Current Events > What was Star Wars's jumping the shark moment? *spoilers*

(+) Yeah! (+)

The Sith dagger

honestly, and i might get shit for this, but it was when yoda started flipping around with a lightsaber

The Sith dagger

Both are f***ing stupid. Legends era Imperial Remnant is essentially just a bunch of "we learned nothing from the things that destroyed the Empire and have instead decided to double down on the idea of super weapons".

This.

As much as 'Somehow Palpatine returned' is bad writing in terms of execution (and generalized storytelling), it isn't exactly out of character for Palpatine to have that contingency.

The Sith dagger however is complete fucking bullshit. "Go find this dagger that happens to be associated with your lineage, that has the conveniently written runes in an illegal language, that is left next to the corpse of the dude who killed your parents, and said dagger had been modified to have perfect replica of the wreckage of the second Death Star shoved into its hilt, and go and take it, decipher the language, go to the right spot on the planet where the bulk of the Death Star crashed and hold it up to get pointed in the right direction to go find the vault"

It'd have been more believable if they had just had R2-D2 come out and say "Yeah, I stumbled upon Imperial data at some point in the last 30 years and already know where it is."

Yeah, in a way it's in keeping with Lucas viewing the Empire as a Fascist style autocracy. Hitler was obsessed with the idea of German turning the tide of the war with wunderwaffe (wonder weapons) like ridiculously large tanks, rocket and jet fighters, and the v1 and v2 rockets. All of which came far too late to actually make a difference in the war, or in the case of the ridiculously large tanks, were too large and dumb to do anything but sit there.

In the case of Star Wars though it's like "you guys could have just build like 500 more Star Destroyers and thus been able to patrol more to keep rebel cells under control instead of investing it all into one giant dumb weapon".

Ep9 as a whole aside probably the Ashoka series when it was established that literally anyone even with the worst possible aptitudes could tap into the force.

All so Sabine, a character who didnt even need the force could wield it.

The Sith dagger

Death Star funding aside, it actually tracks that they didn't have enough resources to patrol the Galaxy effectively. The Republic was like 1000 systems out of tens of thousands and the Republic was reorganized into the Empire, which only stood for ~24 years. Didn't quite have time to have the infrastructure to then patrol the entire galaxy.

If Palpatine had leaned on the cloning aspect sooner, he could've played a longer game before flexing the Empire's fascistic tendencies and build up the necessary infrastructure (trained officers, troops, ships, etc) before turning the Empire into his idealized police state governed by fear.

Even if the Empire had been around longer, they'd still need basically centuries to effectively govern the width of the inhabitable galaxy.

Ctrl f "Christmas special"

Have y'all truly forgotten?

I like how you include the Sun Crusher in that list.

That is like putting a nuclear bomb on a list of badly designed cherry bombs. EVERYONE who knows about the Sun Crusher mocks it for being basically a 12 year old's "well nuh-uh, my ship is the size of the Falcon but it can blow up stars and is made of magical invincible materials that lets it destroy capital ships by just flying through them and also Han Solo steals it because he is awesome and he should have kept it instead of that lame Millenium Falcon because my awesome ship is better!"

I think that one is on the "nah, that doesn't exist" level of recognition. But it also would not be a "jumping the shark" moment, to be fair.

The Christmas special was a fun side thing

midichlorians

Little does Luke know that the GALACTIC EMPIRE has secretly begun construction on a new armored space station even more powerful than the first dreaded Death Star.

The extended music number at Jaba's Palace in the RotJ Special Edition.

That scene perfectly encapsulates the vision shift that we see in the prequel films.

I feel like people overlook the problems with Return of the Jedi as a "jump the shark" moment because the franchise ended for a long time after the movie came out.

Making Leia Luke's sister after they already made out multiple times was
Ewoks.
Han was useless in the film.
The stuff with Jabba in the beginning is so removed from the rest of the plot. "Oh first we need to save Han before the important stuff can start"
Slave Leia.

The film's only saving grace is the stuff with Luke, Vader and the Emperor.

I stand by this. Except slave Leia was pretty chill.