Dave Filoni On The Endgame For 'Star Wars Rebels'

By Ciaran Duggan,

Yesterday, io9 reported on an interview of Dave Filoni at Star Wars Celebration London. In the interview, Dave Filoni covered a range of topics, including the highly anticipated return of Grand Admiral Thrawn and the future trajectory of Star Wars: Rebels. The underlying theme throughout the interview was the notion of an 'end game' and the attempts to align the diverse number of storylines together at the end of the series. But what is the end game? And how does Filoni intend to go about bridging the different Rebels' story arcs together? 

Dave Filoni: We have surmised, over the years, that the Rebellion isn't technically over until 'Return of the Jedi' and even then there was some additional fighting that lead up to Jakku. So when is the ultimate victory that would mean Hera and company are free of the fight? Well, it doesn't seem to be for a long time. So it's not impossible and there are probably a lot of stories, I'm just gonna try and tell the most important ones for them, what their saga is, and probably not every saga ends on the same day. In Rebels, we're introducing this pretty potent Force-using kid. Where is he? You'd think he'd be a pretty important tool for the Rebellion to use in the later films. But eventually [fellow producer] Simon Kinberg and I figured out what that means, where they go and what happened to them.

Filoni has made it clear then, that the stories of our principal Rebels' characters (heroes and villains) may not be resolved in the TV series. Whether or not Filoni is hinting at a swift conclusion to the series is unclear, and, neither here nor there to be frank, however it does suggest that the stories of characters like Ezra, Maul, Kallus, Sabine and Thrawn may be left open-ended. Filoni compares this art of story-telling to that of the iconic author, J.R.R Tolkien, as Filoni reveals how Tolkien's Lord of The Rings novels' influenced Filoni's approach to the way in which he tells stories on Rebels. 

Dave Filoni: I love to give a lot of Tolkien references, but [in those stories] Faramir is kind of doing his thing, Frodo is doing his thing, Aragorn is doing his thing, everybody's got their different movements...it's amazing how Tolkien orchestrated all that. So even bits that weren't necessarily in the books, he knew what was going on. And when you take on mass continuity like this, that's what you're really getting at. You have to understand the world and all the moving parts of it. And I think the challenge is you want each story to be original and exciting. 

Of course the big unveil at Celebration London this past weekend was the return of the iconic former 'Legends' villain, Grand Admiral Thrawn. Filoni had a few words to say about his story arc and the end game of his character. 

Dave Filoni: When we start, I always want to know where it's all going. If we bring [Thrawn] in, we have to think reasonably about, 'Where is he?# There are any number of reasonable answers as simple as 'He's on a Star Destroyer.' You can reasonably say that. While there's the hunt for Luke Skywalker, there's all kinds of other things going on in the galaxy. That's a reasonable thing. You usually start off thinking, 'Okay. At least we have a reasonable thing in the future. We need to know what our end game is for this character, [and] I think [that] is exciting. You go through a number of questions. 'Does he survive'? Does he not survive?' We've been the architects of that as we've been going. I think we have a nice path figured out for Mr. Thrawn. I wouldn't bring him back lightly without that plan.

What do you make of Filoni's words? Aside from the excitement of Thrawn's return, would you be satisfied with open-ended conclusions to some of the characters' story arcs (akin to Ahsoka)? Or, would you like to see a firm and clear ending to their arcs on the show?  

Source: io9

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