Star Wars Secretly Fixed A New Hope's Plot Hole by Retconning Jedi History
Star Wars loves to change the details.
Summary
- There have been many adjustments to the Star Wars universe over the years.
- One comment by Obi-Wan in A New Hope has been a lingering plot hole for ages.
- Star Wars has quietly fixed the issue with an effective retcon.
Sometimes it’s hard to remember the days before Star Wars. Nowadays everybody knows about the Jedi and the Sith, and Han Solo and C-3PO. Even if you have no interest in the movies, you know who Darth Vader is and you know that he’s Luke’s father. The Star Wars universe is entrenched in the zeitgeist and it’s not going away any time soon.
There was, of course, a time when none of that was true. In 1977 A New Hope came out (not even affixed with the “Star Wars” part of the title yet), and an incredible amount of world-building took place. It’s impressive, actually, that for a movie that was intended to be a stand-alone it hasn’t been completely re-written by the sprawling Star Wars universe.
Having said that, there have been a few retcons to A New Hope, mostly for the better. One recent change has fixed a plot hole almost fifty years old.
A Thousand Year Peace
In A New Hope, Luke’s new mentor Obi-Wan “Ben” Kenobi tells him that before the Clone Wars the galaxy had enjoyed “over a thousand generations” of Jedi knights preserving order and justice. The implication is that there had been peace in the galaxy for all that time.
Of course, that was before the Star Wars universe sprawled outward to include many stories of this supposedly peaceful time, many of which are not peaceful at all. Star Wars: The High Republic is a series of books that cover many conflicts, battles, and threats from the period preceding Episode 1.
A Minor Adjustment
In Cole Horton’s The Star Wars Book, some context is finally provided to clear up this discrepancy. It’s a minor adjustment, but the book notes that the Clone Wars were "the largest and most destructive conflict to face the galaxy in a millennium."
This gently retcons Obi-Wan’s statement from A New Hope: it’s not that the galaxy experienced absolute peace up until Attack of the Clones, but rather that the scale of the conflicts were all minor compared to the destruction caused by the Clone Wars.
It’s like the Clone Wars were WW1. It’s not that wars didn’t happen in the years before that point – it’s just that the scope was so much bigger than the world had known before.
Other Changes
Of course, this is relatively minor compared to other changes made since A New Hope. Here are four more retcons made in the Star Wars universe, some good and some bad.
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Han shot first.
In the original version of A New Hope, Han is cornered by bounty hunter Greedo and shoots him – unprovoked and with a hidden weapon. George Lucas apparently thought this made the rough-around-the-edges renegade a little too rough, so he changed the scene so Greedo shot first. Real fans know the truth, and they have the t-shirts to prove it!
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Old friends who don’t remember each other.
Obi-wan doesn’t recognize C-3PO or R2D2 when he meets them in A New Hope. But this gets changed later, presumably to shoehorn fan favorites into the prequel movies. There, Obi-wan and the droids are friends for years.
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He’s not dead yet.
Darth Maul dies pretty definitively in The Phantom Menace – dude was sliced in half! But the character was so popular he was brought back in the animated Clone Wars as well as Solo, both of which take place after he was cut in two.
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Palpatine coming back.
Probably the dumbest retcon in cinema history, you could tell that the creative team behind The Rise of Skywalker were desperate when they came up with this nonsense.