10 Underrated Star Wars Legends Characters That Deserve A Second Chance

The Star Wars universe became significantly smaller on the 15th of April 2014 after Disney purchased Lucasfilm for an eye-watering $4 billion. Disney wisely decided to retcon the entire Star Wars Expanded Universe, branding everything outside of the main film continuity and The Clone Wars show as Legends. This meant they were able to wipe the slate clean and create a new Expanded Universe, one that was markedly less convoluted.

Dozens of stories and hundreds of characters suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced as they were wiped from the canon.

Popular characters such as Grand Admiral Thrawn have since re-emerged, finding their way into the new Star Wars canon in different ways. However, others - such as Luke Skywalker's evil clone ‘Luuke’ - are probably best left floating in the void of space.

Some of the best Star Wars content, characters and stories still reside in Legends though. With a Star Wars renaissance in progress now would be a better time than ever to draw even more inspiration from the old canon, and reinvent some of its most under-appreciated heroes and villains…

Although Darth Plagueis is technically still canon thanks to the now heavily meme’d dialogue referencing him in Revenge of the Sith, his previously explored backstory in the 2012 novel ‘Plagueis’ by James Luceno is not. Darth Plagueis is now, effectively, an even more mysterious character than he was in Legends.

We now know extraordinarily little of him in the Canon other than he was a powerful Sith able to prevent death. The Tarkin novel (Also written by James Luceno) confirms he is still Palpatine’s master in the canon.

Mortality in Star Wars is a complicated affair, and the return of this Sith Lord could shed some light on the obscure Sith alchemy that allowed Palpatine to return from the dead. He has even more potential if you factor in the heavy speculation that he may have conceived Anakin through manipulating Midi-chlorians.

His obsession with saving his loved ones from dying makes him stand out against the usually narcissistic intentions of his peers. Laying some interesting foundations for the character. Or perhaps this was a steppingstone on the way to learning how to prevent his own demise.

It is entirely possible however that Palpatine conceived the story of Darth Plagueis the wise to lure Anakin to the Dark Side. (He is hardly a trustworthy individual, after all.)