So far I’ve tried to stick with problems in the films that were avoidable even taking into account the change in technology between the original trilogy and the prequel trilogy.  And that’s how I want to keep it.  In this next section I’ll discuss places where Lucas just cold punched holes in the plot of his own movies.  As I was pulling this section together, I realized that all but one of the following gripes somehow involved my favorite character from all of the movies, Obi-Wan Kenobi.  Of course, a good chunk of the story does follow Obi-Wan, so I can’t be too surprised.  I suppose I should do the prudent thing and let you, dear reader, decide what this all means.

One of the most major problems deals with Obi-Wan’s training, which he’s about to finish at the beginning of The Phantom Menace.  Qui-Gon clearly trains Obi-Wan Kenobi.  There isn’t any point during The Phantom Menace that would indicate otherwise.  And yet Obi-Wan specifically refers to Yoda as his trainer in The Empire Strikes Back during one of his ghost voice-overs.  It could be argued that Yoda finished Qui-Gon’s training in between The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones, and that would indeed be a great solution to this conundrum.  Yet Lucas chose to ignore this simple error that could have been easily solved with two lines of dialog in Attack of the Clones.

And speaking of ghosts and Obi-Wan’s training, why is it that Obi-Wan must train to speak with Qui-Gon after Qui-Gon has departed, but Luke can see Jedi Ghosts no problem, without any training?  At the end of Revenge of the Sith, Yoda indicates to Obi-Wan that he will be learning how to communicate with Qui-Gon via peyote hallucinations or something.  He’s to commune with Qui-Gon while watching over Luke on Tatooine.  That way he can learn how to live forever as a blue ghost.  It takes training not only to become a blue ghost, but to be able to communicate with blue ghosts as well.  Even so, Luke has no proper training to be able to speak with Obi-Wan in Return of the Jedi.  And he sees the whole lineup of blue ghosts at the end of Return of the Jedi.  (I exclude the scene at the beginning of Empire Strikes Back because Luke is near death and could arguably be closer to Obi-Wan’s astral planeimibobber).

Now, I’ll play the word game and look over a potentially major inconsistency between the original trilogy and the prequel trilogy.  Obi-Wan explicitly says, “I don’t seem to remember ever owning a droid.  Very interesting.”  Note that Obi-Wan stipulates that he did not own the droid (which is disingenuous at best, as he sure did use him like he owned him).  So we can let that one slide.  But why is it that R2D2 doesn’t seem to thing that it would be good to tell everyone all of the crazy shit he knows?  Hey Luke, I think that crazy dude in the mask may actually be your father.  C3PO’s memory was wiped at the end of Revenge of the Sith, so that’s explained, but R2D2 has no excuse.

And last for this section, Obi-Wan says in A New Hope that Anakin was the best star pilot in the galaxy, and that he was a great pilot when Obi-Wan met Anakin.  Now, this is obviously why that insufferably boring (and not to mention physically impossible) pod race takes such a chunk of The Phantom Menace.  The race is supposed to establish that Anakin is an awesome pilot.  And it does, sort of, if you qualify being good at video games being a good pilot.  I mean, I had a flight simulator when I was a kid, and I kicked the shit out of that thing on a daily basis.  I don’t think Anakin was any better at pod racing than I was at those simulators.  Even though we barely see Anakin fly, ever, at all, in the prequels, except during the pod race and the slapstick scene at the end of The Phantom Menace in which a bumbling child destroys a giant spaceship, Anakin is still touted as the best fighter pilot/space pilot in the history of the Force.

Read part IV here.