Death isn’t really that big a deal in Star Wars. If you’re a Jedi you can usually reappear as a sparkly Force ghost to give cryptic advice, and if you’re not, resurrections are fairly common. The most obvious example is The Rise of Skywalker informing us that “somehow Palpatine returned” after being tossed down a reactor shaft in a space station that then exploded.
There’s also Boba Fett’s half-digested return in The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett, and Darth Maul’s surprise one-off cameo at the end of Solo: A Star Wars Story. These characters returning from the grave has many fans demanding their favorites get the same treatment, with the most popular candidate being Samuel L. Jackson’s Mace Windu.
Now some are saying enough is enough, pointing to a recent demand to bring back the very dead Jedi Master Plo Kloon. A thread on r/StarWars argues that dead should mean dead and that fans should “just let characters die, it was a meaningful part of the story.”
We agree, as every unlikely reversed death lowers the stakes in other stories. Sadly, you can’t simply pretend The Rise of Skywalker didn’t happen, which hand waved away one of the biggest deaths in the franchise with some mumbled guff about ancient Sith ways and cloning.
The future may be a little brighter, though. Taika Waititi’s Star Wars project is said to be entirely separate from the Skywalker saga, meaning that we won’t get any surprise legacy characters dusting themselves off after they definitely died.
