"THAT'S NOT HOW THE FORCE WORKS!"
— Han Solo, The Force Awakens
All spoilers are unmarked! You Have Been Warned!
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, 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 story, Lucas realized that introducing a new entirely 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.
The Force Awakens
- Anakin's lightsaber, which was last seen
◊ falling down into the gas planet Bespin, ended up being not only intact, but acquired by Maz between movies. The odds of finding any items that got lost in a gas planet, let alone something as small as a lightsaber, are slim to none. When an appropriately shocked Han asks her how she obtained the weapon, Maz responds with "a good question, for another time." She never does, at least in the films. Even with the much later (and still implausible) expanded universe explanation (that an Ugnaught found it), it still doesn't change that the lightsaber was brought back without any planning or justification in the films. - Naming her son Ben Solo implies that Leia named him for Obi-wan "Ben" Kenobi... except she never met the man, only hearing tales of him from her father and seeing him from a distance as he dies. Naming her son after a nickname of a complete stranger seems an odd move.note
- 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 (the same happens with Kylo's side wound, which is implied to be a sort of Worf Had the Flu case, despite the fact he had been explicitly turning it into an advantage by increasing his Dark Side power through its pain, and that he was moving pretty quickly for someone whose injuries should be slowing 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 and use the Force to "fly" through space (most notably Kanan in an episode of Star Wars Rebels - although that was more of a case of Kanan managing to catch and brace himself against a piece of a starship and propel himself back towards the dock that had atmosphere, rather than Force-powered flight pushing against nothing at all), Leia, unlike Kanan, received little-to-none Jedi training in the new canon (as opposed to the Legends continuity), making this seem completely out of the left field note That said, however, there has as yet been no on-screen accounting for Leia's life between Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens; she may have received training at some point. 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. Though whether or not this is an adequate explanation and/or whether or not it should have been explained in the film rather than by the director is still a matter of contention. note
- When Finn and Rose are imprisoned on Canto Bight, 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 (and judging by his looks and his clothing's, he had spent a long time in the cell). The guy in question also happens to have the exact same skills as the codebreaker that Maz told them to find, which entail being able to infiltrate the First Order flagship and make it look easy.
- Yoda's ghost affects the physical world by summoning Force 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.
- DJ's betrayal might not be out of character for himself, but it sure is for the First Order. Despite being an organization that had never shown any redeeming policies and whose members routinely executed even people who were still useful to them, they suddenly become willing not only to allow a literal spy to go away in exchange for verbal information, but also to actually pay him a boatload of money as a bonus to add him smug points. Unless DJ was in the First Order's payroll all along and was just deceiving Finn and Rose, which the film doesn't imply and the expanded materials outright deny, it is inexplicable than they decided to strike and fulfill a treat with a random rascal instead of just torturing him for the info and killing him afterwards.
- 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 armors or even the force-fielded suits worn by Republic Commandos during the Clone Wars.
The Rise of Skywalker
- 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 there's nothing in the previous films that can serve as foreshadowing, it also comes after the new Expanded Universe had established rather 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 in Endor. His behavior and machinations in the films themselves don't really match Sidious's 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 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.
- 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.
- Rey seemingly and accidentally kills Chewie by blowing up his transport with 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.
- C-3PO is able to translate the runes on the Sith dagger, but he's not allowed to tell anyone what it says due to his programming...for some reason. You'd 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 heroes solve this issue by giving him a memory wipe, despite the fact that a "memory" wipe should purge his memories, not his programming.
- 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, seemingly both to give him an excuse to know people on the planet they were on and to make him a closer counterpart to Han.
- Hux turning on the First Order and being a spy for the Resistance. There is no build up, little foreshadowing, and no explanation for why he would betray the First Order except for a grudge against Kylo. 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 organization he has been helping lead, all because he doesn't like Kylo being in command of the Order (which he 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.
- 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 special 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 feel singularly jarring for how little sense it makes overall. 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 natural talent is dwarfed by Palpatine's own. He would have been far better off just having regular children.
- 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. Which 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 that doesn't explain why they can't just take off vertically, fly where they need to go, and hover there to let Rey (who has been shown to be able to hover/fly herself) 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. It's never really explained why exactly this made him have a Heel Realization (although Adam Driver is a good enough actor to pull it off convincingly); 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. 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.
