Rian Johnson’s extremely mysterious new Star Wars trilogy might have just become a little less mysterious, thanks to an entry in the official Art of Solo: A Star Wars Story book that appears to bring a whole swathe of the Extended Universe into canon.
The entry in question concerns the villainous Dryden Vos’ desk, and reads as follows:
“The central desk, which represents the administrative seat of his power, is a bespoke piece of furniture. The stone base, that Dryden has plundered from the Sith temple of Exar Kun, is made from polished obsidian and decorated with carved hieroglyphs representing spells that protected its former home.”
For those who haven’t taken a deep dive into the non-cinematic Star Wars stories, think of this news as such. All the films we know and love took place a “long, long time ago,” but what was happening a long, long, long, long, long time ago? So long that we’re talking about 4000 years before the events of A New Hope.
Well, this is the setting of Knights of the Old Republic, which has been explored through a graphic novel and, most famously, through a series of RPGs by Bioware. This time period is traditionally used to allow stories to be told that simply couldn’t fit into the Skywalker-centric plotlines of the prequels, Original Trilogy and now the Sequel Trilogy. Fortunately, technology doesn’t seem to ever advance much in Star Wars, so everything is still recognizable. We’re talking hyperspace crafts, lightsabers, giant space fortresses and so on.
Furthermore, Exar Kun is a major figure in this setting. Once a Jedi Knight, he fell to the Dark Side, named himself a Dark Lord of the Sith and proceeded to wage a cataclysmic war against the Jedi Order and the Galactic Republic. He’s also notoriously unkillable, having grown so powerful that he separated his soul from his body and ended up as a kind of mysterious evil ghost haunting his tomb on Yavin IV. To be honest, I’d probably have had second thoughts about turning part of an ultra powerful immortal ghost Sith’s tomb into my desk, but you do you Dryden Vos.
Now, I should stress that this isn’t a cast iron confirmation that Exar Kun is coming to a cinema near you very soon. Leland Chee, head honcho at the Lucasfilm story group, was asked about it recently though and said the following:
https://twitter.com/HolocronKeeper/status/1001545337830391808
So, again, no firm confirmation, but this does absolutely show that these classic Star Wars tales are very much in the story group’s mind as they begin the preliminary plans for what’s to happen after Rey, Finn and Kylo’s arcs are all wrapped up. Besides, there’s been much demand for a Knights of the Old Republic movie over the years, so we wouldn’t rule it out just yet.
