The lore of Star Wars feels so permanently enshrined at this point that it’s hard to imagine there was ever a point where that lore wasn’t certain. Wait… who are we kidding? Part of the real propulsion of the Star Wars franchise is the constant debates about the franchise timeline and canon, precisely because that canon is so messy. George Lucas alone is responsible for going back and recutting the original Star Wars trilogy into several new “special editions.” Those new cuts changed key scenes like Han Solo’s meeting with Greedo, so that rascally smuggler seemed less slimy by shooting Greedo in self-defense, rather than in cold blood.
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However, “Han shot first” is a debate about what is ultimately a minor re-characterization of a major character. Star Wars has gone much further than that, at times retconning the entire franchise storyline with later changes. No era of Star Wars has been free of big retcons: as you will see below, in fact, the 3 biggest Star Wars retcons come from the original trilogy, prequel trilogy, and sequel trilogy, respectively.
Honorable Mention: Rey Is Someone
Star Wars: The Last Jedi and Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker are a pair of films that need to be studied: Never before have we seen creative and executive hopes collide so chaotically. The result was a retcon that has arguably upset the balance of the franchise, forever.
Director Rian Johnson took a bold swing with the major theme of The Last Jedi, which was that anyone had the Force potential to be a great Jedi. It was revealed that sequel trilogy heroine, Rey (Daisy Ridley), was not connected to some great Force user bloodline: she was just an average orphan who rose to be a great hero. It was a perfect echo of how Luke Skywalker’s story originally played out in A New Hope, before the sequel films came (see below), but the powers at Lucasfilm couldn’t let it stand. TRoS took a wrecking ball to the entire concept of Rey being remarkably unremarkable, instead retconning her origin into a story that was steeped in previous franchise lore. And yet, it didn’t really make a lick of sense. Rey was part of the Palpatine bloodline because one castaway clone of Palpatine fell in love? Like what?
Then again, with everything that TRoS dumped into Star Wars lore, this big change seemed like small potatoes. All it did was stomp on the notion that an average Star Wars fan could imagine themselves as a great Jedi hero, or that Star Wars could escape the Skywalker shadow. Now, the franchise is on the hook for that ‘New Jedi Order’ movie to provide more purpose to Rey’s muddled story.
3) Palpatine Lives! (The Rise of Skywalker)
“Somehow Palpatine returned,” is now one of the most infamous quotes in blockbuster cinema. When Star Wars made the reveal that Darth Sidious/Emperor Palpatine had returned from the dead, the fandom went into uproar. It was entirely on Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker to not only explain this major retcon to Return of the Jedi‘s ending, but make Palpatine a compelling villain all over again. And as we all know now, the movie failed miserably on both counts.
Palpatine transferring his essence into a clone body wasn’t even an original idea: Rise of Skywalker committed one of the most blatant rip-offs of the Star Wars “Legends” stories we’ve ever seen, and still managed to botch it. Palpatine lost all of his muster as the ultimate Sith Lord, and it was almost sad to see him so decrepit, with his Machiavellian scheming reduced to an armada attack and a vampiric power snatch.
The retcon didn’t hit at all like Lucasfilm hoped that it would: in fact, it was a major signal that the Star Wars franchise was running on creative fumes. It’s not a coincidence that we haven’t had a Star Wars movie since The Rise of Skywalker (2019). The connection between Palpatine, Kylo Ren, and Rey (as explained above) was so flimsy that it has caused more confusion than anything. In fact, the franchise has had to use its other content lanes (comics, TV series) to backfill the explanation of how and when Palpatine started cloning himself; who helped him achieve the goal of preserving his life; the “strancasting” process that created Palpatine avatars like Snoke, and how it all led to Rey. That’s a lot of work to fix one bad retcon.
2) Padamé Dies of a “Broken Heart” in Childbirth
The Star Wars prequel trilogy seemingly had an easy job: tell the story of how Anakin Skywalker went from the “chosen one” of the Jedi Order to becoming its greatest failure, the Sith Lord Darth Vader. Padmé Amidala was already a ruling queen of Naboo when she met Anakin Skywalker, at a time when Anakin was still young enough to be drinking blue milk out of juice boxes. Yet, in the second and third prequel films, Lucas actually managed to sell fans on the idea that Padmé and Anakin’s romance sprang naturally and wholesomely, and was as confusing for the two prominent Clone Wars as it was passionate. Revenge of the Sith completed the challenge by explaining how and why Anakin fell, with Palpatine poisoning the same love for Padmé that was the light in Anakin’s life. That’s why it’s so baffling that Lucas made it all the way to the end zone of the prequels, only to fumble the ball so badly at the goal line that it broke Star Wars continuity.
Revenge of the Sith‘s rushed epilogue has Padmé die in childbirth from “a broken heart” following Anakin’s fall to the dark side, and seeming death. A tragic Shakespearean ending, to be sure – but it flew in the face of a key moment from Return of the Jedi. As Luke Skywalker is trying to broach the subject of revealing he and Leia are related, he asks Leia what she remembers about her mother. Leia has actual memories to share (“kind…but sad”); thanks to Revenge of the Sith‘s later depiction of Padmé’s story, Leia’s maternal memories no longer made any sense. In early scripts for Return of the Jedi, Leia’s mom actually did survive the early Fall of the Republic (hence the memories), so maybe George Lucas forgot his own revisions?
The death of Padmé raised major new questions about Leia Organa’s backstory, which Star Wars has arguably gone too far in trying to explain (see: Obi-Wan). There’s never going to be a way to fully reconcile this issue – but fans have never stopped trying. In fact, rationalizations like Leia accessing a Force memory of Padmé’s last moments during her birth (kind, but sad…) are now so popular they’re being accepted as lore.
1) Darth Vader is Luke’s Father (The Empire Strikes Back)
That is no misprint… The biggest twist in the entire Star Wars Saga – and one of the biggest twists in the history of cinema – is, in fact, a retcon!
When George Lucas made the original Star Wars, he had an entire saga in mind, but only the means to make one space opera adventure on an indie budget. Lucas crafted what has now become the quintessential hero’s journey for the blockbuster movie age: a seemingly mundane boy (Luke Skywalker) finds out he has a “chosen one” destiny to defeat a great evil, if he can only unlock and master his own power potential. Darth Vader and his Death Star station were the horrific and scary embodiment of a fascist regime’s brutal power (Emperor Palpatine is all but a bit character in the film), which the hero must overcome. The simplicity of Vader (masked inhuman killer) was what initially made him such a haunting icon, so it was the highest of ambitions for Lucas to attempt to deepen the villain with a critical backstory reveal.
It wasn’t until he was cracking the story and script for The Empire Strikes Back that George Lucas decided to make Darth Vader and Anakin Skywalker the same person. It was a twist that changed the entire nature of the Star Wars Saga, forever: the simple “good vs. evil” setup of the original film was instantly replaced by a deeper story about generational cycles, destiny and fate, and a much more nuanced look at the thin line between goodness and corruption. Star Wars matured from being a hit movie into being an entire Shakespearean epic within the span of a single scene, and now “The Skywalker Saga” is the backbone on which the franchise rests.
Make no mistake: no prequels, sequels, or all that expansive universal lore would exist if not for Darth Vader’s big reveal. That’s why it’s even funnier that very few Star Wars fans can even quote the iconic lines of Vader’s reveal correctly.
Which Star Wars retcons blew your mind, or changed your view of the franchise completely? Let us know in the comments or over on the ComicBook Forum!
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Image courtesy of Netflix -
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