The Star Wars IP is riddled with iconic characters. And, considering it involves several all-out galactic brawls, not all of those characters live to fight another day. Then there are the characters who seemingly die and then are brought back later on to, yes, fight another day. Those are the ones we’re looking at today. However, because the Star Wars franchise is filled with so many different forms of media stretching over the course of decades, we feel the need to elaborate on just what constitutes a “resurrection.” Basically, if a character died in one season of a TV series—or in a movie—and was brought back a few episodes or a season down the line (much less in an entirely different project), that counted. What didn’t count was if a character died in one movie or series episode and was brought back in that same movie or series episode. For instance, Ahsoka Tano in Star Wars: The Clone Wars‘ “Altra of Mortis” or Rey in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.
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Fake out deaths also didn’t count, of course. Like the Grand Inquisitor, whose death was faked by Darth Vader in Obi-Wan Kenobi so Reva Sevander would reveal her true intentions when it was just her and Vader. A fake out death is not a genuine death. But these following characters? They were supposed to be dead. We saw them die or were heavily led to believe they had died. Yet they came back anyway.
8) Palpatine
Emperor Sheev Palpatine aka Darth Sidious was thrown down a reactor shaft by Darth Vader in Star Wars: Return of the Jedi. It was the end of his tyrannical reign, and a memorable one at that. But then he was brought back as, sigh, a clone in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.
The Rise of Skywalker explained that Palpatine survived by transferring his consciousness in a clone located on the Sith planet Exegol. The novelization of The Rise of Skywalker explained that Palpatine sensed that Vader was wavering between the Dark Side and the Light (which he wasn’t, really, not until the second half of Return of the Jedi). He had the clones waiting and ready for a while, so while he was falling down the shaft, he sent his own consciousness to Exegol, meaning his body was dead partway down the shaft. It’s all completely ridiculous. Let’s call Sidious’ resurrection what it was: a big “Uh oh” after much of the fandom didn’t respond well to the big swings taken in Star Wars: The Last Jedi.
7) Burryaga Agaburry
Star Wars: The High Republic is a multimedia project made up of three phases consisting of novels, comics, audio dramas, and the series Young Jedi Adventures and The Acolyte. Wookie Jedi Knight Burryaga Agaburry is someone whose presence has been fairly consistent throughout those.
Agaburry was seemingly knocked off in the novel Star Wars: The High Republic – The Fallen Star (2022), where he was assumed to be one of many dead Jedi at the Starlight Beacon station. Nonetheless, he was revealed to be alive in the following year’s short story Star Wars: The High Republic – Tales of Light and Life “All Jedi Walk Their Own Path.” It’s hard to feel too much about this one, considering Agaburry has never so much as been in a live-action Star Wars project. He’s just been in niche material.
6) Aurra Sing
We don’t see Aurra Sing actually get incinerated in the Season 2 finale of Star Wars: The Clone Wars, but nonetheless the Slave I (she’s partially known as a mentor to Boba Fett) she’s flying crashes on Florrum and blows up. Regardless of whether she was meant to be part of the burned-up wreckage—and it seems perfectly likely she was—she still showed up the following season, trying to kill none other than Padmé Amidala.
However, as is revealed in Solo: A Star Wars Story, Aurra Sing was once and for all murdered by Tobia Beckett (Woody Harrelson), who was hired to do so by Dryden Vos (Paul Bettany). Beckett pushed her off the side of a cliff of some type.
5) Asajj Ventress
Nightsister Asajj Ventress died in the 2015 novel Star Wars: Dark Disciple by sacrificing herself, saving her lover, Quinlan Vos, from the power of Count Dooku’s Force lightning. And for nearly a decade she stayed dead until her appearance in Star Wars: The Bad Batch‘s third season episode “The Harbinger.”
Fellow animated series Star Wars: Tales of the Underworld (2025) informed confused fans that Vos and Obi-Wan Kenobi took her body to her home planet, Dathomir. Ventress’ spirit turned down the chance to be with the souls of her fellow Nightsisters and came back to life to be with Vos.
4) Echo
Fan-favorite clone trooper Echo was a case of the show making us believe the character was lying dead just off-screen. In Star Wars: The Clone Wars Season 3, Episode 19 “Counterattack,” where a ship is destroyed behind him. We then see his helmet, now heavily damaged.
Were it not for that show’s seventh season airing on Disney+, we might not have ever seen Echo again. But we did, and then we saw plenty more of him in Star Wars: The Bad Batch, which started the year after The Clone Wars wrapped up.
3) Boba Fett
Boba Fett didn’t have much screentime in the original trilogy, but he was so well-designed and had such swagger that he was an immediate hit with fans. So, even though he hadn’t fully ingrained himself in people’s minds as an integral part of the original trilogy’s narrative, it was still hard to see him get chomped down by the Sarlacc in Return of the Jedi.
When Temuera Morrison popped up as Boba in The Mandalorian Season 2, it was a real treat. We finally get the chance to understand who the man was behind the mask. We also believed (to a certain extent) that someone like him could have escaped the Sarlacc Pit. So why isn’t Boba Fett number one on our list? Because Star Wars: The Book of Boba Fett failed to deliver on the promise of just how great this particular character getting his own story could be. It didn’t even feel like his show half the time, considering it shifted focus to Din Djarin.
2) Fennec Shand
Did we see Fennec Shand die? Some might argue over that. But she was gut shot and left in the desert in The Mandalorian Season 1’s “The Gunslinger”…she seemed pretty dead. But Ming-Na Wen was so great as the character that she was brought back in the sophomore season’s “The Tragedy” and continued to be a fun presence in The Book of Boba Fett.
After Toro Calican unexpectedly shot her like a coward and left her to die, Shand was lucky enough to have Fett find her in what should have been her final moments. He brought her to a mod parlor in Mos Eisley and had her charred abdomen swapped out for cybernetic parts. This is a great resurrection because, one, it makes sense how she could come back and, two, Wen is such a natural in the Star Wars universe that it would have been a bummer to have her relegated to a single episode.
1) Darth Maul
Darth Maul was quite iconically bisected in Star Wars: The Phantom Menace after what is almost certainly the best lightsaber duel in the franchise’s history. Then, 13 years later, he returned in the penultimate episode of Star Wars: The Clone Wars‘ fourth season, titled “Brothers.”
Interestingly enough, Maul was always supposed to come back after The Phantom Menace. He was a big part of George Lucas’ plans for the sequel trilogy before Disney took over and released their disappointing seventh, eighth, and ninth episodes. It would have been interesting to see that, but the arc he got throughout Clone Wars and Star Wars Rebels (which culminated in him getting killed once and for all by Obi-Wan Kenobi) was more than solid enough to justify the return of the enigmatic character.
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