Star Wars Only Needs to Learn One Thing
Friday evening the lights go down at the Honda Center in Anaheim and Disney spends two hours showing fans what is coming next. The Disney Entertainment Showcase runs 7 to 9 p.m. on August 14, the opening night of D23, and the official promise is first looks at films and series, new announcements and musical performances, which is the same promise every year. Most of the room will be there for Marvel or Pixar. I will be watching for one thing, and it has nothing to do with release dates. Andor finished as the best thing Star Wars has ever put on television, by a margin that stopped being arguable a while ago. What Lucasfilm decided that meant is the interesting part, and Friday night is the first chance to stop guessing.
The lesson is not the flattering one
Strip the praise off Andor and look at what it did. It took its own premise seriously. A show about a rebellion is a show about the unglamorous work of starting one, so it wrote about informants, funding, cowardice, and how much of an ordinary life a person burns before picking a side. Nobody's parentage mattered. Almost nothing lit up and hummed.
It also removed the scaffolding. No legacy cameo stands in for stakes, no scene pauses so the audience can applaud a face it knows. The Empire is frightening because it is a competent, boring institution staffed by ambitious people doing paperwork, which is a much worse thing to be ruled by than a wizard.
Then there is the test nothing else in the franchise has passed in years. You can hand it to someone who has never seen a Star Wars film and it plays. Not as homework, as a political thriller that happens to be set there. That is the whole lesson, and it is not a compliment to the brand. A story that only works if you already care is not a story, it is a reunion.
The other reading
There is an easier explanation for why Andor worked, and it is the one a franchise usually reaches for: Star Wars television can be prestige television if you point the camera at beloved characters more seriously. That reading produces Ahsoka.
Ahsoka is not contemptible. It is handsome, sincere, and for viewers who arrived from the animated shows it delivers. But look at where it keeps its feeling. The plot engine is a search for Ezra Bridger, a character whose entire hold on you was built in a different show. The central wound, a broken bond between Ahsoka Tano and Sabine Wren, happened before the first episode and gets referred to more than dramatised. The villain arrives pre-loaded: Thrawn is frightening because Rebels and a shelf of novels told you he is. Watch the same footage cold and you see people standing in forests being very upset about a man they have never met.
The exception proves the point. Baylan Skoll is the major character the show invented rather than inherited, and he is the one who lands for a newcomer, because everything interesting about him gets said out loud in a scene you are actually watching.
The Mandalorian started from a better place. A stranger, a job, a kid: you could hand season one to anybody. Then its second season ended with a de-aged Luke Skywalker arriving to save the day, and a lot of what followed was the show arranging itself around arrivals.
The gap between a series that earns its feeling and a series that withdraws it is the embarrassing part. Not that the weaker ones exist. That the same studio made both.
What is actually on the schedule
Almost nothing about Friday's content is public, which is normal, so the schedule is the only honest thing to read. D23 runs Friday, August 14 through Sunday, August 16 at the Anaheim Convention Center and the Honda Center, on what organizers call the largest show floor in the event's history. The Lucasfilm pavilion is open all three days with photo ops, props and costumes from the film Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu, which reached cinemas in May, and from Ahsoka Season 2, which is due in 2027. There are fireside chats with the teams behind both, and Mandalorian and Grogu meet and greets at 4, 5, 6 and 7 p.m. every day.
Read that floor plan honestly. It is a footprint built on two legacy properties, and it tells you which titles have a costume in a case, which is a different question from which ones have a script worth your Sunday. Floor space is not evidence. Friday at 7 is.
What to do about it
Two things, and the second matters more.
When Friday night comes, listen for what the footage is about rather than who is in it. A premise you could describe to a stranger without using a proper noun is the good sign. A montage of returning faces cut to music is the other one.
Before then, watch Andor. If you have never seen it, make this the week, and treat the Star Wars part as irrelevant to whether you will like it. Give it three episodes, which is how it was released and about how long it takes to stop feeling like a franchise and start feeling like a novel. If you already have, rewatch the prison stretch in the back half of season one, the argument in concentrated form, one evening.
Then, for the fair test of the other reading, put on Ahsoka straight after. The difference is not budget and it is not taste. One of them explains itself to you. The other assumes you were already in the room.
