Star Wars Finally Fixes A Big Return Of The Jedi Plot Hole That We All Missed

Many of the decisions that Disney have made with Star Wars are up for debate, but one that I think was objectively right was deciding that everything is equally canon. Prior to Disney, the old Legends universe had tiers of canonicity, with the films being the “most” canon and everything else existing in a kind of vague fiction. But though it may cause a headache to the writers, Disney decreed that every Star Wars movie, TV show, video game, novel and comic they make is as canon as anything else.

One thing that we’ve seen as a result of this is writers solving some mysteries and tidying up some inconsistencies in the films. For example, the current Star Wars comic has devoted a lot of time to explaining what happened to Anakin’s blue lightsaber. The weapon fell into the pits of Cloud City in The Empire Strikes Back, then next appeared in Maz Kanata’s bar in The Force Awakens. While resolving this, Star Wars #4 also neatly tied up what happened to Luke’s X-Wing.

Confession time: even as someone who thinks they have a pretty good handle on Star Wars, I hadn’t even realized there was a mystery here to be solved. And it seems most people missed this one as well. However, it’s true that Luke arrives on Cloud City in Empire in his X-Wing and then leaves on the Millennium Falcon. So, what happened to that X-Wing?

Well, Star Wars #4 (which is set between Empire and Return of the Jedi) shows that Luke and Leia returned to Cloud City. Their objectives were to learn about carbonite freezing in order to rescue Han, search for Anakin’s saber and – it’s now been revealed – for Luke to retrieve his X-Wing.

So, now we know that Luke kept the craft he used to blow up the Death Star in A New Hope right the way through the Original Trilogy and into the Sequel Trilogy. The last we saw of it was in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, where Luke’s spirit lifted it out of the water to allow Rey to reach Exegol. We can assume she also used it to travel to Tatooine to bury Luke and Leia’s lightsabers in the final scene. I hope Rey takes care of it in future, too, because that X-Wing sure has some history behind it.