Princess Leia's big risk

Princess Leia took an excessive risk, one that jeopardized the entire Rebel Alliance, as highlighted by a scene that should have been rewritten to make her ignorant of the situation instead.

"They're tracking us."

After Han, Luke, Chewie, Leia, and the droids escaped from the Death Star, Leia asserted that the Imperial forces allowed them to leave because they were tracking the Millennium Falcon, hoping to be led to others in the Rebel Alliance. She suddenly dismisses this belief, however, even though she has no reason to risk leading the Imperials to their quarry. As the only person onboard to know the location of the rebel base, as well as the person on whom Han was counting for payment, Leia held all the cards. If she suspected they were being tracked, she should have insisted that they land the Falcon and board another ship.

Switching ships was not a dominant strategy, but as the Imperials had no other leads on the location of the rebel base, there was no immediate need to reach the base and analyze the data carried by R2-D2. A delay if not being tracked would be a minor nuisance and would be greatly outweighed by the risk of having the base destroyed if indeed being tracked, given that Leia felt the tracking to be relatively likely (at least enough to mention). Everything that had been shown about Leia's character, to that point, indicated that she was astute enough to understand these risks and take the precautionary route.

And yet she allowed them to proceed to the rebel base, to where the Imperials did indeed track them. This out-of-character moment could have been avoided by simply removing the relevant lines of dialogue and focusing on Leia's hope that a weakness could be found, once the Death Star plans were analyzed. Ignorance isn't flattering, but it's easier to justify.

Of course, the rebels did find a weakness, which they were able to exploit, in part because the Death Star had to maneuver around a planet to get a clear shot at the moon on which their base was located. Quite ironic that the Death Star, which was designed solely to house a laser capable of destroying a planet, had to wait because a planet was in its way. [Yes, Alanis, this is irony.]