Q. What makes people think the Empire wins?
A. Several things: The Rebels are forced to abandon their base on Hoth, taking losses in the process; Han Solo gets captured; Luke loses his lightsaber hand. On the other hand, the Empire doesn’t really lose anything except a handful of Storm troopers (and Admiral Ozzel and Captain Needa).
Yes, alright, the Rebels do lose Hoth, but it’s not as if they’ve been wiped out or anything. Presumably they had to abandon Yavin after the end of Star Wars, but we never say the Rebels lost that one. Just because they don’t blow up a Death Star, doesn’t mean they got a trashing.
Yes, alright again, Han Solo does get captured, but I will deal with this point later.
Luke loses his lightsaber hand, but gets a robotic one instead. In "Return of the Jedi" this ends up helping Luke, as it helps highlight the similarity between himself and his father, who’s hand he removes in a similar fashion, which may help Vader return from the Dark Side (I’ve got no real evidence for this, actually, but it’s not the main point of my argument anyway so I’ll leave it).
In pursuing the Millennium Falcon through the asteroid belt, the Empire takes considerable losses, which may range from a handful of Tie Fighters, which we definitely see, up to a whole Star Destroyer, which we sort of see. Either way, it’s a lot of losses given the end result (it‘s Boba Fett that tracks them down). So it is wrong to say the Empire doesn’t take any real losses.
The main point of my argument (at last)
Darth Vader’s objective throughout the whole of ESB is to capture Luke
Skywalker, as evidenced by his lines:
"The Rebels are there, and I’m sure
Skywalker is with them."
"He will join us or die, my master."
His first plan is to capture him on Hoth, along with as many other Rebels as he can, but Luke gets away from Hoth, after first destroying multiple ATATs.
Vader’s next plan is to lure Skywalker to Cloud City by capturing Han and
Leia and torturing them so that he knows of their pain through the Force. Once
there he will either persuade Luke to join him or, if Luke is too
goody-two-shoes, kill him. Boba Fett can then take Solo away and Vader will
(presumably) take Leia, Chewbacca, C3P0 and R2D2 off with him.
Vader’s first
mistake is to let Boba Fett take Han off before he actually has Luke properly
captured, not merely present in the City. This results in Vader not having a
further lure when the rest of his plan goes pear-shaped. This is why Han’s
capture isn’t a plus for the Empire, as if they’d hung on to him it would have
meant the Rebels having to get him back from the Empire’s maximum security
stockade. Next, Leia and co. escape, thanks to Lando. So Vader’s second mistake
was to insist Leia got taken with him rather than being left on Cloud City (who
bets Lando wouldn’t have minded that so much, eh?).
But Vader’s big, BIG
mistake, the one that gets him a big L, is that he doesn’t manage to capture or
kill Luke. He gets away. Even though he’s rubbish. In the whole fight, Luke only
gets one decent hit on Vader without using the Dark Side (that’s the one where
he zaps Vader with the broken pipe spewing dry ice, if you’re wondering).
So
where did old Darth go wrong then? I don’t know at exactly which moment he lost,
but it may be that there was nothing he could have done to make Luke turn to the
Dark Side, in which case he would have had to Carbon freeze him or kill him.
Vader had ample opportunities to kill Luke, but didn’t take any of them because
he wanted to turn him. He only had one chance to freeze him, when Luke fell in
the machine, but he blew that one by underestimating Luke’s incredible jumping
powers.
Vader’s final attempt to capture Luke is very much an emergency-back-up-plan-B, as it’s the one where he has his men deactivate the Falcon’s hyper drive. To add insult to injury, this one is foiled by R2D2.
So Darth Vader is the big loser of ESB, as he gets defeated by Han Solo’s spaceship, which doesn’t even work properly, then by his own son, who beats him by having his own hand cut off and then jumping to his doom, and then by the droidfriend of a droid he built.
The End
Oh, while we’re on the subject of ESB, I remember several people being worried that Episode 2 might be spoiled by the fact that it will probably include the romance between Anakin and Amidala. Let us all not forget that, at it’s heart, ESB contains the romance between Han and Leia. So I for one am not too worried on that part. Although I still fear that "When Clones Attack" might be spoiled by George Lucas being George Lucas.