Star Wars Characters Who Deserve Their Own Series

Mara Jade is the fan-favorite Star Wars character that was introduced by Timothy Zahn way back in his original Thrawn trilogy of novels. In the Star Wars EU, Mara was a very complex character: she became a servant of the Emperor at a young age, and she was left adrift and desiring to kill Luke Skywalker for years before having to team up with him to stop another round of Clone Wars. Now that it’s an open secret that we’re going to be getting a live-action pseudo-adaptation of Zahn’s original story in Ahsoka, it would be the perfect time to get a series focusing on what Mara Jade did in the long years following Palpatine’s death.

Yes, Star Wars fans, you can go ahead and say it: we love Timothy Zahn’s Star Wars novels, and in addition to giving Mara Jade her own series, her smuggler mentor Talon Kardde deserves one, too. In the original Thrawn trilogy, Kardde was basically a version of Han Solo that took over as the biggest name in smuggling after Jabba died rather than joining the Rebellion (at least, not right away). The simple truth is that we’ve deserved a proper Star Wars series focusing on the galactic fringe ever since plans for Star Wars: Underworld were scrapped, and Talon Kardde would be the perfect character to center such a series around. 

When Marvel got the license back to make Star Wars comics, they hit the ground running with a mixture of familiar characters and newer ones. The best of these newcomers is Doctor Aphra, a kind of amoral archeologist who was once forced to serve Darth Vader before faking her death and striking out to have her own misadventures. This character and her comics are filled with the kind of heart and humor that modern Star Wars often lacks, and since that awful Boba Fett show already introduced her Wookie comic companion Krrsantan, we think it’s past time she gets her own show in which to shine.

Some Star Wars fans may balk upon seeing Captain Rex on this list because, quite frankly, we’ve already seen so much of him, both in the original Clone Wars show and the later spinoff Rebels. But there are some fascinating gaps in Rex’s history, including the gap between his “retirement” and joining the Rebellion and the gap between his pre-A New Hope recruitment and his appearance (if you believe Dave Filoni) in the strike on Endor. This guy has been around for almost as many epic galactic events as R2-D2, and we’d love to see a series focusing on him as an old clone distrusted by others who must train a new generation of young warriors.

Darth Maul is what happens when a character that looks cool but is completely one-dimensional later and gets fleshed out later by better Star Wars writers. In The Phantom Menace, Maul was little more than a menacing cipher, but later writers turned him into everything from a mysterious gang lord to a kind of Sith Ronin out to kill Darth Vader, all before Obi-Wan Kenobi finally finished him off for good on the dusty plains of Tattooine. Maul’s onscreen cameos are always brief but memorable, and we’d love for him to have a live-action series to better explore this killer character and his murky motivations over the years since his first apparent death.

Most Star Wars fans agree that the Sequel Trilogy was a major failure, but the films had some amazing characters and performers, with the most impressive being Adam Driver’s character Kylo Ren. The character seems to have a cool backstory, complete with a seeming betrayal at the hands of Luke Skywalker and then creating his own mysterious Knights of Ren. 

But since all he got to do in the sequels was monologue and fight, we’d love for him to get a solo (so to speak) series exploring more of his journey with the Force and his plans for the First Order. And that Star Wars show could answer our biggest question: just who were the Knights of Ren, and why were we supposed to care when they went down like chumps in that last movie?