10 Smartest Decisions In Star Wars History

8. Galen Erso Designs The Death Star's Fatal Flaw - Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

Galen Erso Rogue One
Lucasfilm

First off, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story is amazing. Sure there's some funky editing where you can tell when the film was chopped and changed in post-production, but at its core is an inspiring, heartfelt tale of a group who come together and sacrifice EVERYTHING to lay the foundations of the Empire's collapse.

By providing further context to the first Death Star's destruction, Rogue One transforms a much joked about plot point from A New Hope into something emotionally wrought, that lays bare the odds the Rebellion was up against in sometimes terrifying detail.

So a shout out, if you will, to Galen Erso - the former Imperial engineer-turned-saboteur who purposefully designed the Death Star's fatal flaw. Played by the ever wonderful Mads Mikkelsen, Galen was one of the principle architects of the Death Star who went into hiding. But, after realising the Empire would complete the weapon with or without him anyway, he understood that the best shot anyone had at destroying it would be if he undermined its construction from the inside.

Without Galen's noble sacrifice, the Empire may have been able to build a truly impenetrable planet killer. A hero of the Alliance, along with the rest of Rogue One.

Content Producer/Presenter

WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well. In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.