10 Biggest Star Wars Retcons

6. The Origin Of The Death Star's Weakness

Star Wars Rogue One Galen Erso
Disney

The fact that the Rebel Alliance was able to discover and exploit the Death Star's weakness in A New Hope always felt a little improbable - as did the fact that the Empire's planet-killing battle station had such a catastrophic defect in the first place.

It obviously wasn't a plot hole or anything like that, but it all just felt a wee bit convenient. Not that the Rebels would care, with Luke's precisely-aimed proton torpedoes granting them an unprecedented victory over a much stronger enemy.

In 2016's Rogue One: A Star Wars Story though, this particular plot point received a most welcome retcon, with the revelation that the Death Star's weakness wasn't as random as it seemed, and had actually been put there by Galen Erso.

Is this what George Lucas had planned all the way back in 1977? Certainly not, but as with Maul's resurrection, this is another example of a good retcon, since the idea of the weakness being planted by Mads Mikkelsen's conflicted engineer is way more compelling than it being an unintentional design flaw.

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Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!