Star Wars Retcons The Force Awakens With New Return Of The Jedi Sequel

Star Wars is retconning Star Wars: The Force Awakens with its upcoming and long-awaited Return of the Jedi sequel. Over the years, and especially following the launch of Disney+, Star Wars’ storytelling has become more interconnected than ever before. Previously, each Star Wars trilogy (and the animated shows) chronicled a specific period and era of the Star Wars timeline, contributing to the overall saga but never fully intruding on one another’s territory.

There’s a 30-year gap between Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens, which, even after the divisive release of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker and before the advent of Disney+, was filled with a handful of novels and comic books, mostly concerned with the First Order’s rise, Palpatine’s utterly surprising resurrection, and the political issues within the New Republic.

Now, however, since the debut of The Mandalorian in 2019, Star Wars has been dutifully expanding the New Republic era’s history, including major events and character crossovers such as Ahsoka Tano’s meeting with Luke Skywalker, Bo-Katan Kryze’s and the Mandalorians’ reclamation of Mandalore, Boba Fett’s power grab on Tatooine, and even the discovery of a secondary galaxy. Still, none of these incidents really disturbed Star Wars’ continuity in the lead-up to The Force Awakens.

The same can’t really be said for the upcoming events teased by Ahsoka season 2’s first teaser trailer, however, as Star Wars Rebels’ Imperial Grand Admiral Thrawn returns from exile and wages an all-out war against the New Republic. In the trailer, the Chiss tactician says, “Citizens of the glorious Empire. I have returned. I took an oath to protect the Empire; I therefore declare war on the Rebel Alliance.”

Therein lies the problem. How are audiences supposed to believe that a massive war occurred between Thrawn’s Imperial Remnant and the New Republic just a few years after Return of the Jedi without any mention of it in the Star Wars sequel trilogy or its tie-in media? The scale of this conflict should affect the New Republic’s power in the galaxy and the First Order’s rise. And yet, Thrawn’s return wasn’t even a possibility until he was first name-dropped in The Mandalorian season 2, which arrived in 2020, nearly a year after the end of the sequel trilogy.

Ahsoka Season 2’s Heir To The Empire Storyline Puts Star Wars’ Continuity At Risk

Custom Image by Yailin Chacon

Basically, Ahsoka season 2 now functions as a sequel to Star Wars Rebels, a bridge between Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens, and as Dave Filoni’s new canon version of Timothy Zahn’s classic Star Wars Legends story, Heir to the Empire. Thrawn’s return by itself wouldn’t have too big an impact; if he’d assimilated into the Imperial Remnant, which would later evolve into the First Order, that would be fine. Taking it upon himself to incite a full-scale war against the “Rebels,” however, is a different matter entirely.

The entire point of the First Order is that they were consolidating power in secret; they didn’t stage their first attack until 28ABY (25 years after Return of the Jedi), when they bombed the New Republic Senate chambers in an incident known as the Napkin Bombing. Even then, the First Order didn’t outright claim it as their own attack.

At the same time, Leia Organa was ousted from the Senate for failing to disclose her true parentage, creating a rift in the New Republic’s political sphere and allowing the First Order to operate in the galaxy without interference until they publicly declared themselves in 29ABY. In response, Leia created the Resistance to combat the First Order’s increasing threat.

Surely, though, if Thrawn had declared all-out war against the Republic just a few years after the Empire’s official fall in 5ABY (Ahsoka season 1 takes place in roughly 9–12ABY), the New Republic would have been much more aware of and willing to combat any perceived threats against it. They likely wouldn’t have demilitarized their forces to such an extent (which is why Leia felt compelled to form the Resistance), and it would have been much harder for the First Order to infiltrate the Senate with its spies and political supporters. Those events make very little sense in this new context.

Either Thrawn’s war against the “Rebels” proves so easy to diffuse that Ahsoka season 2’s storyline will feel painfully unnecessary, or it will have such a big impact on the galaxy that the subsequent rise of the First Order and the New Republic’s political divide a mere 15 years later will become contradictory. That doesn’t mean Ahsoka season 2 won’t be good on its own or even genuinely exciting to watch — Thrawn has always been a compelling villain — but it does make Star Wars‘ continuity feel much less stable.

Of course, part of the problem with Star Wars‘ New Republic and sequel trilogy storytelling is that there was no firm plan in place when Lucasfilm and Disney began development of Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Each movie was essentially made up as they went along, leading to the discrepancies between The Force Awakens, Rian Johnson’s Star Wars: The Last Jedi, and J.J. Abrams’ The Rise of Skywalker. Star Wars has been trying to tie everything together ever since, but issues like this will continue to arise the more it attempts to fill in the blanks between trilogies rather than focusing on new eras.

Ahsoka season 2 will premiere on January 20, 2027, exclusively on Disney+.

Release Date

August 22, 2023

Network

Disney+

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