10 Biggest Star Wars Retcons

6. The Origin Of The Death Star's Weakness

Darth Maul Star Wars The Clone Wars
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 almost nine years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. He has been writing and video editing for 10+ years, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers and uploading them to YouTube (they're admittedly a bit rusty by today's standards). If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order or to tell you about the making of 1988's Remembrance of the Daleks, Danny is the person to ask.