Rogue One merged with A New Hope: Some thoughts and my own little headcanon

Posted by Rampant Coyote on March 22, 2017

Stop now if you haven’t seen Star Wars: Rogue One. Unless you don’t mind spoilers. The video includes the last couple of minutes of Rogue One, and I mumble on about it a little bit . You have been warned.

 

One last chance…

 

So… Rogue One won’t be out for home release for a couple more days, so I don’t want to consider too deeply how this guy obtained the footage. BUT… he did what we were all did in our minds at the end of Rogue One. He merged it into the original film that started it all, Star Wars (AKA Star Wars Episode 4: A New Hope), with only the briefest of transitions to indicate some time has passed – minutes or hours. Now we can skip the opening crawl.

It’s not perfectly seamless, but it’s very, very cool… and says a great deal about how the well the filmmakers staged the end of Rogue One.

Watching the two together, I reconciled a few issues in my own mind. In Rogue One, Darth Vader takes an active role, trying to prevent any escape and stop the plans from getting out. They’ve only got a shuttle’s worth of Imperial Stormtroopers to work with, so he really has no choice. He’s got to act fast. He fails. A corvette gets away… one of the most common ships in the galaxy.

From there, he has to go back to a star destroyer, and we know from the other movies that tracking a ship through hyperspace is difficult. But they manage to do so. The damage has already been done, but now they cripple the Tantive IV. Game (apparently) over. As C3PO says, “There will be no escape for the Princess this time.” Vader’s a bit more leisurely, and has a star destroyer’s worth of Imperial Stormtroopers this time. He lets those guys attack against a much more organized defense, but the end is all but inevitable.

As was this video, eventually.

I imagine the video being taken down by Disney’s lawyers is also inevitable, so enjoy it while you can.

There are a couple other pieces of headcanon I have now developed since seeing Rogue One. One is… the rebels are now in possession of the only full set of plans that includes the Death Star’s weakness. The Empire now knows that Galan Erso sabotaged the design of the Death Star and gave it a critical weakness, but they don’t know exactly what he did. They want those plans almost as much as the rebels do. Now, they can keep the weakness secret until they can figure it out themselves, so destroying all trace of the plans is an acceptable Plan B.

While that’s the official priority, Darth Vader’s got more interesting fish to fry. For one thing, he wants the location of the secret rebel base–although it would seem like he’s got prisoners from the remains of the fleet at Eadu who might know the answer to that one. I’m going to assume that time is of the essence, and that most of the rank-and-file soldiers have not been told the name of the planet or where it is on the star charts. They just have a base on a moon around a big ol’ gas giant, one of zillions. Princess Leia is guaranteed to know the details, and focusing on her means they can find the base before the rebels relocate their HQ again.

I imagine Vader is also very interested in why she was on her way to Tatooine. It’s kind of in the middle of nowhere, not on the way to anywhere else.

Okay, the other bit of headcanon I’m considering adopting. Why the gunner is ordered not to fire on the escape pod? That’s an oldie. Everyone assumes that the guy was a laser gunner. But there were tons of those guys. What if this was one of the tractor beam operators? They are pulling back any potential escapees? They don’t have many of those, they are short range only (established in other movies), and they don’t want to commit to dragging in a decoy while another pod with someone carrying the plans gets away.

Okay. Yes, I devote time and brainpower to thinking of these things. I won’t apologize. I’m a geek.

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