Our Little Starkiller Problem

Star Wars: The Force Awakens spoilers follow, out of necessity. But not that one.

Let’s get this out of the way first: I loved The Force Awakens. For reasons I’ll get into later I needed this film to be good.

It was. Is it flawless? No. There’s like three flawless films in existence and two of them are by Orson Welles. We do not speak of the third film.

That’s not what matters: what matters is that The Force Awakens is the Apple of Star Wars movies: it just works.

(I know, trust me, that some of you don’t feel the same way. This is not a Safe Space for you. Go read something you will un-ironically enjoy. You don’t even have to thank me for it later.)

However, there is one thing that threw me out of the film on first viewing, and the longer I sit with it — and the more I learn about what the official canon — the more I have a problem with it.

That one thing is the way that Starkiller Base’s plasma weapon works. Specifically the way that the destruction of the Hosnian system — Hosnian Prime and the other worlds on which the Republic Senate and the fleet is currently stationed — is visible light years away on Takodana.

A quick reminder: the First Order fires up Starkiller and fires a burst of solar plasma at the Republic. Later on Poe Dameron gives us the name of the Hosnian system. The Visual Dictionary by Pablo Hidalgo sets up the idea that the Senate rotates through the member worlds.

We see the plasma burst streak out of Starkiller and through space. Then we see that red streak over the sky on Takodana, where Maz Kannta’s castle keep stands. We hear people screaming because of the red streak in the sky. That causes Finn to turn around and see the streak, even though he’s almost on board a ship.

Cut to: the streaks obliterating Hosnian Prime and it’s subsidiary worlds.

Cut to: Finn running back to Han and back into the thrust of the plot. He says it was the Republic.

When we stepped out of the Vista Theater on Thursday night I brought this up with my friends because the sequence through me right out. I was so on board with the movie up until that part. Suspension of disbelief cranked up to 9 and everything. But there is no way you can see a planet blow up the second it does from light years away.

My friends assured me that it just had to be in the same planetary system. Which reads as a very Joss Whedon thing, but better that than just artistic license.

Look: the Force violates physics, and so does hyperspace travel which takes exactly as long as the storytellers need it to in every one of these movies. But light, man, light takes as long as it takes. That’s why you have hyperspace.

So Hosnian and Takodana must be in the same system, right?

Nope.

There it is, right in the Visual Dictionary. Hosnian Prime is just inside the borders of the Core Worlds, galactic East of the core. Takodana is out west in the Expansion Region. Starkiller Base is all the way out in the Unknown Regions, in the northwest. Probably the Portland system, which makes the First Order something worse than fascists: it makes them hipsters.

(Calm down. I have dear friends who just moved to Portland. It’s just a hacky, tacky joke. I’m probably just jealous. I am a white Gen Xer, after all.)

Anyway: there’s been no official explanation of just what in the hell is going on, so that means we have to do something we haven’t cared enough to do in a long while: chase a No-Prize.

For the uninitiated: the No-Prize was something Marvel comics editors used to give out to letter column writers who would go the step beyond pointing out a continuity error to actually come up with a reason why the error was not, in fact, an error but some weird twist.

Let’s start with what we know about Starkiller Base:

• It eats up a star in order to fire planet killing plasma bursts.
• Those bursts travel through hyperspace, as per recon pilot Temmin “Snap” Wexley (Greg Grunberg).
• The bursts are visible in real space.
• The detonations of those bursts are visible at impossible by conventional physics distances.

Now these bursts are not powered by a hyperdrive — which is what ships like the Millennium Falcon use to get from system to system. Instead they are hurled into hyperspace by Starkiller.

The means to do so may cause a rupture, or a “leak” into real space from hyperspace of the plasma energy shadow. The red streak we see isn’t the actual plasma then, but an “afterimage” of the streak in hyperspace.

This is in some ways a drawback for the First Order: they have this sniper rifle that kills planets but it uses tracers. It is possible to trace the fire back to it’s point of origin. (Thanks for that one Jonnie Chang.)

On the upside: it makes for a fantastic terror weapon. Everyone on the path of fire will see a streak in the sky. That’s enough to freak everybody out.

But what about the destruction of the planets? There’s still no way that we can see that.

And we don’t.

What we’re seeing is the impact of the plasma and the residual cast off shadows from that impact. We don’t see chunks of planets shattering from Takodana, but the hyperspace shadow of the plasma that is dancing around those chunks of planet.

So there we go: light still travels at the speed of light and hyperspace objects are plain weirder than we knew before because hyperspace is magic.

I’m sticking with this until Pablo Hidalgo gives us an official answer or one of you comes up with something better.

(If someone can work out why it is going right to left instead of left to right — other than the obvious fact that J.J. favors the left side of the frame — I would be very grateful. I can’t square the map to the film frame.)

And no, you do not get a No-Prize for saying “it’s stupid is a better answer.” That’s not how it works. Ask Stan Lee if you’re confused. My work here is done.