How Does the First Order Pay for Their Ships and Military?

In Rogue One, Jyn Erso finds six mysterious project names before reaching Stardust, the Death Star file. Their threatening names make them sound like six more Imperial superweapons. However, canon tells a more complicated story: three helped hide parts of the Death Star program, one built the Empire’s new army, and two remain almost complete …

Luke Skywalker had defeated the Emperor, but winning a war did not tell him how to rebuild the Jedi. In this fan-made story, that search brings him to the abandoned Jedi ruins on Dantooine, where an ancient presence is waiting. The stranger knows both the Jedi and the Sith from the inside, and he does …

San Diego city meetings are not known for heavy breathing, black capes, or threats against the Rebel Alliance. That changed when a speaker dressed as Darth Vader stepped to the microphone during an August 19 council committee meeting. He had only a few minutes, a voice changer, and a very modern piece of surveillance technology …

Darth Vader’s birth scene in Revenge of the Sith moves so quickly that the operation can feel almost immediate. One moment Anakin is burning on Mustafar, and soon after, the mask closes over his face. But the film never shows a clock, a calendar, or any clear measure of the time passing. To work out …

Anakin Skywalker’s green interceptor looks like one more piece of machinery left behind when his life collapsed on Mustafar. The movie never returns to it, and Vader soon becomes linked with very different ships. That makes the fighter easy to forget, even though it was sitting beside one of the most important moments in Star …

A Sarlacc is one of the nastiest ways to die in Star Wars. It waits beneath the sand, catches anything that comes close, and can keep its victim trapped for years. Yet Tatooine has another monster capable of turning that famous death pit into a hunting ground. The strangest part is not only what this …

For a few seconds during the Boonta Eve Podrace, The Phantom Menace cuts to a two-headed announcer who talks over himself in two languages. He is strange enough to be memorable, yet the movie gives viewers almost no time to understand what they are looking at. That makes his apparent disappearance from later films feel …

The Tatooine stretch of The Phantom Menace feels focused on a small group trying to repair a ship and get back to Naboo. Look more closely, though, and several people connected to the Force pass through the same part of the story. Some are central to the plot, while others appear so briefly that a …

Grievous was one of the most heavily modified cyborgs in Star Wars, yet his final moments look strangely easy to ignite. Obi-Wan fires several shots, and the Separatist general suddenly burns from the inside like his body was packed with fuel. The scene is quick enough that the important setup is easy to miss. To …

The prequel cast is suddenly closer to Star Wars than it has been in years. Hayden Christensen is playing Anakin again, Ewan McGregor keeps asking for more Obi-Wan, and old Clone Wars stories are finally appearing in live action. That makes one reunion idea feel far less impossible than it did a decade ago. The …