Credit: Inside the MagicStar Wars has a canon problem and there’s only one way to deal with it: just make up entirely new universes.
In the nearly 50 years since A New Hope (1977) first hit theaters, the lore around the franchise has been built into a massive universe (and expanded one, you might even say) of historical events, characters, places, time periods, gadgets, minerals, alien species, other dimensions, and that one time that Luke Skywalker joined a cult that worshiped gold-plated blob alien that contains a black hole to another plane of existence.
The Expanded Universe was relegated to the status of “Star Wars Legends” when The Walt Disney Company bought Lucasfilm from George Lucas. This basically relegated decades of canonical storytelling into a toy chest for Dave Filoni to grab a Grand Admiral Thrawn or a chunk of cortosis as he deems fit.
The Lucasfilm Story Group (and Pablo Hidalgo, specifically) has been specifically tasked by the company with keeping track of official canon, and yet, it is not enough for fans.
The Acolyte, the newest Disney+ Star Wars series, has been hit hard by the vocal contingent of fans who have been unhappy with virtually every new offering of the franchise since The Force Awakens (2015), with occasional exceptions for The Mandalorian, as long as there aren’t too many women or too much moral ambiguity.
It currently holds the lowest Rotten Tomatoes audience score for any Star Wars project; notably, most episodes of the show were review-bombed to hell hours before they were even released.
Related: ‘Star Wars’ Remake: ‘The Phantom Menace’ Hits YouTube
While the reasons for the animosity toward The Acolyte can be hotly debated (if you want to ignore the fairly obvious misogyny, homophobia, and racism), a big part of it, at least on the surface, is the claim that the Leslye Headland-created show “breaks canon.”
Fan discussion of The Acolyte‘s actual merits was bogged down by two separate debates about the birthdates of two barely-seen characters. A bunch of people were furious that Mae (Amandla Stenberg) said “hell,” despite Han Solo (Harrison Ford) saying the same thing, because it raised weird questions about whether a galaxy far, far away has a concept of heaven and hell.
So, what we propose is that Disney and Lucasfilm just dispense with the idea of canon entirely and greenlight the animated What If…Star Wars? show that has been rumored for months, and not just in LEGO form. If you get rid of the idea that you have to stick to one single storyline with concrete, definitive canonical events, you could have a lot of fun.
Here’s some suggestions for how the Star Wars universe could diverge and maybe let fans actually enjoy something for once:
What if Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan Defeated Darth Maul
After two decades of mockery, The Phantom Menace (1999) has been pretty thoroughly reclaimed by fans at this point. While George Lucas’s first entry in the prequel trilogy contains some pretty cringy moments and questionable racial coding, it has now taken its place as one of the more beloved entries in the franchise.
But even before fans came around on the merits of Jar Jar and midi-chlorians, the fandom consensus was that the climactic “Duel of the Fates” sequence in which Qui-Gon Jinn (Liam Neeson) and Obi-Wan Kenobi (Ewan McGregor) battle Darth Maul (Ray Park) for their lives and also the soul of Anakin Skywalker (Jake Lloyd), if you want to get figurative about it, is pretty amazing.
At the end of the duel, Maul is defeated (until Dave Filoni decided to break canon, but who cares when he does it), and Qui-Gon is dead, leaving a barely-trained Obi-Wan to train Anakin as his master wants.
But what if the Jedi Master and his apprentice had been able to take out Maul and Anakin got the kind of empathetic, experienced training that Obi-Wan did? Instead of growing up in the wake of the death of one of the greatest Jedi of his age, Anakin could have benefited from his experience and perhaps had a father figure to look to instead of the Senator from Naboo.
What if Darth Plagueis Had Lived?
Speaking of the Senator from Naboo, The Acolyte recently dropped a quick appearance from Palpatine’s (Ian McDiarmid) own master in its final episode: Darth Plagueis the Wise.
There is still little canonically established about Plagueis, but Palpatine’s monologue in Revenge of the Sith (2005) gives us a little bit to go on. The Sith Lord was immensely powerful, able to use the Force to create life. He was obsessed with the idea that the Dark Side would allow him to achieve immortality, and Palpatine himself had killed Plagueis in his sleep.
While Star Wars commentators online might be raging about whether or not the Sith Lord would have been 15 years old at the time of The Acolyte, we have a better question: what if Palpatine hadn’t killed him and, by the time of The Phantom Menace, Plagueis was still calling the shots?
We’d like to see the timeline in which Darth Sidious is still the apprentice squaring off against Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan, and the mysterious Munn is pulling the strings during the Clone Wars.
What if the Midi-Chlorian Counter Was Broken?
A lot of hypothetical scenarios hinge on dramatic events like who gets killed in what duel of which fates, but it is interesting to think of the alternate universes that are caused by something as simple as a mechanical malfunction.
Episode I established that there is a direct link between the ability to use the Force and the amount of “midi-chlorians” in one’s bloodstream, allowing one to test for acceptance to the Jedi Order like a cholesterol count. According to readings taken during The Phantom Menace, Anakin had the highest count ever recorded (even higher than Master Yoda!) at over 20,000 midi-chlorians per whatever unit was used.
But, in order to test for Force ability, Jedi have to run tests and use analysis programs, both of which can become corrupted or simply return inaccurate data. What if, according to a reader on the fritz, Anakin actually had a low count and thus was not worthy of being taken as a child from his mother to join the Order and remained a slave on Tattooine? Small tests can cause big results.
Related: Report: Luke Skywalker To Return as ‘Star Wars’ Main Character, Disney Rejects New Series
What if Jango Fett Wasn’t the Clone Template?
According to the official records of Kamino, Jango Fett (Temuera Morrison) was paid 20 million credits and an unaltered clone of himself to act as the genetic template for the Grand Army of the Republic that would eventually become the stormtroopers of the Galactic Empire.
As the premiere bounty hunter of his generation, Jango was selected by Count Dooku (Christopher Lee) as the perfect physical specimen to build a fighting force that could serve alongside the Jedi Order in a galactic conflict, only to turn on them when Darth Sidious triggered their subconscious commands. But what kind of world would we see if one of his fellow bounty hunters or even Dooku himself had been the clone template?
What if Anakin Saved His Mother?
If there is a moment in which it can be pinpointed as to when Anakin’s (Hayden Christensen) journey to the Dark Side truly began, it is in Attack of the Clones (2002), when he returns to Tatooine to rescue his mother, Shmi Skywalker (Pernilla August) from slavery.
However, once he arrives, he discovers that she has already been liberated, married a moisture farmer named Lars (Jack Thompson), and been kidnapped by Tusken Raiders for unclear reasons. By the time he finds her, Shmi has been tortured for a month and quickly dies. In his grief and rage, Anakin kills an entire village of Sand People, including women and children.
Needless to say, his wholesale slaughter of Tusken Raider pushes him into a mental space that Palpatine can take advantage of, with very unfortunate consequences for the galaxy. But what if he had gotten there earlier and saved Shmi, allowing her motherly love and guidance to help keep him on the track of the light?
What if Ahsoka Hadn’t Left the Jedi Order?
Due to false accusations and the unbending bureaucracy of the Jedi, Padawan Ahsoka Tano (voiced by Ashley Eckstein in Clone Wars and Rebels) was expelled from the Order and put on trial by the Republic for the bombing of the Temple at Coruscant, which she totally didn’t do.
While she was exonerated and pardoned by the High Council, Ahsoka decided not to rejoin the Order, basically for moral reasons. When Order 66 was triggered, this may have saved her life, given that clone troopers could argue that she was not technically a Jedi anymore and didn’t need to be exterminated.
If she had rejoined, would she have been killed? Or could she have made more of a difference in preventing the slaughter and Anakin falling to the Dark Side?
What if Order 66 Had Failed?
In Revenge of the Sith, the Sith finally have, well, their revenge. Palpatine invokes Order 66, the subconscious programming of the Grand Army to exterminate the Jedi, resulting in nearly all of the Order being killed across the galaxy.
Anakin, newly christened Darth Vader, personally leads the attack on the Coruscant Temple and wipes out the younglings; after decades of planning, Darth Sidious destroyed generations of Jedi and, apparently, their future.
But what if the battle-hardened Jedi out in the field actually managed to overpower the clones and successfully fought back? What if the younglings were able to escape from Anakin (as Grogu did) and were able to reveal what had happened? Would the Jedi finally be able to figure out who had been masterminding the whole thing, or would the Clone Wars transform into a whole new destructive conflict?
Inside the Magic’s gentle suggestions of What If…Star Wars? stories will continue!