WARNING WARNING WARNING: Spoilers for The Last Jedi lie ahead.
If you’ve seen The Last Jedi, you’ll remember one of the plot points concerns the First Order’s ability to track spaceships even during hyperspace travel - it’s what leads Finn and Rose to hatch the plan to go on board the First Order’s ship and block their tracker in order to escape.
(It doesn’t really work out, that plan, does it?)
Tracking a spaceship at the speed of light seems pretty tricky, and it turns out the technology is several decades in the making. Rogue One, released last year and set 40 or so years before The Last Jedi, revealed that there were plans to develop hyperspace travel in place even back then. Jynn Erso finds then on the planet Scarif. Look!
It must just have taken ages to perfect - maybe they abandoned the idea after the rebels blew up the ol’ Death Star, or maybe it was just really tricky to get right, and they kept losing ships and stuff. Or the Death Star had the only copy of the instructions on it, so it was back to the drawing board after it went pop.
Either way, nearly four decades after Jynn sees those plans, the technology is in place - still new and scary enough that Rose is surprised by it.
Maybe, just maybe, destroying the Death Star was a kind of jerky thing to do - like, they saved loads of Rebel lives and stopped the Empire taking over the galaxy and stuff, but the hyperspace tracking industry took quite a walloping.
In other Last Jedi news, we’ve put together a bunch of the most interesting and out-there theories fans have come up with since drinking in the latest instalment to the Star Wars universe.
They include the possibility of Rey being a clone, and the idea that perhaps Luke could be Kylo Ren’s father (please no). There’s sadly no shipping of Chewbacca and his Porg mate to be found, though. Come on, give the people what they want.
(Images: Disney)
Latest
Related Reviews and Shortlists
