Star Wars Just Doubled Down on its Weirdest Plot Hole, But Our Theory Could Fix It

The map to Luke Skywalker. The secret location of Kamino. The path to another galaxy in Ahsoka. The hyperspace wayfinders to Exegol in The Rise of Skywalker. Throughout the Star Wars saga, people are constantly trying to figure out how to get from one place in the galaxy to another, which frequently creates huge problems because no one seems to have any idea where anything is.

The absence of crucial cartographic knowledge is a strange and specific Star Wars trope, and now, with a tiny detail in the latest episode of The Bad Batch, the franchise has revisited it in a strange new way. In fact, the show seems to have made map problems in Star Wars even worse, implying that starships erase their flight plans automatically. But why?

In The Bad Batch Season 3 Episode 5, “The Return,” it’s revealed that our clone heroes have no idea where Tantiss Base is located. Considering Crosshair and Omega were just living there, and that they escaped from Tantiss in Episode 3, this is very strange. Why don’t Crosshair and Omega know where Tantiss is? Is this a plot hole, or a weird element of canon?

Within the current Star Wars canon, Tantiss is the location of secret cloning experiments conducted on behalf of Emperor Palpatine. The Bad Batch has linked these machinations with “Project Necromancer,” which is clearly part of how Palpatine somehow comes back to life four decades after coming down with a bad case of exploding.

In the old-school “expanded universe” canon, Mount Tantiss was located on the planet Weyland. This is apparently true of the current canon too, but the Bad Batch doesn’t seem to know anything about the name of the planet or its coordinates. But why? If Omega and Crosshair just flew from there, why didn’t they check to see where they’d been?

How do Star Wars’ Hyperspace maps work?

At the end of Episode 3, Omega and Crosshair left Tantiss Base in a stolen Imperial Shuttle. When Episode 4 begins, it’s revealed they have to land on another planet because the shuttle was severely damaged during their escape, and by the time they catch up with the rest of the Bad Batch in Episode 5, they’ve ditched the ship. This, in theory, could explain why they don’t know where anything is. If they jumped into hyperspace in Episode 3 and then crashed in Episode 4, it’s possible the ship’s maps were destroyed.

But the location of Tantiss is very important, and Omega and Crosshair jumped to lightspeed on their own. Did they just not notice where they’d been? We could blame the damaged shuttle; maybe Omega got a quick look at their hyperspace route but didn’t really pay attention because the struggling ship was already about to drop out of hyperspace. This theory seems plausible enough... unless there’s a deeper wrinkle.

We know Palpatine loves keeping planets hidden. The cloning planet Kamino is the best example in the prequels, and the Sith fortress Exegol in the sequels. But how did he pull this off? Well, because Crosshair and Omega have no clue where Tantiss Base is, and because they never once mention the planet Weyland, it seems likely that any Imperial traffic in and out of this secret facility automatically has its hyperspace records erased.

In fact, this seems like the only way to keep an entire planet a secret. If Palpatine wants to keep all of that info locked down, he’d have to make sure all Imperial ships automatically erase their hyperspace flight plans as soon as those flight plans are completed. The ships know where they’re going, but their operators don’t, and anyone in the Empire who wants to keep their trachea intact isn’t about to go poking around for answers.

Does this mean that the entire Empire is jumping into hyperspace without knowing where they’re going half the time? Based on what we’ve seen in the rest of Star Wars canon, there’s nothing to disprove this theory. If you work for the Empire, you’re not just working for the Dark Side, but also quite literally in the dark.

The Bad Batch is streaming on Disney+.

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