We will pry the Skywalker saga from Disney’s cold dead hands

Disney bought Lucasfilm 2012. We saw the first big fruit of that labor, Star Wars: The Force Awakens, in 2015, and it went over pretty well. Sure, some fans critiqued the film for following the template of the original Star Wars movie too closely — even George Lucas thought it lacked originality — but it made a boatload of money, and overall people were pleased and eager for more.

Since then, we’ve had an explosion of Star Wars media, more than we ever got when Lucasfilm was running things: two more mainline Star Wars films, a couple of side stories, two Star Wars TV shows and many more on the way. There have been hits, but there’s also been a fair bit of blowback, much of which seems to stem from Lucasfilm knowing that it wants to make more Star Wars stuff, but not knowing what kind.

The most obvious example of this is the one-two punch of 2017’s The Last Jedi and 2019’s The Rise of Skywalker. While The Force Awakens was criticized for hewing too closely to tradition, The Last Jedi was blasted for breaking with it. You know how Rey’s parentage was set up as something important and mysterious? Forget that, she’s nobody. You know how Supreme Leader Snoke was set up as some kind of Emperor-like figure? Well, he’s dead now. This iconoclasm was right there in the text: “Let the past die,” Kylo Ren says. “Kill it if you have to.”

The Last Jedi was an attempt, however inelegant, to drag Star Wars somewhere it hadn’t been before, but the backlash was so fierce that Disney overcorrected with The Rise of Skywalker, burying itself in formula. Rey’s mysterious parentage matters again. Snoke the Emperor stand-in was gone so they brought in the Emperor himself. When Lucasfilm is threatened, they seem to retreat to the safe place of retelling the Skywalker Saga or letting the characters from that story carry the day…and sometimes they go to that safe place even when things are going well…

The Star Wars-ification of The Mandalorian

I am a casual Star Wars fan. I enjoyed the original trilogy, kind of shrugged my shoulders at the sequel trilogy, yawned through Rogue One and skipped Solo: A Star Wars Story like the rest of the world.

Honestly, I don’t know if I was ever truly excited by a Star Wars thing until 2019, when The Mandalorian premiered on Disney+. Now here was something worth writing home about. Everything was identifiably Star Wars — the spaceships, the aliens, the costumes — but the show itself felt inspired by the things that inspired the original trilogy, namely westerns and samurai movies, rather than like a retread. And there was a new lead character, Din Djarin the Mandalorian, whose quest had nothing to do with Luke Skywalker, or Han Solo, or Darth Vader: he had to return the adorable and mysterious Baby Yoda to his people. What possibilities! We could see a whole planet full of Yoda-type aliens, something the mainline movies had never explored. This could be the start of a bold new adventure.

I started having concerns pretty early in the second season, when it became clear that the producers on The Mandalorian were less interested in striking out on their own and more in using the show to import other parts of the existing mythology. Even the season 2 premiere, which was mostly excellent, introduced Cobb Vanth, a figure who originated in a series of Star Wars books. After that, we met Bo-Katan Kryze, a Mandalorian warrior who first appeared in Star Wars: The Clone Wars. Then we ran into Ahsoka Tano, an ex-Jedi who also got her start on that show. Boba Fett turned up after being left for dead in 1983’s Return of the Jedi. The show became a boarding house for wayward plot threads.

And mind you, I enjoyed spending time with these characters (Ahsoka especially made a great impression), but that The Mandalorian was becoming less about the Mandalorian — who was brand new to the franchise — and more a vehicle to continue the stories of characters who were already established elsewhere, which meant they brought their baggage with them. The world of possibility that got me so excited at the end of season 1 was shrinking.

And then, of course, they brought in Luke Skywalker, once again played by Mark Hamill with help from some very convincing de-aging technology. The climax of The Mandalorian’s second season was that a character from the original trilogy showed up.

Although that’s not quite fair. That episode, “The Rescue,” also featured a heartbreaking goodbye between Din Djarin and Baby Yoda, whose relationship formed the emotional core of the show. Still, it was odd that the Mandalorian was getting shown up on his own series. But if they leave it there and keep Luke’s involvement minimal, The Mandalorian still has a chance of becoming its own beast, of breaking new ground in the Star Wars Cinematic Universe, of shocking the system and reminding us of the boundless invention that made the original movie such a hit.

But after watching The Book of Boba Fett, I kind of doubt that’s going to happen…

Why is Boba Fett a secondary character on his own show?

The Book of Boba Fett, which is running now on Disney+, is ostensibly about former bounty hunter Boba Fett taking over Jabba the Hutt’s old criminal empire on Tatooine. And it is about that, but the last two episodes — like, two full episodes out of a set of seven — have featured Boba Fett in only one scene between them. Instead, we follow Din Djarin as he deals with the fallout of The Mandalorian season 2 finale, meets up with his old Mandalorian brethren, fumbles with the Darksaber and tries to visit Baby Yoda, which gives the show an opportunity to bring in Luke and Ahsoka again. (And this time Mark Hamill wasn’t involved at all, so Disney doesn’t need the legacy actors in order to feature their characters.)

Whether it’s flashing back to Boba’s time with the Sand People or catching us up with Din and the gang, The Book of Boba Fett seems like it would rather do anything than advance the story of Boba Fett. I thought things were heating up when a pair of Jabba’s cousins — the Twins — were brought on to menace Boba, but they leave almost as soon as they’re introduced. Most of the show just seems to be marking time before Lucasfilm does what it really wants to do: rope in legacy characters so viewers can get a nice shot of nostalgia. And if the rumors are true, we’re not done with the famous cameos.

Why are these shows so hesitant to strike out on their own? I don’t know. Maybe Disney is still smarting from the backlash to The Last Jedi. Maybe they’re just trying to give the people what they think they want, or maybe SW masterminds Dave Filoni and Jon Favreau would just rather play in the sandbox they already have than make a new one.

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away that only had, like, eight people living in it

Whatever the reason, I don’t see the Star Wars universe expanding beyond these self-imposed bounds anytime soon. The upcoming Obi-Wan Kenobi series will feature Ewan McGregor back in the title role and Hayden Christensen back as Anakin Skywalker, from the prequel films. I’m sure it will be fun to watch, but by necessity it can’t take things anywhere new; it has dominoes to set up for the original trilogy. The same could be said of the upcoming show Andor, a spinoff of Rogue One. There’s a little more wiggle room there since the characters aren’t as well known, but the stories can only go to so many places, even with a second season already ordered.

That said, some of the forthcoming spinoffs do go farther afield. There’s talk of one series, for example, set during the High Republic era, hundreds of years before the Skywalker saga when the Jedi were at the height of their power. Lucasfilm has been exploring the High Republic era through a new publishing initiative, and it has indeed introduced a lot of new characters and stories.

In fact, outside of the movies, there’s a lot of Star Wars content that explores new horizons, from the Knights of the Old Republic video games to the many Star Wars novels. But will that originality transfer to the screen, or will this hypothetical new show revolve around some distant ancestor of Luke and Leia’s? The future of Star Wars is wide open, but it’s up to Disney and Lucasfilm whether they actually want to actually explore this wild weird galaxy or keep circling the same block.

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