Is The E-11’s Stun Feature A Plot Hole?

There's one. Set for stun.

And then Princess Leia is instantly incapacitated, and then captured. The line has always intrigued me. A big part of the reason why is that it was the line of dialog that the Stormtrooper button played on the Kenner Imperial Troop Transport. I can't stress to you how amazing that was to have a little piece of the movie at home in the days before VHS home movies were a thing. But I was just watching A New Hope the other day, and something struck me. The E-11's stun setting is too effective to have only been used once in live action. Stun weapons were a big part of Bad Batch season one, as well as the final episodes of The Clone Wars. But I want to talk about about a couple of live-action sequences where it might have been the perfect weapon.

First let's talk about the effect itself. The Stormtroopers are notoriously inaccurate to the point that it has become an in-universe joke:


Unlike the blaster bolt, the stun setting fires an ever-expanding circle. It's virtually impossible to miss the target, as evidenced by how easily the Stormtroopers subdue Princess Leia on the Tantive IV. Wouldn't this have been a more effective weapon choice for the anti-marksmen Stormtroopers?

Aside from that general statement, we need to examine two specific situations. There was a massive Stormtrooper presence on Cloud City when Luke arrived. Darth Vader's mission was to capture, and not kill, Luke Skywalker. He devised an elaborate James Bond villain scheme to freeze his son in carbonite. Once he lured Luke to the carbon freezing platform, wouldn't a better and simpler plan have been to have some Stormtroopers pop out of hiding and fire a volley of stun blasts at him from all directions? It seems like escape would have been impossible.

Another scene happens to be one of my gear grinders from the recent Obi-Wan Kenobi series. It's a scene I wrote about HERE. When the Stormtroopers have Obi-Wan pinned in an underwater corridor of Fortress Inquisitorious, they fire a blaster volley at him, eventually compromising the glass that is keeping the seawater at bay. This is the equivalent of firing a gun inside a pressurized airplane. It seems like the E-11's stun feature was purpose-built for that exact scenario, yet it wasn't even considered.

Hopefully you've gathered that I'm not seriously bothered by this. There are storytelling reasons why these choices were made, but I like these Saturday articles to occasionally have a quirky talking point. Or a memberberries talking point, which I worked in with the Kenner ITT comment (score!). But that recent viewing of Episode IV did make me go "hmmmm" for a moment.

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