It's Time for Some Star Wars Characters to Retire or Just Die Already

Outside of Andor, it appears to be a very small Galaxy, where you can't help but run into the same few people, again and again.

The main trio from the original trilogy is not even the whole of the problem, perhaps not even the biggest part of it, if only because much of Disney animated and live-action series are set before the original trilogy.

Even without them, the Disney universe has more than enough characters who made cameo appearances in movies and series where they really did not belong – Ahsoka Tano is the biggest offender, but there also are Obi-Wan Kenobi, or Darth Maul (yes, resurrecting him after he got cut in half and dropped down a bottomless well was not Disney's fault, but sticking him in at least two stories which had nothing to do with him was), or Grand Moff Tarkin.

To clarify, it is not the matter of telling more stories featuring old main characters (the concept that the old Star Wars Expanded Universe used and overused) – indeed, if anything, Disney seems to be reluctant about that.

Rather, it is the matter of characters appearing in cameos just for the sake of triggering nostalgia in the audience.

Not only this creates the above-mentioned feeling of a small Galaxy, this also often stifles the stories, preventing them from developing their own casts. Do you need a high-ranking Imperial commander for an episodic role, for example? Just use Tarkin. And so on.

Certainly, with a setting as old and established as Star Wars some amount of nostalgia baiting is inevitable, and you have to deal with the fact that a lot of people are watching your content to see familiar faces again.

But this endless cameo approach is just the worst of both worlds – the old characters are hanging around constantly, yet rarely get a room to breathe.

Even if they, by luck, get their own stories, those stories cannot change their status quo too much. At this point you wish for them to retire or die already. Not like that is going to help, unless Disney manages to think of an idea of moving Star Wars forward, past the time of the sequel trilogy and thus past the point when all the old characters do, in fact, end up dead, that would make for compelling stories. Until then, endless revisiting of the past might be inevitable.