The Last Jedi - There At First.. wait

[PairO'Dice Lost]

There was at least one hyperspace accident in Legends:

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Pammant/Legends

where the realspace object - a planet - took massive damage.

Written by the same author that introduced the term "hypermatter" in the first place.

Actually, while the wiki article implies that the Quaestor collided with the planet while in hyperspace, the original sources just say this:

Invisible Hand was built in a factory in the tunneled Quarren colony world of Pammant. The planet was recently devastated with radioactivity and fractured to the core by a cataclysmic hyperspace accident involving the Republic's Star Battlecruiser Quaestor.

The Quaestor, a Republic Praetor-class battlecruiser, led a raid against the Separatist shipbuilding facilities at Pammant, where her hyperdrive was damaged by torpedo droids. The Quaestor's hyperdrive engaged, rocketing the great ship into the planet. The impact scattered radioactive particles through Pammant's atmosphere and fractured its core.

A "hyperspace accident" could indeed mean the cruiser collided with the planet while traveling through hyperspace, but could also mean, for instance, that the cruiser tried to enter hyperspace while within Pammant's gravity well and either failed or only momentarily succeeded before being forced back to realspace, the hyperdrive and/or engines were severely damaged, and the ship crashed into the planet in realspace; the fact that the term "rocketing" was used instead of "launching" or "jumping" or the like implies physical impact.

Here we have only one known indication in either Canon (pre-TLJ) or Legends of a hyperspace-related accident having any effect on a realspace object, where there is very little detail about what actually happened, the instance involved a damaged hyperdrive (and so might not have successfully jumped the Quaestor into hyperspace), and the instance was--as you pointed out--originally written by the same author who detailed hyperspace physics and presumably knew how hyperspace travel works. I'm not convinced that this portrayed or was intended to portray a ship hyperspacing into a planet.

Now, I could certainly accept that it was; continuity mistakes aren't uncommon, and after all we don't have a complete understanding of hyperspace physics and neither do they in-universe. But even if that's the case, it's a single example that goes against every other instance and explanation of hyperspace travel we have, such that while that incident occurring in a freak accident under specific circumstances may be plausible, being able to do that deliberately with no preparation or special hyperdrive modifications to carry out the Holdo Maneuver is very much not.

Today it occured to me that Last Jedi is totally a rehash of The Empire Strikes Back, despite what people have been saying to the contrary.

The Battle of Hoth was moved to the end.
The chase by the Super Star Destroyer was without asteroids.
Rey goes to see a reluctant master on an isolated rainy planet and goes into a Dark Side Cave.
Rey leaves said planet to face Kylo (despite the urging of her teacher, I believe to remember).
Trip to a super shiny and fancy planet that turns out to not be at all what they hoped.

It's history repeating itself, but with the important difference that Rey faces Kylo and wins.

...well, damn. I hadn't thought of equating Cloud City with the casino place, but yeah, there's some parallel there - including that they went there seeking an ally, and that ally wound up betraying them to the villains. The chase is a much vaguer connection to make, but still there to an extent. Dang, so, that means the only major scenes without some kind of parallel in TLJ are, what, "I am your father" and Han getting captured and frozen in carbonite? And the former is only barely averted by the decision to make Rey's parents nobodies.

They did a good job of changing enough things to not make the film look like a blatant rehash the way TFA was, but it really is more or less a remix of Empire, with the Throne Room scene from Return of the Jedi thrown in, isn't it?

Yeah, TLJ blatantly rehashes ESB and RotJ, it's just not as beat-for-beat as TFA was because it's interleaving two movies instead of copying one. I'm continually surprised that more people didn't notice that immediately while they were watching it (or worse, tries to argue to the contrary) 'cause it was nearly shot-for-shot in the throne room scene and the walkers-attack-Crait/Hoth scene.

In case you missed it before, I ranted wrote about that in detail before, upthread:

Spoiler: Plot Summary

Show

The movie opens with a bunch of Gallofree transports fleeing a Rebel Resistance base as a bunch of Imperial First Order Star Destroyers jump into the system, led by a Star Dreadnought Siege Dreadnaught.

The Rebels Resistance members narrowly escape with a rag-tag fleet, and the movie's protagonists split up. Luke Rey lands on Dagobah Ahch-To, a very rainy and remote planet not known to wider galactic society, where she asks Yoda Luke--a curmudgeonly old man living like a hermit in a little hut raising his own food--to train her, but he refuses because he feels Luke Rey is too reckless and undisciplined and because he doesn't want a repeat of the last time he helped train a powerful preteen Force-user, Anakin Skywalker Ben Solo, who was eventually seduced to the Dark Side by Palpatine Snoke. Luke Rey persists, and though she is ignored at first eventually the wise old Jedi Master relents.

We get a montage of the Jedi Master telling his pupil about the history of his Jedi Order, before it was destroyed. Detouring to a brief RotJ interlude, Obi-Wan Luke talks about how he couldn't redeem Anakin Ben, and Luke Rey says he's wrong:



Back to ESB, the Jedi Master shows his apprentice a hole in the ground with a powerful Dark Side presence, and the apprentice goes into the hole to face his her fears and insecurities. The movie gets a bit trippy, the apprentice faces great internal conflict, and slowly the face of Vader Rey's parents is revealed to be...his her own face!

Meanwhile, Luke Rey has a vision of Han and Leia Kylo on the far side of the galaxy, and feels that he she can save them if only she goes to them. She gets into a big argument with the Jedi Master about the vision and leaves to go meet up with them.


Back on the other side of the galaxy, Han and Leia Finn and Rose have snuck away from the main Rebel Resistance fleet in a beaten-up ship to go to the idyllic Cloud City Canto Bight, a neutral city in the current war known for gambling and fancy rich people stuff. They're searching for a top-class con man and smuggler, Lando Calrissian Maz Kanata's friend, to help them fix a little hyperspace problem. When they get there, the characters discover it isn't as idyllic as it seems, as beneath the surface the dirty work is done by Ugnaughts human slaves.

There, they run into Lando Maz Kanata's friend, are arrested by security forces, and are thrown into a jail cell together, where they have a conversation with Lando a different slicer for no particular reason who fills the same role; he offers help, they say they don't want it. In ESB Lando betrays them to the Empire first and then gives them access to a hyperdrive-capable ship and helps them escape, in TLJ he gives them access to a hyperdrive-capable ship and helps them escape first and then betrays them to the First Order, overall proving him less trustworthy than Han Finn originally thought. Oh, and their astromech buddy aids greatly in their escape with some novel tools and attachments.


Smash-cut to RotJ. Han and Leia Finn and Rose need to lead a small group into the Endor bunker Dreadnought to disable the device screwing over their fleet. To do so, they use an Imperial a First Order ship with a corresponding transponder, slip through the shields using some stolen codes--which an Imperial officer notices but lets go--and, surprise!, it's a trap, as they're surrounded by bad guys and captured. They escape thanks to timely intervention from their best buddy Chewie BB-8, who captures an AT-ST and starts shooting all the bad guys.

Luke Rey, meanwhile, has turned himself herself over to Vader Kylo Ren. They have a brief conversation on their way to see Palpatine Snoke, during which the Jedi claims there is still some good in the Dark Sider while the Dark Sider claims it is too late for him and the Jedi should join him instead (which is incredibly close dialogue-wise to the RotJ version). They walk out of the turbolift into a large throne room holding Palpatine Snoke on a throne surrounded by red-robed royal guards, with a small window looking out into space off to the side.

Palpatine Snoke taunts Luke Rey, takes off his her binders with the Force, and gloats about how he planted the seeds that caused everything to come to pass, how he will destroy the puny Rebellion, and how he will kill Luke Skywalker, complete with taking Luke's Rey's lightsaber and sticking it on the right arm of his throne and taunting the "Jedi Knight" about taking it back and striking him down. Luke Rey ends up helpless and weaponless before Vader Kylo while Palpatine Snoke assaults him her with Force powers, and in a shocking twist the Dark Side apprentice kills his master and the throne room starts disintegrating around them.


Smash-cut back to the start of ESB, where AT-ATs AT-M6s are attacking the secret Rebel base on Hoth Crait, a remote white planet with a base built into a mountain, complete with massive front door and secret back entrances. (To their credit, it's not a direct ripoff of the Hoth base visually, it's a ripoff of that and the ANH Yavin IV base.) Rebel Resistance soldiers dig trenches in front of the base with cylindrical anti-vehicle blaster cannons dotted along them, and the soldiers jump in, pointing their rifles toward the oncoming walkers as one of them looks at the walkers through macrobinoculars (in what is, again, almost shot-for-shot the opening of the ESB battle).

The walker slowly lumber forward until they get within range to destroy the shield generator front door while low-flying airspeeders that don't have the weapons to penetrate the walkers' armor fruitlessly distract them until they can come up with a crazy plan to take down the thing that will destroy the shield generator front door. Though the bad guys destroy their objective, the good guys escape to safety on the Millennium Falcon.