You have the feeling that Star Wars has the habit of recycling its characters a little too often, bringing back to life those who were supposed to be dead? This impression is not unfounded: the animated series The Bad Batch just confirmed it.
Star Wars has a problem. It is not so much his postlogy that is in question here, even if it did not receive the best reception from the public. Nor is the subject the retouching of George Lucas on his work (“ Han shot first ”, it seems), nor certain daring with regard to lore. Midi-chlorians, despite their controversial status, are not in question either.
The current problem of Star Wars is his unfortunate propensity to not leave the characters dead who are supposed to be dead. A very recent example took place on March 27, 2024 on Disney+. Episode 9 of the third season of The Bad Batch brought Asajj Ventress, a character well known to fans, back into the saddle.
We had already briefly covered the biography of Asajj Ventress when his name was mentioned in the series Ahsoka. In short, she is an assassin from the planet Dathomir. For a time, she used her talents in the service of the forces of evil. She was also Count Dooku’s apprentice.
It’s in the novel Dark Disciple, released in 2015, that the fate of Asajj Ventress is supposed to have been sealed: she is sent on a mission to try to assassinate Count Dooku. She fails and is killed by her target. His remains are then brought back to Dathomir, after various twists and turns. End of the story. But in 2024, everything changes.
A trailer announcing season 3 of The Bad Batch is broadcast in January 2024 and the pot aux roses had already been discovered (Asajj Ventress appears). Of course, we have no doubt that the animated series has planned everything for this unexpected return considering what happened in Dark Disciple a decade earlier.
Palpatine, Boba Fett, Darth Maul…
It prevents. The narrative artifices deployed to guarantee character coherence should not hide an increasingly visible trend in Star Wars: dead characters don’t seem to stay that way for long. Over time, examples begin to become relatively numerous.
In this regard, the most symptomatic case is the return of Palpatine, supposed to have been dead since episode VI, after his fall into a well on the Death Star. He returned by surprise in Episode IX and, since then, there has been an effort by Disney and Lucasfilm to justify his resurrection after the fact, sometimes clumsily (” somehow, Palpatine returned “).
Palpatine and Asajj aren’t the only ones we keep bringing back to life: we could also mention Boba Fett. The famous bounty hunter was supposed to have disappeared into the maw of the Sarlacc, on the planet Tatooine, in Episode VI. And then The Mandalorian decided otherwise. Boba Fett even got his own series.
Darth Maul is another notable example: did you remember that Palpatine’s disciple was cut in two by Obi-Wan Kenobi on Naboo, in Episode I? It’s forgetting what happens next. He also survived, in the series The Clone Warsat the very end of the film Solo: A Star Wars Storyand, finally, in the series Rebels — before giving up the ghost, definitively.
If we were really harsh, we could also be critical of the Force ghost trick, which is very practical for putting dead characters back on screen. In this regard, the list is very long: Yoda, Anakin Skywalker, Qui-Gon Jinn, Leia Organa, Luke Skywalker, Obi-Wan Kenobi. They may have an ethereal shape, but they are there.
This could still happen again in the future, even if nothing has been done: we think of the recent interview given by Samuel L. Jackson, the actor who played Mace Windu in the prelogy. For him, his character is not dead. It is therefore not entirely impossible to see him return for a miniseries, especially since he is very popular.
These twists and turns, even if they sometimes result in the permanent death of certain characters (like Palpatine and Maul), are annoying. They tend to weaken the dramatic intensity of Star Wars. However, it is when the saga plunges into tragedy that it is at its best. Rogue One And Andor are here to demonstrate it.
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