Disney XD’s animated adventure
Star Wars Rebels came to a fitting close last night, but not before introducing fans to a brand new game-changing Force ability: time travel - or a version of it, anyway.
The episode A World Between Worlds saw Ezra in a Force-dominant space where he not only had access to past events in the universe, but could seemingly alter history as well. It’s an intriguing twist on Star Wars mythos, one we haven’t seen used anywhere in the franchise yet. But what does it mean for future Star Wars properties? Is it possible we could see this bizarre form of time travel in a Star Wars film on the big screen one day?
Speaking to Cinemablend, Star Wars Rebels showrunner Dave Filoni said:
“No, I hope not. I mean, because this is important for this particular story, and I think we'd have to be very careful about how it would be used otherwise. It's why we destroy the temple in the episode. It's mainly a place that people would go to see the future and the past. It's not such an active place and Ahsoka, for her part when she's pulled out of that moment, is placed back in that same timeline and not very long after she left it. So again, she's smart enough to know that she cannot go back with Ezra, so there is not this big time travel thing. She knows she has to remain a part of her world and her timeline.”
The moment in the episode that Filoni is referring to is when Ezra uses The Force to save Ahsoka by pulling her away from her battle with Darth Vader (as see in in Star Wars Rebels Season 2). Filoni clarified that what we saw unfold in Star Wars Rebels technically isn’t even time travel in the traditional sense. Filoni continued:
“I don't really think of it as time travel. It's not really a thing where you go through one door and out another in a different time. The world between worlds is really about knowledge and gaining knowledge. As the Dume wolf says, what's in there is knowledge and destruction. You can gain knowledge of the future or futures that may happen, and you can see things that happened in the past. You can at times choose to alter them, but it's perilous to do so and when you alter something you don't know if that's not the way it always happened. So destruction is the other half of what's in there. When you go through these doorways, you're in peril of destruction because you're missing all sorts of things that would have happened or things would've happened otherwise, you know, so it's a dangerous game but it's not something we're here going in and out of different doors. It's an extension of the Jedi's ability to perceive the future and the past, as described in Empire Strikes Back.”
In other words, don’t expect to see Luke’s fate at the end of The Last Jedi - or any other controversial decisions made by Rian Johnson - retconned by Star Wars Episode IX director J.J. Abrams, as that clearly was not Filoni’s intention with Star Wars Rebels - hence, why the the Jedi temple was destroyed after the rescue.
What do you think of the use of “time travel” in Star Wars Rebels? Is it a complete game changer in the universe?