I've been sick the past couple days, and (on an only somewhat related note) decided to watch all of the Star Wars movies in their chronological order (with the obvious exception that Solo is unavailable on the Disney+ platform, yet). Doing so reveals several story line inconsistencies I hadn't anticipated/remembered. Three that I recall off hand (spoliers follow??):
1) In A New Hope: Obi Wan says to Luke "I don't seem to recall ever owning a droid" when in the first three movies he spends considerable time with R2. And in the context he appears to be unfamiliar with R2.
2) In Empire: Luke asks Leia about her mother and she relates she has a few early memories of her. But, of course Padme dies during childbirth.
3) Continual references of Obi Wan (in ROTJ) to Yoda training him, but he spent most of his time training with Qui Gon and there is zero mention of that.
Also, until doing this I had long regarded The Return of the Jedi as a horrible movie (better only than the Phantom Menace) and lauded Empire as the greatest of the series. In the context of all the movies in this order, ROTJ is actually pretty consistent with the overall theme and level of silly introduced in the first three movies and Empire is an outlier with many slow and dragging portions of the plot as Luke goes to Degobah. Without that context Luke's excursion there was fun, intriguing, and interesting, for me, to learn about Yoda and see him in what I had originally thought was his natural environs. But of course we learn that he's just a ***** that went into hiding when things didn't go his way.
Finally, it becomes all too obvious from Rogue and following that a) the Empire is unable to correct their Death Star flaws/weaknesses b) they really have little to no other ambition than to blow up planets. Apparently, that is the ultimate power in their eyes because they devote a lot of their energy to it, once Palpatine tricks everyone into making him emperor, at least. I guess they have a point there.
