‘Star Wars Resistance’ Will Overlap With ‘The Force Awakens’

The Star Wars timeline seems to be getting more and more packed, with TV shows and movies filling up every conceivable gap between Revenge of the Sith and The Force Awakens.

Star Wars Resistance, the animated series which debuted earlier this month, will actually overlap with The Force Awakens, revealing TV audiences to some of the first post in-universe stories told in the era of the sequel trilogy. The choice, according to head writer Brandon Auman, came down to making the storytelling clear and letting fans — even younger or more casual ones — understand from the get-go when the story takes place.

“It’s a little hard for the younger fans to wrap their heads around it if it was, say 15 years before The Force Awakens,” Auman told SYFY Wire. “Then it’s a very nebulous timeline. You’re kind of not sure. The fact that we’ve got Poe Dameron and BB-8 from the very beginning — kids and any fan of any age automatically just know… ‘This is the new movies, this is where it’s gonna take place,’ so it’s just easier. And it was just fun to kind of roll in and back up a little bit instead of just trying to follow exactly where the movies are at.”

It also likely means that characters and stories from The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi which were not explored in any depth due to time and storytelling constraints will likely be able to resurface and be given more room to breathe.

“This is actually an interesting timeline,” series producer Justin Ridge said, “because you have all this old tech that’s still around, and some of the old droids and things that are still working, but you have all the new tech from the new movies. It’s a cool hybrid of old and new. Even though it has more the lighthearted tone to it, there are still stakes. This is still Star Wars, there’s still good guys and bad guys, it’s just there’s not a war going on at this point, so we don’t start off heavy with conflict, we have to see how the First Order is building up. This is part of [series lead] Kaz Xiono’s mission: to figure out what that is and report it to the Resistance.”

Star Wars Resistance airs on Sundays on the Disney Channel.