Lucasfilm is attempting to fix Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker - but the current Darth Vader story from Marvel comics is damaging canon.
Marvel Comics is attempting to fix Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker - and it isn't going well. The latest Star Wars film was hardly Lucasfilm's greatest success. Although it broke $1 billion in the global box office, the final chapter in the Skywalker saga was hardly well-received. As a result of this poor reception, Lucasfilm has been using tie-ins to try to flesh out some of the story's more controversial details. All this adds up to a surprising number of tie-ins to Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, but they're only making the problem worse.
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Marvel's current Darth Vader run, by writer Greg Pak and artist Raffaele Ienco, has been an attempt to explain how the secret Sith planet of Exegol fits with the wider canon. It is set shortly after the events of The Empire Strikes Back, with a wrathful Darth Vader seeking revenge upon Palpatine after he was humiliated for his failure to turn his son. The Sith Apprentice retrieved a Sith Wayfinder, and used it to make his way to Exegol. There, he discovered the true power of the Emperor - as he beheld the fleet of Xyston-class Star Destroyers in production there, and was overcome by the power of the kyber crystals the Emperor was using to power the cannons of their planet-smashing superweapons.
Marvel is making a valiant attempt to reconcile the sequel trilogy's biggest revelations with the original trilogy. Unfortunately, it's not going well, not least because it doesn't make sense for Darth Vader to know so much about the Emperor's plans. It's hard to see why Anakin Skywalker's Force Ghost didn't simply let his son Luke Skywalker know about Exegol shortly after Return of the Jedi. He'd certainly have been able to send Luke to Mustafar to pick up his own Wayfinder, meaning Luke would never have needed to chase down Ochi of Bestoon. Rather than make more sense of the sequel trilogy's relationship with Star Wars lore, the current story has simply caused more problems.
It doesn't help that the current Marvel story doesn't even fit terribly well with the rest of the Star Warscanon. The Sith Eternal are even more confusing and inexplicable; Rae Carson's novelization reinterpreted the Sith Rule of Two, hinting the Sith Eternal were something of a lesser caste ruled by the Sith Lords, but Pak's Darth Vader run takes a different view of things. The Xyston-class Star Destroyers have been retconned to use kyber crystals, implicitly contradicting the Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker Visual Dictionary. A single panel also showed Mas Amedda, a member of Palpatine's inner circle, knew about Exegol - creating a new plot hole because Mas Amedda believed the Empire defeated and destroyed after the Emperor's death according to Chuck Wendig's Aftermath trilogy. As spectacular as the current Darth Vader story may be, nothing about this makes any sense.
When Disney acquired Lucasfilm back in 2012, they erased the old Expanded Universe and promised a new approach to canon, in which everything mattered - whether it be a film or a novel, a TV series of a comic book. But the end of the sequel trilogy, and Lucasfilm's attempts to solidify its relationship with the canon, are having a detrimental effect. Star Wars is coming to the point where, once again, fans are going to have to play one story against another, to pick and choose which source they believe. Only time will tell whether Lucasfilm and Marvel's attempts to fix Star Wars: The Rise Of Skywalker and Star Wars canon, in general, can hold up under this strain.
