"That's not how the Force works!"
— Han Solo, The Force Awakens
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The Empire Strikes Back
- An example done well is the famous Retcon of Darth Vader being Luke's father. It's well-documented that Vader and Luke's father were originally separate characters (an early draft of The Empire Strikes Back even has Luke's father appear as a Force Ghost), and there was nothing in the original Star Wars, later subtitled A New Hope, that even hinted at this twist. Obi-Wan's talk about an evil Jedi named Darth Vader betraying and murdering Luke's father (who was not named Anakin until Return of the Jedi) was taken at face value until Empire came out. Obi-Wan even addresses Vader as "Darth" like it's his first name, because it was his first name at that point. One very early Expanded Universe story before Empire had even mentioned the three of them together. The twist works because the revelation is just as bewildering for Luke as it is for the audience, and because it's quite dramatically effective: Luke learns that his perception of his father is a lie and is forced to question his path of vengeance, Vader gains character depth beyond being a ruthless villain, and Luke's potential fall to the Dark Side is much more palpable with the knowledge that his own father succumbed to the temptation. This was foreshadowed earlier in the film with Luke's Force vision of Vader with his own face, though this is only more obvious in hindsight. For a first-time viewer, the scene could just be interpreted as Luke needing to confront his potential inner darkness as symbolized by Vader (which is developed further in Return of the Jedi) and thus the familial reveal would still be surprising. Also, some dialogue and acting in the first film fortuitously appear in hindsight to be foreshadowing, like Luke being said to have "too much of his father in him", Obi-Wan briefly hesitating when Luke asks about his father, and that "Vader" is spelled (though not pronounced) identically to the Dutch word for "Father" note . Still, Return of the Jedi had to handwave the retcon of Obi-Wan's deception as him speaking from "a certain point of view".
Return of the Jedi
- Lucas had a vague idea of "The Other" mentioned in The Empire Strikes Back as Luke's secret sister who would also become a Jedi, and she and Luke would face the Emperor together in the final film, but that plot thread was left for later in the overarching series, which was vaguely conceived as nine or even twelve films. She would have been a Sequel Hook for a fourth film (Episode 7), and a draft script of Empire tentatively named her "Nellith". Then the pressures of that movie's production plus issues in Lucas's personal life were so stressful that Lucas decided to make Return of the Jedi the final theatrical film of the series (he only decided to go ahead with the Prequels in the mid-90s). With only one more film to wrap up the entire story, Lucas realized that introducing an entirely new character out of the blue to be The Other would be more trouble than it was worth, and decided that one of the existing characters had to fill the role. He finally settled on the idea that Leia would be The Other and Luke's sister because she was the most convenient choice in the cast and because they had already started dropping hints that she was Force sensitive. When Hamill was told about it, he incredulously asked if Lucas had just made it up on the plane ride over. Still, it manages to work anyway, closing the love triangle and explaining certain connections and situations in the first two films. In hindsight, this is likely why Lucas approved of Palpatine coming back from the dead through cloning in the Dark Empire comics, despite the rest of the then-Expanded Universe's disregard of it (though later, he himself would introduce continuity issues through the Balance/Chosen One stuff in the Prequels), because in the end Luke and Leia face Palpatine together akin to Luke and his sister in the pre-ROTJ plan.
The Force Awakens
- Snoke's entire character feels like a sudden insertion on a setting in which he doesn't fit in any way. He's a massively powerful Force user with enough political clout to lead the remnants of the Empire, but he's explicitly not a Sith, nor a Dark Acolyte, nor a Dathomiri, nor a Jedi, nor connected to any known Force user in any way, which gives zero explanation about where did he come from to become such a powerful being or why we the galaxy had not met his menace in any previous point of the story. The films' most knowledgeable characters take him from granted, yet explain nothing for the viewer's sake, and the expanded materials only deepen the mystery by further confirming Sidious knew nothing about him until the moment of the Sith's death. This ultimately goes nowhere, though, with the trilogy's final film introducing an additional Ass Pull on the topic.
- Maz Kanata being in possession of the Skywalker lightsaber. It makes little sense that anyone could recover the lightsaber, since it fell into the core of a gas planet. And even though Maz says she will tell the story of how she found it someday, this never happens. It is never explained, most likely because the writers had no idea how she found it either. It seems they just wanted the most iconic lightsaber in the franchise to appear without bothering to explain how.
- Rey's solid victory over Kylo Ren in a sword duel, despite having been the first time she ever touched a lightsaber while Kylo had been explicitly training at it since his childhood, meets no clear explanation. The film vaguely implies her self-taught experience with her staff might have helped to translate her skills to lightsaber fighting, but the little resemblance between a metal staff and a single-bladed lightsaber undermines this explanation (and the same happens with Kylo's side wound, which was implied to be a factor in his defeat, despite the fact he was moving pretty quickly for someone whose injuries should be slowing him down).note
- R2-D2 reactivating conveniently just moments after the climax wraps up is given no explanation whatsoever in the movie. According to Abrams, R2 heard BB-8 asking for help
and merely took that long to compile the information. This begs the questions though of why no-one else tried asking R2 for help, such as C-3PO, and if they did why didn't he respond to them.
The Last Jedi
- Leia using the Force to survive being blasted into a vacuum after bombers destroy the bridge of her ship. While it has already been established in canon that Force-users can survive in the vacuum of space, Leia had not been shown to have any Force abilities thus far and nowhere in canon is anyone able to propel themselves through empty space with the Force. It's also unexplained how she also apparently managed to avoid being hit by the flames of the explosion or any debris from the decompression either. When asked about it, Rian Johnson explained that Leia's use of the Force was completely instinctual and out of a will to survive, comparing it to stories about parents suddenly being able to lift up wrecked cars to rescue their children. The Rise of Skywalker later explains this with a completely different reason, showing Leia having undergone Jedi training under Luke.
- When Finn and Rose are imprisoned on Canto Bight while trying to find the legendary codebreaker that Maz told them, all hope seems lost. However, they get thrown into the same cell as a guy who knows how to break out of the prison, but for some reason didn't escape on his own until the good guys showed up (even although, judging by his looks and his clothing's, he had spent a long time in the cell), and more importantly, the guy in question also happens to have the exact same skills as the legendary codebreaker, which entail being able to infiltrate the First Order flagship and make it look easy. The sheer improbability of those conveniences is not mentioned, and Finn and Rose are so happy with the twist that they choose to trust him instead of the right guy, who betrays them under threat by the First Order.
- The revelation that both the Resistance and the First Order buy their starfighters from the same suppliers, aside from coming conveniently from the very ship DJ had stolen, contradicts directly the trilogy's previous background. Episode VII materials had established that the First Order had their own shipyards and production lines in the Unknown Regions, eliminating any need to import material at all, while the Resistance bought their military hardware from the same central companies as the New Republic, which obviously didn't overlap with those working for the First Order (e.g. the Resistance's Mon Cala ships are built by a company on the other end of the galaxy from the First Order). In fact, the First Order and the Resistance use literally zero common equipment, making it even more farfetched.note
- Yoda's ghost affects the physical world by summoning lightning to destroy the first Jedi temple. There is no foreshadowing for this stunt, and it completely contradicts Obi-Wan's dialogue in Empire about how he "cannot interfere" during the duel between Luke and Vader. (Not to mention that Force lightning is a Dark Side ability, meaning that unless Yoda had fallen to The Dark Side, he shouldn't be able to do this even if he was still alive -although considering Yoda first summons clouds to generate a single bolt of lightning, it's likely this is just weather control and not "shooting lightning out of your hands.")
- Captain Phasma's armor enabling her to completely No-Sell direct blaster fire. There's basically no precedent of a personal armor of any kind in the two Star Wars continuities that could pull such a stunt, not even the famed Mandalorian armor or even the force-fielded suits worn by Republic Commandos during the Clone Wars.
- Kylo Ren swiftly killing hyped-up, mysterious, extremely powerful Snoke two thirds of the way through the movie. Both the previous and this film had established Snoke to be a chessmaster with absolutely mighty Force powers who could submit both Kylo and Rey by lifting a finger, yet in order for his death to happen, he suddenly loses all the basic accuracy of his Force perception (in which he was even focusing that very moment) and fails to realize both Kylo's feelings of betrayal and his usage of the Force to direct the taken lightsaber towards Snoke. His own death by bisection also comes as somewhat of a setting rupture given that, even in the Disney canon, the most famous enemy to die this way (Darth Maul) had turned out to have survived despite being a much lesser Force user with no resources at the time.
The Rise of Skywalker
- Poe Lampshades the sudden reintroduction of Palpatine, and the fandom's reaction to it, in a much-memed clip: "*sigh* Somehow, Palpatine returned."note
- Mirroring Palpatine's rushed return to the scripts, the twist of Snoke being a mass-produced being created by Palpatine as his personal Puppet King comes from nowhere. Not only is there nothing in the previous films that can serve as foreshadowing, it also comes after the new Expanded Universe had established solidly that Snoke was his own person, even stating in the novelizations of the first two sequel films that he had witnessed the fall of the Republic from the shadows and that Sidious didn't know anything about him until right before dying at Endor. His behavior and machinations in the films themselves don't really match Sidious' plans in The Last Jedi either, which opens many vital questions about his knowledge and allegiance to Sidious that go completely unanswered by the end of the film.
- The sudden reveal that there are enormous, whole chunks of the Death Star II that remain intact even after having fallen from orbit, despite the entire station was clearly seen to violently blow up to ashes in the Battle of Endor. More incredibly, the fact that Palpatine's chambers are similary immaculate, even with their signature window. This one can be hand waved by an interview with George Lucas explaining a hyper drive malfunction and rebel tractor beams pulling away most of the Death Star's debris to enforce No Endor Holocaust, but this of course is not so much as explained on screen and still wouldn't explained why any part of the station would be recognizable, much less usable after such an event.
- The existence of an entire planet of Sith cultists with enough industrial capacity to outproduce the rest of the galaxy combined in naval tonnage is never so much as alluded to in previous films, and in fact Palpatine always made a big deal of the fact that the Sith were an extremely tiny and secretive group to the point that no more than two "real" Sith ever existed at the same time. You'd figure that if Palpatine had an entire planet full of thousands of followers and knew about them, they'd figure more strongly into his plans going all the way back to the blockade of Naboo, or at least the Empire.
- In a related point to the previous, the Disney Canon had established officially in 2017 that the Chosen One prophecy foretold the destruction of the Sith, only not of the dark side of the Force itself, which explained the continued existence of non-Sith dark side users such as Kylo Ren and Snoke after Anakin had killed Sidious. However, with Sidious being revealed to be alive and more powerful than ever after the Chosen One's death, the entire prophecy just falls flat on its face. While the most charitable interpretation is that Anakin's children and grandson still contributed to the defeat of Sidious, at the end it is entirely up to Palpatine's own granddaughter and the voices of all the Jedi from the past to finally destroy the Sith, which still makes the prophecy a very farfetched affair at the best and renders the concept of the Chosen One basically null. If anything, all Luke and Anakin did was make Palpatine more powerful,note which is about as contrary to "destined to destroy the Sith" as you can possibly get.note
- Rey instinctively throws Force lightning in a moment of stress, which is later explained in the film as her unconsciously tapping into the Dark Side power of her bloodline. According to this explanation, Force lightning requires absolutely no training to be performed and is just innate for those in contact with the Dark Side - something that had never been suggested and is even contradicted by previous materials in the same continuity. In the films and The Clone Wars, not all Dark Siders used the technique, only those who were very experienced Force users, and being merely strong in the Force seemed to have no relation with it; Darth Vader didn't use Force lightning when he was in his power peak before Mustafar, not unlike Asajj Ventress and Kylo Ren himself, and even an unholy powerhouse like Savage Opress was just puzzled the first time he saw the move. The reason why the technique is suddenly a natural trait now seems to be merely to give Rey even more power and connect her more overtly to Sidious.
- C-3PO is able to translate the runes on the Sith dagger, but he's strangely not allowed to tell anyone what it says due to his programming (you'd think that if his programming forbids him telling anyone what's written in Sith language, he'd be programmed to not be able to translate the text to begin with), and the only way to solve the issue is apparently giving him a memory wipe (despite the fact that a "memory" wipe should purge his memories, not his programming). However, after all the drama played with the lost of the original personality, it turns out R2 had stored an entire copy of C-3PO's personality and is able to restore it completely, undoing the whole plot point against all of its setup. (In fairness, it was mentioned right from the start that R2-D2 had backups of C-3PO's memories, likely since he already knew C-3PO was mind wiped before in Revenge of the Sith, C-3PO just doesn't trust them to work. The breaking of continuity comes from the way the script tried to have it both ways, playing up the angst of a Heroic Sacrifice as if it was going to be definitive while never intending to have it stick.)
- Similar to Han in The Empire Strikes Back, Poe advances the middle act by linking up with a companion from his past as a smuggler who can help the heroes out. The problem is that before that scene, Poe was never stated or implied to have been a smuggler at all, and EU material had actually explicitly stated he was a Military Brat whose parents were naval officers in the Rebel Alliance, that he went to the academy young, and that he served in the Space Navy for his whole life. His past as a drug smuggler comes completely out of nowhere, just to give him an excuse to know people on the planet they were on.
- Speaking of the previous point, Rey seemingly and accidentally kills Chewie by blowing up his transport with her Force lightning, only for it to turn out he was actually on a different transport which arrived with the first transport to the area that is visible for only a few seconds and can be easily missed. The audience and the characters are led to believe that Chewie was led into the first transport, only for the movie to reveal shortly after the explosion that he's alive without showing the other transport he actually arrived in.
- Hux turning on the First Order and being a spy for the Resistance. There is no buildup, little foreshadowing, and no explanation for why he would betray the First Order except for a grudge against Kylo, which in the previous films had been mostly Played for Laughs. Despite the fact the previous movies and books all made it clear he was a loyal follower of the First Order, then suddenly in this film he is willing to sabotage the entire organization he has been helping lead, all because he doesn't like Kylo being in command of the Order (which Kylo kind of was already, back when he was Snoke's right hand). This is not only out-of-character, but also counterintuitive for a scheming villain like him because, if the Order gets defeated, Hux himself will be judged and probably executed as a war criminal, and no spy work will probably spare him from such a fate by this point, considering he murdered billions by ordering the destruction of Hosnian Prime as his Establishing Character Moment all the way back in his introductory film. This was likely done to replace him with the more competent Allegiant General Pryde, who kills him for his treachery, but it still doesn't make sense.
- Rey being revealed as Palpatine's granddaughter. There were no prior explicit hints that they were related and Palpatine previously had no known relatives in this continuity. Only a few fans had speculated with this possibility after The Force Awakens and it was considered a fringe theory compared to other theories about Rey's origins. The twist also comes off as a retcon of The Last Jedi, which presented Rey's parents as random junk traders who didn't care about her. Daisy Ridley would later reveal that J.J. Abrams was flip-flopping back and forth on whether to actually put the twist in the film throughout most of filming, leaving her with no idea how to play her scenes, so it seems the Ass Pull played both out and in-universe.
- The film seems to treat the revelation that Rey is a Palpatine as the explanation behind her massive Force powers, implying those were naturally inherited from Sidious himself through his bloodline. However, this all but states the reason why Palpatine was such a strong Force user in the first place was more his sheer natural talent than any kind of training, reinforced by the fact that a completely untrained Rey was able to both perform feats far above the most powerful masters (e.g. lifting hundreds of tons of rock when Yoda struggled with a small pillar or an X-Wing) and to intuitively do things that Jedi apprentices take years to learn from masters (including Luke Skywalker and Ben Solo of all people). As a consequence of those new power levels, it is implied now that the Force is much stronger in the Palpatine lineage than the Skywalker family, despite the former being a random politician clan and the latter being the Chosen One's very bloodline. Nothing of this had ever been foreshadowed or even merely hinted, and even if it had been, it would still make little sense in context. Note that in Revenge of the Sith, Palpatine explicitly tells Yoda that Anakin will soon be more powerful than himself despite obviously having nowhere near his training, wisdom, or experience, and Anakin believes he's already there, all solely on the basis of his bloodline, something Snoke also alludes to in The Last Jedi. Palpatine's whole plan of creating a more powerful apprentice via Anakin then becomes nonsensical as it turns out Anakin's genetic talent is dwarfed by Palpatine's own; he would have been far better off just having regular children or cloning himself.note
- The Millennium Falcon's landing gear being broken, and it being used as an excuse for why they can't just fly over to the Death Star ruins. First of all, last we saw the Falcon, its landing gear was working fine upon takeoff, and we only saw infantry blaster fire hit the ship, which has never been shown to damage ANY ship, let alone the Falcon. Secondly, the Falcon takes off and lands vertically - it's not like a bloody airplane, the thing can hover. This explains why the landing gear was broken (the two hundred yard long ditch leading to the crash site indicates that Poe plowed it into a planet for reasons known only by the Force), but doesn't explain why they can't just take off vertically, fly where they need to go, and hover there to let Rey disembark.
- The execution of Kylo Ren's Heel–Face Turn can come off this way. While there is groundwork for it set up in the previous films (such as his feelings of inner conflict and remorse), in The Rise of Skywalker there isn't much meaningful character development towards this (especially as The Last Jedi ended with him making a second Redemption Rejection and declaring himself Supreme Leader). Having ruled the First Order for around a year, Kylo still seems pretty adamant about staying on the Dark Side, spending most of his screentime trying to turn Rey to the Dark Side and plotting to usurp Palpatine right up until the moment Leia dies, Rey stabs him, then heals him and confesses she wanted to take "Ben's hand". One conversation with a mental projection of Han later, and he's back on the Light Side. Adam Driver is a good enough actor to pull the scene off convincingly, but it's never really explained why exactly this made Kylo have a Heel Realization; he never previously considered switching sides after he believed his mother was dead or when Rey offered him a chance at redemption, yet both seem to factor into his turn this time around, especially given that this Han was just a figment of his memory. While viewers can interpret Kylo's exact motives for his Heel–Face Turn in many ways, the movie itself doesn't make it very clear as to why he's now changed his mind; he could well be seriously questioning his life choices throughout the entirety of the film, but we never actually see any of this.
- At the end of the film, Kylo suddenly being capable of resurrecting Rey through the Force by giving her his vital energy, a technique that there was no reason to think Kylo knew (which would also open the question of where, when and how did he master it, especially given that the whole thing sounds like a Light Side power, not something that would be in the Knights of Ren curriculum). It's vaguely implied that he was inspired by Rey previously using it on his chest wound during their duel, but this doesn't explain how he could learn an advanced technique like that solely by watching, nor how any technique could actually bring someone back from death (an ability that had previously only been associated with Darth Plagueis, and which could have even been actually all a lie by Palpatine).note
- The entire Battle of Exegol is reliant on the fact that Palpatine's Star Destroyers do not know which way is up (that's up as in, the opposite of down) without a single ground-based navigation beacon. Star Wars had never shown that such oddity could happen in any condition: all the previous trilogies, series and expanded materials had shown fleets taking off without any similar MacGuffin, and the film itself doesn't explain why in this case it is required, thus leaving us with the notion that somehow, not a single member of the crew on any of these thousands of ships could work out how to angle their ship towards the sky. (And the cherry on the cake is that, as usual, Palpatine has been building this fleet for decades and yet did not think of peppering fifty beacons all across the planet surrounded by multiple batteries of turbolasers in order to get around this crippling weakness, although he clearly has the resources to do so.) It doesn't help that Allegiant General Pryde later transfers navigational control from the tower to his flagship, begging the question of why Palpatine didn't have the navigational equipment built into every ship to begin with if it was so crucial (because, again, he clearly has the resources to do so), making it look like the heroes only have a chance due to Palpatine and the Final Order being incompetent.
