Matt Yglesias takes a break from politics to talk about what's really on everybody's mind: How the Star Wars prequels have made the timeline of the Star Wars universe almost completely incoherent.

I had this problem with the prequels at first, but the short, unhappy reign of Chimperor Bush has shown us that wholesale societal change can happen on a very compressed timeframe. We know this from history -- for extreme-but-similar-to-the-situation-in-Star-Wars examples, consider the Russian Revolution or the rise of Nazism -- but watching the drastic changes in my own country since 9/11/01 has certainly brought this lesson home. Twenty or so years is plenty of time for a small group of people to seize control and completely change the way a society operates without anybody realizing what's going on until it's too late.

It's happened before in less.

(UPDATE: Although one of Matt's commentors is right that Obi-Wan ages much, much faster than everybody else during the same span. That is a big problem: he should be 50 at most in Episode 4. There are a ton of little problems like this, all stemming for Lucas's laziness as a writer. The incredibly rapid discrediting of the Jedi Matt mentions is another, though somewhat easier to explain away.

I'm not saying the prequels didn't screw everything up -- just that I'm now much more willing to believe that a small group of people could seize complete control of a Republic and completely eliminate through effective propaaganda nearly all vestiges of the old system in far less than 20 years.)

My big problem with Star Wars is that in a huge galaxy the same group of people keep running into each other over and over again. It's completely unbelievable. And Darth Vader built C-3PO, but nobody ever saw fit to mention this before now? Uncle Owen buys the same exact droid twice, the one built by his stepbrother, who later flew off with it on the day his stepmother died before turning into the second evilest man in the universe -- but never mentions the connection? Come on. And now [SPOILER] Chewbacca's [/SPOILER] going to meet Obi-Wan and the droids in the third one? Coincidence after coincidence after coincidence, all stemming from Lucas's inability to create a new Star Wars property that would be worth seeing without endless shout-outs to the old movies.

Just awful.