The vitriolic response to the Star Wars sequel trilogy surprised nobody who paid attention to the vitriolic response to the Star Wars prequel trilogy a decade earlier. But notably, the backlash to the prequel trilogy softened when The Clone Wars began airing in 2008. The animated series, spearheaded by George Lucas himself along with Dave Filoni, fleshed out the prequel era and its characters and retroactively strengthened the movies.
In addition to adding new depth to underdeveloped characters from the movies like Padmé and introducing fascinating new ones like Ahsoka, The Clone Wars did a better job of explaining the complexities of the galactic timeline, like exactly why Palpatine decided to wage war between the two political factions he was in charge of. It’s been suggested that a Clone Wars-type show rounding out the thinly drawn characters and storylines from the sequel movies could redeem the trilogy in the same way The Clone Wars did for the prequels.
However, what this argument fails to take into account is that Lucas always planned to fill in the Clone Wars era with an animated series. The show didn’t hit the airwaves until three years after Revenge of the Sith gave away its ending, but fleshing out the prequel era with a cartoon was Lucas’ plan from the beginning. He designed the characters’ arcs in Episodes II and III to accommodate the series. Attack of the Clones set the stage for the series with the Battle of Geonosis and Revenge of the Sithgave it a spectacular endgame to work toward with the Great Jedi Purge, the birth of the Empire, and Anakin’s turn to the dark side.
The sequels didn’t have anywhere near the same amount of forward planning. The movies themselves weren’t even planned ahead of time, let alone any potential animated spin-off. If J.J. Abrams and Rian Johnson had gotten together and worked out a vague roadmap for the trilogy before rolling cameras like George Lucas did when he began making the previous two Star Wars trilogies, then the trilogy might’ve ended up being at least coherent. But since they told the same story almost entirely independently of each other, the sequel trilogy is riddled with inconsistencies and contradictions.
Another problem is that the sequel era’s timeline is a complete mess. Whereas the prequel era is consistent with the original trilogy and has a clear arc from point A to point B, the sequel era isn’t even consistent with itself. J.J. Abrams kept changing who Rey was, who Snoke was, whether Ben could be redeemed – the story was a complete mess. Since Rian Johnson went out of his way to upend The Force Awakens’ nostalgic themes in The Last Jedi, the sequels don’t really hold together as a trilogy.
The timeline of the sequels is filled with massive holes and unexplained mysteries that Lucasfilm’s comics and novels and tweets have been struggling to explain ever since. It’s not clear if Finn was an actual Stormtrooper or a janitor. Palpatine’s return and his immense fleet of underground Star Destroyers make no sense at all. Poe’s shoehorned-in backstory as a spice runner contradicts his already-established backstory. The extent of the First Order’s rule over the galaxy was never really explored. The fall of the New Republic was never explored. One could make the argument that the fact the sequels failed to explain so much of themselves just gives more creative freedom to the writing staff of a possible animated spin-off, but explaining away the lazy decision-making of other storytellers isn’t very creatively freeing.
Whereas The Clone Wars had a lot of fertile ground to cover between Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith, a sequel-era cartoon would struggle to do something similar because it’s not even clear what happened in The Last Jedi and The Rise of Skywalker, let alone off-screen between them. Rey and Poe didn’t meet until the final scene of The Last Jedi. The central trio didn’t even appear on-screen together until the last movie. All the main characters would be apart for the first five or six seasons of the show.
It’s entirely possible that there’s a visionary in the mold of Filoni with a great idea for a sequel-era animated series that would unify the newest trilogy with a more cohesive narrative arc and add new depth to characters like Finn, Poe, and Rose. But said visionary would have to go through a lot of mental gymnastics to explain plot points like Luke’s self-exile and the creation of Snoke. The sequels’ attempts to make up for their own narrative missteps just made things worse. Maybe a TV showrunner could just make a series out of the elements of the sequels with a glimmer of hope, like Rose Tico’s everywoman characterization and Leia’s early Jedi training and Captain Phasma, and avoid things like Starkiller Base and Force-Skyping and “Somehow, Palpatine returned.”