Star plans, you'd be surprised at how many place settings you'd have to worry about." The canonical version of this story was shown in the 2016 film Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. This version is mostly different from that depicted in the radio drama. While the Rebels still get a transmission through to the starship at the last minute, the action is moved from Toprawa to Scarif. Leia's ship receives the plans in the heat of battle rather than after the fighting is over, as in this episode.

Some promotions for the episode described its opening scene as the moment when Artoo and Threepio first met. In fact, while the dialogue implies that their assignment as counterparts may be fairly recent, it is clear that they are not meeting for the first time. Brian Daley specified in a 1995 interview that he intentionally left the nature of the droids' prior relationship unclear and the promotional statements were an error.

While Captain Antilles was both seen and mentioned in the Star Wars film and novelization, this radio episode was the first work to connect the name to the Rebel officer strangled by Darth Vader. Antilles mentions that someone in the Tantive's crew must have been working with the Empire to help them track the ship. The Star Wars CCG would later identify this double agent as U-3PO, a storyline that would be confirmed in the 2021 canonical reference book The Rise of the Rebellion and the Battle of Yavin.

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