Earlier this year at Star Wars Celebration, looking ahead to a new slate of Star Wars movies, Lucasfilm officially unveiled a new chronological look at continuity, breaking down thousands of years in the galaxy far, far away into nine distinct periods. Now, the official website has gone a little deeper—and teased some very intriguing hints along the way.
Now included as part of StarWars.com’s databank, the “Eras” section of the site offers an updated guide to the primary works of contemporary Star Wars canon—although sadly books and comics are largely left on the wayside save for The High Republic in favour of film, TV, and video games, and where exactly they fit into the nine eras revealed back at Celebration.
Unsurprisingly, a lot of what we have so far is the stuff centred around the Skywalker Saga’s main eras—Fall of the Jedi, Reign of the Empire, and Age of Rebellion covering the prequel and original trilogies, and then the New Republic and Rise of the First Order covering the sequels and post-Return of the Jedi TV—but there are at least some new descriptions for each era beyond these too. Both the earliest and furthest eras of this timeline are left blank for now: Dawn of the Jedi, the ancient setting of James Mangold’s planned origin story for the first Jedi; and New Jedi Order, the post-Rise of Skywalker setting of the upcoming Rey standalone film from Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy. But one intriguingly as-yet-unexplored era does have a brief bit of scene-setting: the Old Republic, the ancient era slotted between Dawn of the Jedi and the High Republic. Here’s what the timeline now reads for this period:
The Republic is founded among the worlds of the Galactic Core, and the Jedi Order emerges to protect it. A schism within the Jedi leads to the creation of the Sith in this epic era.
Is it a lot? No, not really. Is it something? Yes, and what does a Star Wars fan love more than making a lot of nonsense over the tiniest of scraps? The Old Republic, of course, is largely known to fans for the games it’s named for, namely the EU CRPG legends Knights of the Old Republic and its sequel The Sith Lords, and their MMORPG continuation The Old Republic, the rare piece of still-active Expanded Universe media in the current Lucasfilm era. And with a remake of the former still planned at some point, perhaps there’s hints that elements of those stories could now become enshrined in current continuity here.
But there’s also some very interesting positioning of things here—the Jedi Order is an establishing institution here rather than during the Dawn of the Jedi, for example. Or the fact that it’s in this period we have the schism that creates the Sith, and potentially the Sith Empire or something akin to it from KOTOR. It’s two sentences, but hey! Two sentences is better than no sentences.
Time will tell how long it’ll take before we see more of this timeline fleshed out—but for now, it’s fun to think what could be.
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