Entertainment Weekly has been dropping some very cool information this week regarding Rogue One‘s first draft. Today it is revealed that Darth Vader was supposed to kill Director Orson Krennic.  This comes from an interview with Rogue One‘s original writer Gary Whitta:

Back in this version of the story, Jyn Erso and the character we came to know as Cassian Andor escaped with both the data tapes and their lives. The villain of the story, Director Krennic (played by Ben Mendelsohn) also survived the battle, although barely.

Instead of lying wounded on a transmission platform while the green beam of the Death Star literally incinerates him on its trajectory into the planet, Krennic found shelter from the blast. In what sounds like a type of epilogue to the story, we would have seen his rescue by Imperial forces.

“They tore him out of the rubble and they brought him back,” Whitta says. “When they’re going over the ruins, he somehow survived.”

Krennic thinks he has endured. He thinks he has served valiantly for the Emperor. He thinks he has done everything right, everything within his power … right up until an unseen force squeezes off the air in his throat.

“Vader kills him for his failure,” Whitta says.

While Vader killing Krennic would have been pretty satisfying, I like his actual death a lot more. The irony that Krennic being killed by his own superweapon is perfect. Whitta also talks about how he considered an idea where Vader was going to fight a bunch of opponents, not the same ending where he murders all those Rebel Fleet Troopers:

“The rampage where [Vader] murdered everybody wasn’t me. That got added later,” said Whitta, although he had considered a different battlefield confrontation between a large group of opponents and the Sith Lord. “I had pictured early on Vader murdering all these Rebel soldiers but I never wrote it into the script. It was an idea that stuck around after I left and they ended up finding a cool way to use it. It’s actually my favorite thing in the film.”

Make sure to check out the rest of the interview over at EW‘s website. More on Rogue One’s original draft later this week.