The Best Storyline Star Wars Canon Threw Out
How the House of Mouse wrote out one of the most brilliant futures of the galaxy far, far away.
When LucasFilm was still behind the helm of the Millennium Falcon, there were countless expanded universe books, comics, cartoons, and video games. With that in mind, it's really no wonder why Disney's team felt the need to streamline the continuity before releasing the next instalments in the series. But for all that the new canon has largely succeeded, the loss of some of the truly good stories that were thrown out with the old one is somewhat tragic.
In 2007, Dark Horse published "Star Wars: Legacy". It was set far in the future from the original trilogy of films and 100 years later than any material that had been published at the time. The ambitious series expertly wove together an impressive amount of extended universe canon.
Set in 187 A.B.Y. (After the Battle of Yavin), the galaxy is under the control of a morally-neutral empire, as Darth Sidious was removed from power in Episode VI. The Jedi are all but extinct, and the Sith want nothing more than to take back the throne.
The story centres around Cade Skywalker, a distant descendent of Luke. After turning his back on the Jedi order, he spends the early issues of the series as a bounty hunter, and struggles with the consequences of his latent Jedi powers.
He's a force user who can access both light and dark abilities with ease, and this causes him to be discovered by the Sith. Now he’s forced to choose sides. His path winds back and forth between the dark and light sides, making an especially compelling moral journey. There's comedy, tragedy, and everything in between.
Darth Krayt and his Sith army, meanwhile, are absolutely terrifying, and on a purely visual level . On top of these frightening bunch, there were the neutral force-using Imperial Knights, who wielded some top-notch silver lightsabers and retained the striking armor of the imperial guards. The menagerie of characters in this series was a visual buffet.
Considering where the newest trilogy of films has gone, it's easy to wonder what might have been had Lucasfilm taken some material from this comic. After the death of the emperor in Episode VI, a Sith-less Empire seems far more plausible than what the First Order became. Instead, the universe was given a rehashing of the Rebellion and the Empire, but with more convoluted origins and motivations.
We could have seen the Jedi order struggling to rebuild, a Sith army trying to retake leadership of the galaxy, and a neutral Empire stuck in the middle. Legacy's story was dark, but not to the degree of self-parody found in Episodes II and III.
The series ended in 2012, and while it's impossible for the comic to be adapted in anyway now, taken as an alternate timeline, these comics are still an excellent read.