New Star Wars Films Won’t Use Expanded Universe Lore, Data Breathes Sigh of Relief

I love the Star Wars Expanded Universe. I love knowing that the second Death Star was secretly controlled by the brain of the perpetually surprised-looking bounty hunter droid from The Empire Strikes Back. I love that the Gamorrean guard in Return of the Jedi survived being eaten by Jabba’s rancor because he found a magic talisman in its stomach. I love the fact that a creature drawn by a seven-year-old was a real, official alien species that existed somewhere in the Star Wars universe. Until they finally threw in the towel this past April, I loved Lucasfilm Ltd.’s stupidly insane insistence that every officially licensed novel, comic, videogame, short story, TV show, roleplaying game, and reference book, no matter how outdated or incongruous, fit into a coherent, canonical narrative.

The Star Wars Expanded Universe is a mess and I love it.

The ultimate power in the universe

Some people seem to really hate the EU with the kind of passion that normal people hate racism or the Kardashians, and while I don’t know much about the European Union, I do know a thing or two about Star Wars. When I watch the original trilogy, I don’t think about how one day Luke’s going to fall in love with a ghost or Admiral Piett’s first name is “Firmus.” It’s possible to enjoy the movies for what they are and all the insanity, goofiness, and strangely intricate continuity of the Expanded Universe for what they are, as well.

 

Why do I exist?

What makes the Star Wars Expanded Universe unique among tie-in fiction is its inclusivity. In Star Trek, only the movies and TV shows count. In Star Wars, everything does, both the really great stories and the improbably awful ones. This expansive continuity can prove a hindrance to new tales at times, but more often than not it enriches the universe, and can make an otherwise forgettable story become something remarkable in its broader context.

The EU helped keep Star Wars alive between the movies, and it will always have a special place in my heart. But with a new trilogy on the horizon, the Internet is abuzz with speculation, no small part of which involves the Expanded Universe and what role it is destined to play in the sequels. While it would be sad to see (some of) the EU come to an end, I believe that Disney should forge their own path, and here are four reasons why.

1. Everyone’s dead

Hello, my name is LUKE SKYWALKER’S DEAD WIFE.

So let’s say J. J. Abrams decides that the sequel trilogy should follow the continuity of the Expanded Universe. He goes on Wookieepedia (the hilariously named Star Wars wiki) and starts mining for cool EU characters who could headline the new movies. “Whoa,” he says, “Han and Leia had a son named Anakin Solo? That’s so cool, there could be a great story about him having to both live up to the hero he was named after and overcome the dark heritage of that name. It would be a perfect way to tie together the legacies of both trilogies. His whole life everyone’s been expecting him to grow up to be either the next Luke Skywalker or the next Darth Vader, but now he’ll finally have the chance to show them that he’s more than just a name or a bloodline, his destiny is whatever he chooses to make of it, and—oh wait, no, he died horribly in an intergalactic war when he was a teenager.

“Well, that’s all right, because Han and Leia’s firstborn kids were twins named Jacen and Jaina. That could be cool, like if Luke and Leia knew that they were brother and sister from the beginning and that knowledge could have informed their adventures through the whole trilogy. Yeah, this could work! The two of them have some kind of ‘twin bond’ Force connection thing, maybe the bad guy could try to take advantage of that to turn them to the dark side, or maybe it’s a crucial part of his plan to take over the galaxy. I really like this idea of brother and sister coming of age together, I don’t think that’s been done too often in a Star Wars-type setting, and it would fit right into the Star Wars theme of family without rehashing the relationships we’ve seen before. Only, no, wait, I guess Jacen already became a bad guy or something and then his sister impaled him through the heart.

Half of the people in this picture are dead.

“Jeez, this is really not the kind of happily-ever-after I was expecting for Han and Leia. Two thirds of their kids have already been horribly murdered. That’s really kind of depressing. Maybe I’m looking at this from the wrong angle. Maybe I should leave Han and Leia’s family tragedies out of the picture and focus more on what Luke’s been up to. It says here he has a teenage son named Ben. That’s cool, I like how they named him after Obi-Wan, Luke’s first teacher. And apparently Luke’s wife is this smoking hot redhead . . . who used to be an assassin for the Emperor! Whoa, that’s awesome! There’s so much story potential here. Maybe her past comes back to haunt her in the form of someone she wronged who’s out for revenge, and Ben has to deal with the fallout from the war between the Empire and Rebellion as represented by his parents. Or maybe that could have happened if she hadn’t already been murdered by Han and Leia’s evil kid.

“Do we really want to tell the audience that Luke got married and had a kid but his wife died before the movie even started? No one’s going to expect Star Wars to be this depressing. I guess we could always just come up with some original characters the movie can be about. It sucks that we can’t use Luke, Han, and Leia’s family, but it looks like it’s already been pretty much wiped out. Well, at least we can still have the three of them appear in supporting roles. People are really going to love that. And how cool would it be to get some of these other classic characters up on the big screen again? Like the droids and Lando and especially Chewbacca—”

“Oh goddammit!”

2. Everyone who isn’t dead has too much baggage

Jaina Solo, not the main character of any movie.

The latest Expanded Universe novel featuring Luke, Han, and Leia takes place 45 years after Episode IV. Episode VII is set to come out 38 years after the original Star Wars, so already the characters’ current ages don’t match up with those of their actors, but the real problem is in everyone else’s ages. Jaina Solo, Han and Leia’s last surviving offspring, is already 36. She’s already had her coming-of-age adventures, gotten married, and will probably start having her own kids soon. Not that she isn’t still a viable character, but, fair or not, Jaina at her current stage of life is not the type of character I could see Disney choosing to be the star of the sequel trilogy.

And to be honest I don’t blame them. Jaina’s life has been nonstop adventure since she was an infant. She’s been in—and won—more fights than some comic book superheroes (and been kidnapped more times than Lois Lane, but we try not to talk about that). The main character of the sequels can’t be just anybody interesting enough to sustain a story for three movies, however; he or she is going to be the face of Star Wars for a new generation of fans. That character needs to be someone fresh, someone new, someone who hasn’t already been desensitized by decades of war and violence, someone who has never chopped off her own brother’s arm with a sword and carved his heart out of his chest while he was preoccupied with trying to save his infant daughter.

Now featuring 50% more gruesome deaths!

J. J. Abrams and Lawrence Kasdan would face even more problems if they choose to focus on the youngest member of the Skywalker-Solo clan, Jacen Solo’s daughter, Allana. In her latest appearance she was only nine, so the sequels would have had to jump forward almost ten years, creating an even bigger age disparity between Luke, Han, and Leia and their real-life counterparts. Perhaps even more important, however, is that same tragic background that Allana shares with Jaina. When we first met Luke, he was just a simple farmboy to whom nothing interesting or exciting had ever happened. We found out later that his past was a little darker than we’d thought, but that was revealed to us and to him at the same time in the course of the story; he wasn’t introduced with a dark and depressing back story from the get-go.

“This is Han Solo’s granddaughter,” J. J. Abrams could say.

“Oh, okay,” the audience would reply. “But where are her parents? Don’t we get to meet Han and Leia’s kids?”

“Well her mother is the foreign queen of some far-away space kingdom you’ve never heard of, and her father’s not in the movie because he died when she was five years old.”

“Oh my gosh, Han and Leia had a son . . . and he died off-screen? How? Why? What happened?”

“Well, it doesn’t really matter because the movie’s supposed to be about his daughter, not him, but if you have to know, he turned to the dark side so his sister killed him.”

“Really? Luke redeemed Darth Vader all by himself, but Luke, Han, Leia, and this kid’s sister, girlfriend, and daughter all together couldn’t save him?”

“Well . . . there were . . . reasons. But anyway, just forget about that. You’re here for a brand new adventure! You can find out about all the directly relevant old ones by buying about 45 full-length novels published by Del Rey and available now wherever fine books are sold.”

“This deal is getting worse all the time!”

“This deal is very fair and I’m happy to be a part of it.”

The problem is that there’s already so much back story. Yes, they could just not mention any of it, structure the film to introduce the characters as if they were brand-new creations with no baggage like murdered siblings or murdered parents—but that baggage informs who these characters are. Some utilitarian “You know, son, ever since your mother died . . .” exposition won’t convey how Ben’s life has been shaped by his mother being murdered by his cousin and mentor, and no screenwriter worth his salt is going to pause the movie and have a character explain the full repercussions of the half-baked plot of a spinoff novel that came out almost ten years ago.

The only workable option is to not outright contradict the EU, but not let its story points have any effect on the story or characters of the sequels either. Which would never happen, because no Star Wars film has ever cared about what the EU had to say about anything. Hundreds of Expanded Universe stories have had their details fudged in order to remain consistent with later canon. If the prequel era hadn’t been off-limits to the EU before the prequels were released, any stories set there would have been obliterated just as surely as any stories set in the timeframe of the sequels will be.

Take, for example, Star Wars: Legacy, a Dark Horse Comics series set 138 years after the movies. It chronicles the adventures of Cade Skywalker, the great-grandson of Luke, as he struggles to come to terms with his eponymous legacy and free the galaxy from the rule of an evil Empire and the Sith Lords who control it. Along the way, he has to rescue a princess and get help from a scruffy-looking smuggler and a wise old Jedi Master, one of the few who survived the surprise destruction of their order. It also features guest appearances by Luke Skywalker’s ghost.

We’re clearly the bad guys.

It is almost inconceivable that the sequels wouldn’t be undercut by knowing that a few decades later the Sith will return, the Empire will take over the galaxy again, the good galactic government will be reduced to a plucky Rebellion, and the Jedi will be betrayed, murdered, and scattered. J. J. Abrams shouldn’t let the future of the EU stand in the way of the future of Star Wars.

3. Disregarding part of the canon means breaking all of the canon

This single image destroyed all the canon. All of it.

When I talk about the sequels maintaining EU continuity, I mean just that. Some fans would have no problem with the sequel trilogy establishing that Luke and the Solos have no dead children or spouses, Chewbacca is alive, and Emperor Palpatine’s soul never returned from the grave in a series of clone bodies only to be defeated by a floating metal ball with a human face grafted to it (yes, this actually happened), just as long as Han and Leia have kids named Jacen and Jaina. It’s like a continuity tradeoff; if you keep the things they like about the EU, they won’t hold it against you if you ignore or overwrite the parts they’re ambivalent about. “Sure,” they say, “destroy our continuity, just don’t destroy all of it!”

What these fans fail to realize is that there is no meaningful distinction between the part and the whole. In Star Wars, everything is canon. Even the most poorly written, ill-conceived mess of a story in some way expanded the universe we love. If J. J. Abrams exercises his power to say, “Okay, this, this, and this from the EU are still canon, but this, that, and all of this over here aren’t anymore,” there no longer would be any point in even having a canon, because the precedent would be set for it to be dismissed outright at the drop of a hat.

Speaking of poorly written and ill-conceived . . .

That said, would it really be so bad for the sequels to pay lip service to the EU without really being faithful to any of its content? After all, the prequels kept the name “Coruscant” for the galactic capital, and Revenge of the Sith had a shout-out to Dark Horse Comics’ brooding Jedi antihero Quinlan Vos. Who cares if Boba Fett’s back story was rewritten (for the worse) and Asajj Ventress’s original character arc was completely disregarded?

Maybe some fans don’t. But if I’m watching a movie about Han and Leia’s daughter Jaina Solo, who is blonde, is an only child, has a terrible fear of flying and is completely incompetent when it comes to machines, and decided not to become a Jedi because of her poor aptitude for the Force, then I’m not really watching a movie about Jaina Solo. I like the EU characters the way they are, and I would rather they stay that way and see their adventures discontinued than have everything they were rewritten for the sake of the story J. J. Abrams wants to tell. This isn’t the Marvel or DC multiverse where there are a million versions of each character so every new writer can tell whatever kind of story he wants. There is only one Jaina Solo, and if that changes, then continuity isn’t being kept anyway.

“Hydrospanner? What is that, like a bridge?”

The problem is that EU fans have gotten so used to the idea of a mutable continuity that they don’t know where to draw the line. Even without the interference of George Lucas-related projects, the Expanded Universe was unable to remain consistent with itself, and the ensuing retcons and rationalizations fed into the mindset that no continuity error is irreconcilable. But at a certain point, the story you’re trying to preserve becomes so distorted and so far removed from its original intent, the intent that made you love it in the first place, that the sanest thing you can do is let go. There is no perfect canon. Not everything is going to fit. The EU will not fit with the sequels, and it would do more harm than good to pretend it could.

4. Star Wars needs a reboot

I don’t mean a real reboot, Man of Steel-style, where Luke punches the Death Star to death and snaps Darth Vader’s neck to save some Jawas. More like a back-to-basics Star Trek reboot, except not even that extreme. A thematic reboot. No time travel, no cosmic event, just a good old-fashioned space adventure story without all the clutter and distractions. Whether you like the prequels or not, the public perception of Star Wars just hasn’t been the same since they were released. They divided the fanbase of what was once a pop culture juggernaut beloved almost universally. The associated marketing onslaught and brand dilution has only exacerbated the problem. It’s impossible to get away from Star Wars, and when so much of that content is of questionable quality at best, it’s easy to see how such relentless media bombardment has poisoned the well of fan goodwill.

Not that I expect Disney to run some kind of tasteful, understated ad campaign—in fact, I suspect they will only accelerate the public’s brand exhaustion—but if their product itself is high-caliber and fresh, then the business side of the franchise shouldn’t matter as much to the consumer. To deliver that product, a Star Wars movie that appeals to the broadest possible audience without being sanitized into oblivion, the stigma of the prequels, warranted or not, needs to be left behind. So too does the baggage of the Expanded Universe.

In the 40-plus years since his father’s death, Luke has fought evil Force-users, Imperial warlords, ancient Sith ghosts, a trans-dimensional blob from another reality, dragons and dinosaurs, space racists, the resurrected Emperor Palpatine, about half a dozen different alien invasions, and at least that many of his own students who fell to the dark side. As great (or terrible) as all those stories are, they weren’t told until after the story that really mattered, the original trilogy, was completed. If the EU remains canon, while the rest of the audience cheers and whistles at the appearance of an elderly Luke Skywalker in Episode VII, I’ll just be thinking about the time he brutally executed his ex-girlfriend because he mistakenly thought she had murdered his wife, when the actual culprit was Luke’s nephew, whose sister Luke then assigned to assassinate him, all while Han and Leia stood idly by, twiddling their thumbs.

It’s just too much, and not even because so much of it is negative. Should Chewbacca be left out of the sequels just because he died in the EU? If he appeared in the sequels, would the EU come up with some ham-fisted retcon to explain how he survived having a moon dropped on him? Sometimes the cure is worse than the disease.

Abrams and Kasdan already have a difficult enough task in crafting a good movie with a simple story, likable characters, memorable villains, quotable dialogue, and a tone and theme appropriate for Star Wars. Forcing 40 years of continuity down their throats on top of that would just be inviting disaster. To be successful, Episode VII needs to get back to the core of what Star Wars is, and away from everything it has become. The divisiveness of the prequels and the Special Editions, the pandering and oversaturation of The Clone Wars, the sacrifice of creative projects like Knights of the Old Republic III and the original conception of 1313 on the altar of profit, the unyielding preoccupation with death and destruction of the recent EU—all these things are an albatross hanging around Star Wars’ neck. We need to get back to a simpler time, a time long ago in a galaxy far, far away, where heroes could be heroes and farmboys could topple Empires, and there was always light at the end of the tunnel.

Light, or just more murder. Either way.

I love the EU, and it is always going to be there; 160 novels, 900 comics, and Lucas knows how many videogames aren’t going to disappear just because J. J. Abrams doesn’t follow a rule that was never intended for him anyway. The Expanded Universe still lives on as its own separate, unadulterated continuity, after all, untouchable by future projects. We can always return to that universe whenever we wish, and relive old adventures with Grand Admiral Thrawn and Mara Jade, Zayne Carrick and Cade Skywalker, Jaina and Jacen Solo. But the EU is the EU, and neither distorting it into something else to fit with the sequels nor kneecapping the sequels to fit a top-heavy EU is an appealing option. In the end, discontinuing the EU may be the best of several bad options. Hopefully it will be worth it. But trust is hard, among Star Wars fans. Perhaps we should return to the days of the prequels; perhaps we should let fly, and once more let fate decide what continuity will survive, as we did when we were young.