“A long time ago in a galaxy far far away...” is the calling card for Star Wars fans everywhere. However, according to Ahsoka Episode 2, that may not be entirely accurate. While the events of Star Wars may have happened a long time ago, they may not all take place in a single galaxy far far away, but two different galaxies. But just how could that happen, and what does it mean for the future of Star Wars? The answer may actually involve one of the most fearsome villains in the entire franchise’s history.
In Ahsoka Episode 2, Morgan Elsbeth assembles her crew of lightsaber-wielding mercenaries to show them the star map they stole from Sabine Wren. “This is our galaxy, she says, referring to the hologram at her fingertips. As she manipulates the giant star map, an orange line forms, pointing to another entire galaxy surrounded by crude drawings of purrgils. “That is our destination,” she says, surprising Baylan Skoll.
This orange line is the fabled “Pathway to Peridea,” the portal to another galaxy Baylan heard stories about as a child. This path has never appeared in Star Wars before, however, there are in fact multiple galaxies in the non-canon Star Wars Legends timeline. Exploration of other galaxies wasn’t really shown until the 1999 novel The New Jedi Order: Vector Prime, which became infamous in Star Wars history.
The ExtraGalactic Society was a New Republic group dedicated to the search for extragalactic life, and in Vector Prime, one of the ExGal’s listening posts suddenly found something: the Yuuzhan Vong.
The Vong were from another galaxy that once included many species. But through the Vong’s ruthless genocides, they killed all but one species, whom they spared to use as slaves. Vector Prime introduced this evil threat that threw the entire Star Wars galaxy into a tragic war. How tragic? In Vector Prime, the Vong invade Sernpidal through poisonous gas from a beetle, which ends up killing Chewbacca — the first time a major Star Wars character was killed off after the original trilogy.
If Ahsoka is really going to open a path to another galaxy, then it’s possible an extragalactic threat similar to the Vong could use the new connection to invade the Star Wars universe and thrust the “Mando-verse” into a threat even greater than Empire stragglers and the looming threat of the First Order: a genocidal species that could rip through the entire galaxy like it’s nothing.
In the canon Thrawn: Ascendancy trilogy, the Chiss face off against a species known as the Grysks that often garner comparisons to the Vong, but it’s likely Star Wars would invent an entirely new threat to replace the Vong considering Thrawn has already fought the Grysks.
There are also a couple issues with throwing the Mandalorian-era Star Wars universe into an intergalactic war: if there is an invasion, then how will future projects get around showing legacy characters like Luke, Leia, and Han, who are presumedly all in positions of power at this time?
It might take some clever writing to work around this, but Ahsoka could be ramping up to a story that sees a burgeoning New Republic forced to defend the entire galaxy as a whole.
