[All rights belong to The Jim Henson Company; I claim no rights to the characters or their previously established backstories.]
The first time I saw Labyrinth, I viewed the character of Jareth as I'm sure plenty of other people have: a handsome and mysterious king who unfathomably falls for a spoiled teenage girl, he gets too predatorial for any of us to take him seriously and we just view him in the end as a creepy pervert who has a very awkwardly-worded last confrontation with the heroine. However, there were two things in the movie that didn't sit right with this interpretation, and I dissected them over and over for days afterward. The first was his broken-hearted stare in the Escher room as he breathed out, "I…can't live within you," then watched Sarah run further away- oblivious to him and his feelings -and he looked down despondently. It made me pause and ask, "wait, does he actually have legitimate emotions concerning her?"
The second was the very next scene, and the aforementioned awkwardly-worded confrontation. Something about his speech didn't sit right with me: it felt disjointed, almost as if it were in reference to something else we never got to see in the movie. Additionally, Jareth referred to all he had done as if he were performing in a role, and not simply ticking off everything that was in a typical day's work for the Goblin King. "I was frightening," he boasts. "I have turned the world upside-down, and I have done it all for you. I'm exhausted from living up to your expectations of me." It's as if he's saying, "I played the game to my utmost ability. Isn't that enough for you? Can't you take your mind off the idea of winning and focus on who I am outside of that game?"
Now, I don't know if there was some deep, hidden meaning in Jareth's last speech that was hearkening back to earlier drafts, or if it was just haphazardly written dialogue, but I'm a person who's always looking for connections, and my brain slowly began working on an idea: if the movie had been longer, or if they'd made a sequel, how might they have expanded on what this conversation alluded to? Why does Jareth desire to play this role for Sarah? How did he ever find her to even fall for her in the first place? If he spent the whole movie living up to her expectations of what a villain should be like, the implication is he is not in actuality what we saw, or at least that's not all he is. Well, then what would he be?
This was where "The Ultimate Visual History" for Labyrinth became instrumental to me, because it gave firsthand glimpses into earlier drafts of the plot, various personal interpretations of events and such by those closest to the production, and insight from the man himself who brought this character to life. "One feels that he's rather reluctantly inherited the position of being the Goblin King, as though he would really rather be- I don't know -down in Soho or something. But he's not. His thing in life is to be Goblin King, and he runs the whole place as well as he can…. I think Jareth is, at best, a romantic, but at worst, he's a spoiled child, vain and temperamental. But he's completely smitten by the character of Sarah: she's strong-willed and pure."
Armed with this information, I began to see Jareth in a whole new light. I couldn't paint him to be a saint, certainly, but I began to understand he had the potential to be so much more than how he is often depicted; his line about things not being fair resounded in my mind, and I scrutinized the split-second glance he gives Sarah just then. That statement (and look) came from someone who knows just how unfair life is, and though it's only a scar now, it hurt him deeply when he first found that truth out. Pair all this with the refrain in Underground for someone to "get me out of here," and I came to understand Jareth as someone who's very lonely and trapped, and stuck like that forever to boot. The longer I thought about it, the sadder I became to think we never got another movie that delved deeper into his character or revisited his relationship to Sarah.
So, I resolved to write a sequel based on my research and personal conclusions (I should note that I have not read the prequel comic series, to make sure it did not influence my writing, so if there happens to be any similarities, it's only coincidence). I did my best to keep the quirky humor of the film, while also blending it with the classic late '90s rom-com vibe that was so prevalent at the time our story takes place, yet keeping the idea that this is a fantasy still at the forefront; I hope I toed the line all right in trying to recreate the era with plenty of cultural references, without falling over into simply cluttered and burdensome. This book is my love letter to all the fans of Labyrinth, and the creative geniuses that were Jim Henson and David Bowie. I'd like to think that somewhere out in the vast multiverse of time and space, there was an alternative timeline where the movie did well at the box office, and ten or so years afterward, the gang all got back together to make a follow-up film, and that maybe it went a little something like this….