Star Wars has proven it doesn’t need Luke Skywalker anymore

With new Star Wars projects continuing to bridge the gap between films, fans are eager to see how the franchise’s characters and plot lines fit together.

Star Wars TV shows like The Mandalorian, Skeleton Crew, and Ahsoka, which are set after Return of the Jedi, are filling in the story between the original and sequel trilogies.

The sequel films explained what happened to the original cast of characters between the trilogies.

Skeleton Crew proved how fun and creative the series can be when given the freedom.

Long before the events of The Force Awakens, Luke begins training a new order of Jedi while Han and Leia marry and have a son, Ben.

With these characters already established within the lore, it’s hard to create new stories around them set during this period.

You can’t exactly have Han Solo go off and do something that might contradict The Force Awakens, for example. And I’m sure Harrison Ford would hate to be asked to reprise his role again.

So it’s a good opportunity for Star Wars’ secondary characters to fill in those gaps and tell new stories set between both trilogies.

Luckily, there is now a group of characters who may serve as the perfect medium for continuing that narrative.

Clone Wars and Rebels characters Ahsoka Tano, Sabine Wren, and Ezra Bridger have now made their live-action debuts across the various Star Wars TV show projects, with all three characters appearing in the Ahsoka series.

As theorised by ScreenRant, Ezra Bridger makes a great replacement for Luke Skywalker.

However, I’d go one step further and suggest that each of these characters are being set up to drive the story forward.

Bringing back these characters serves as the perfect way for the franchise to take bold new risks with the story, while also having the freedom to ignore events that occur during the sequel trilogy.

For example, with Grand Admiral Thrawn being the big bad for the Ahsoka series (a threat that could also bleed out into other series), it would be weird to have Luke suddenly show up to defeat him.

It’s not like an event this major is addressed at all during the films, and so having this new cast of characters team up to fight him makes a lot more sense than bringing in Luke to deal with the threat.

But with Ahsoka’s characters being the perfect device for telling this story without the constraints of the films, suddenly you have so many more directions to take it.

Hopefully, Star Wars will also eventually address what these characters are doing during the sequel trilogy.

It makes sense why they don't appear during any of the three sequel films. It'd just be too bloated to introduce characters of major significance that only appeared in TV projects by this point.

But maybe there's room for them in the future. It sounds like Ahsoka, Ezra, and Sabine could help Rey rebuild the Jedi Order following the events of The Rise of Skywalker. That’s if they’re still alive.