8. How Did Han & Chewbacca Just Happen To Stumble Upon The Millennium Falcon?
There's a throwaway line in the movie that tries to explain the coincidental nature of Han and Chewbacca just stumbling upon their old ship, the Millennium Falcon, about eight seconds after Rey and Finn fly it off of Jakku, but it doesn't really ring true. There has to be something that we missed, right? A proper explanation as to how the duo found the iconic ship that they'd been searching for for years? Uh, nope: Han says something about a homing beacon and it's brushed off like nothing. A "coincidence." It's one of those film moments where you try really, really hard to pretend that it's not the sum of a ridiculous and unlikely chance encounter, but J.J. Abrams was apparently okay with that being the case. The film novelisation doesn't even bother with a better explanation of these events. Instead, it enforces the coincidence angle, with Han saying:
"Told ya we shouldve double-checked the Western Reaches! Just lucky we were in the general vicinity when the ship powered up and its beacon snapped on."
Explaining this important moment with a lame line like "just lucky we were in the general vicinity" is so lazy that it qualifies the entire incident as a fully-fledged plot hole. C'mon! The galaxy is absolutely huge and sprawling mass of space... are we really buying that?