Author: David Schwarz

David: Oh hello, Mistah Filoni. Good morning. Nice, uh, hat you got there. Thanks for this chance, by the way! I’m pitching a light-hearted and completely not meta episode that I’m calling for now “It Rhymes, Like Poetry”. Good, huh?

So, picture this… Cold open! The Ghost crew are escaping a massive cloud of TIE fighters and the ship is in pretty bad shape. Zeb is complaining about doing yet another dangerous job for Vizago instead of sticking it to the Empire, and when things look dire Hera jumps to lightspeed!

Our heroes get to the world of Pantora, where they deliver their load to some funny looking dealer, but they have to wait at least one day until the Ghost is repaired. The kids (Sabine, Ezra and Zeb) decide to head to the city. Pantora is nothing like it was in that animatic from Clone Wars. It’s become very industrial and it’s full of merchandise vending machines, and people trying to sell you things everywhere and… well, it’s all very crazy and, uhm, satirical, for the grown ups in the audience, you know. Read More

One of the best selling points of the canon reboot has been the opportunity to revisit troublesome details in the worldbuilding of the Galaxy Far Far Away that were either ill-conceived to begin with, or became overcomplicated as the years went on and new stories piled up. One detail that was confusing from the get-go is exactly how fast hyperspace is. For one thing, the film characters call it “light speed”, when it’s clearly got to be way, way faster than that—in fact, the films also tend to suggest each transit takes no more than a few hours; no one brings a change of clothes before departing Tatooine for Alderaan, and Luke doesn’t seem very stiff or grubby when he exits his X-wing on Dagobah.

So maybe you can’t blame the Expanded Universe for never really ironing out these inconsistencies; they didn’t have much to go on. When I raised this topic to the others, David Schwarz pointed out that West End Games’ original table for the transit times depicted in the original trilogy (below) actually contained a typo that suggested all these trips took a matter of days, not hours—which might have been more sensible, but certainly doesn’t seem to be the films’ intent, and isn’t that more important?

Meanwhile, one of my own favorite examples dates all the way back to Heir to the Empire—the Star Destroyer Chimaera, with a hyperdrive faster than even the Falcon‘s, takes five days to travel from Myrkr to Wayland. Look for those two planets on the Essential Atlas‘ galactic map and you’ll find them practically right on top of each other at the coordinates N-7. So if it takes five days to go that tiny distance (and it’s not a freak detail; multi-day hyperspace journeys factor into the Thrawn trilogy alone on multiple occasions), how the hell did Luke survive a trip from Hoth (K-18) to Dagobah (M-19) without his body eating straight through that flight suit? Read More