Star Wars TV Shows To Retcon Rise Of Skywalker
The new wave of Star Wars TV shows will be fixing some of the problems from Rise of Skywalker.
This article is more than 2 years old
Star Wars fans are nothing if not an opinionated and passionate bunch. This can mean incredible praise and hype when things are good and rather toxic derision when things don’t work. Such has been the case in recent years with the franchise which has trotted out a tangled mess of a final movie but made an incredible comeback of sorts with its recent small-screen run. And now it looks like Star Wars storytellers are going to use The Mandalorian to begin to rectify the sins of past movies by beginning to retcon events in The Rise of Skywalker.
Star Wars, as a franchise has had so many storytellers in its group, especially after George Lucas relinquished those duties for the sequel trilogy. Having things get a bit muddled and messy in this galaxy was maybe inevitable. But considering the amount of shade Star Wars fans and critics threw Rise of Skywalker’s way, it makes sense that Mandalorian writers would possibly want to amend some storylines. They can’t rewrite or re-film the movie, but they can at least try to have the former make a bit more sense. And that appears to be their plan for future seasons, with some nuggets already thrown in along the way. Series creator and showrunner Jon Favreau has said he wants to clean up some of those plot holes with things like the emergence of Palpatine’s clones and other odds and ends.
Considering the overwhelming success of The Mandalorian in the Star Wars universe, the show definitely now has the latitude and the eyeballs to start having some say over the franchise canon. It’s earned the right through the first two seasons which have been both a critical and rating success. The Season 2 finale “Chapter 16: The Rescue”, which featured some… surprises, ranked as its highest-rated episode. And as of the end of November, Disney+ users had reportedly logged more than a billion minutes streaming the show.
Jon Favreau wanting to rewrite some of the Star Wars history, or at least put it in a clearer context, isn’t a surprise. It was widely reported at the time that he, along with George Lucas, “hated” The Rise of Skywalker and the story it tried to tell to tie together the franchise. Fans had much the same feeling. It was a critical stumbling block at 51% on the Tomatometer and at times went out of its way to pretend like The Last Jedi didn’t even exist in the timeline.
Future seasons of The Mandalorian should have plenty in store especially considering it continues to work its way through the larger frame of the Star Wars franchise universe. And I very much suspect we continue to see bigger players enter the fray within the world and the plot arcs. It just makes too much sense considering how things have unfolded up until now. And it’s good to see that the show will at least attempt to clear up some of the fuzzier parts of the last movie. The franchise deserves at least that much.
