What I Hope to See in the Star Wars TV Series

The internet is abuzz at the moment with talks of the return of everyone's favorite Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Cowboy/Medieval epic adventure in Star Wars. The highly successful "micro-series" Clone Wars caused a furor amongst Star Wars fans, tantalizing them with five minute episodes that helped to flesh out the Clone War - a subject that had left audiences guessing ever since it was first brought up in Episode IV.

For my own part, I was a long time and avid fan of what has been referred to as the Expanded Universe - the video games, books, short stories, and comic books that added to the original trilogy. The most popular of these pieces was referred to as the Thrawn trilogy - the highly acclaimed series that introduces the blue skinned, red-eyed military genius known only as Grand Admiral Thrawn and acted as a basis for all future Star Wars fiction. As time went on, however, and the characters dashed from one Republic-threatening emergency to the next, the Expanded Universe began to drag on, began to highly contradict itself, and worse, lost much of the subtlety that made the movies great.

The philosophical and political nuances of the original films gave way for overt displays of carnage and genocide by the Dark Side, rather than treating it as a subject of personal interpretation as it was in Episode III. The subtlety as previously stated was replaced by overt displays of violence and, what's worse, magic ranging from shooting balls of fire to raising people from the dead.

My interest in the Expanded Universe slowly faded, replaced instead by a zeal for the movies and what I call "C-Canon" (or Chadd canon), taking what I personally find consistent and enjoyable and tossing out the rest.

With the advent of this new series, I find myself excited at the prospect of having questions between the original trilogy and the prequel trilogy being answered. What happened between the Battle of Geonosis and the rise of the Empire that made Boba Fett the masterful Bounty Hunter he was? The prequel trilogy already established that he was a powerful bounty hunter - if not slightly obscure, which allowed Count Dooku to use him as a basis for an entire Clone Army. When last we saw the young son of Jango Fett, he was clutching his father's decapitated head - not making a return until Episode IV when he is seen in the host of Jabba the Hutt.

What allowed this young child to climb the ladder of the underworld and become synonymous with the term "bounty hunter"?

But as Jabba is mentioned, I also want to see his story flushed out a little. Not so much his I daresay, as much as I'm interested in the entire politics of the rise of the Empire. As is seen in Episode I, the Hutts have absolute dominance of the planet of Tatooine - and yet in Episodes IV and VI, it is controlled by the Empire. Jabba appears to be the last of the Hutts on the planet and has retreated to his small castle, no longer taking refuge in the enormous Mos Espa Spaceport. Slavery was among the dominant markets, along with gambling on the planet - why has this become a thing of the past in Episode IV?

What occurred where the Empire came in, drove out the slavers, and established abolitionist laws?

There are many political details I want to see as well. How was the Empire received? What caused the Rebellion to pick up momentum and later become a force capable of mustering up a fleet to do battle with it? Who ended up dominating the emperor's chiefs of staff?

How was the army formulated with the rapidly dying out clones due to the accelerated aging processes? What kinds of programs were instituted to replace them and pave the way for Stormtroopers?

These are all questions fresh on my mind when I go into watching this series - though all the while I have a looming dread that the excellence built up in Episode III, which had finally introduced the moral relativity I knew always existed in the Star Wars Universe, will be omitted for the sake of Expanded Universe style overt destruction, carnage, and annihilation.

Either way, this is the series I look forward to almost as much as I did to Rome.