Disney Channel’s Star Wars Resistance Gives the Franchise a Much-Needed Infusion of Fun

Star Wars Resistance, Disney’s newest offering on the animated Star Wars altar, opens with a visual gag that even the most casual fans of the franchise will get a kick out of. No spoilers here, but in the few seconds it takes for that gag to resolve, the personality of the newest addition to the greater Star Wars landscape, both stylistically and narratively, is made clear: Deeply saturated but flatly lit, Wookieepedia-fluent but unapologetically irreverent, this is a series that will be concerned primarily with having fun.

This is lucky, as the recent waves of “fandamentalist” conversation around Star Wars as a franchise have been decidedly un-fun, and the recent cinematic and serial additions to the Star Wars canon have leaned more aggressively into the universe’s darker and more fan-servicey corners. To have something like Star Wars Resistance added to the mix, with its tight cast of mostly new, mostly extra-political characters, and with what amounts to a chaotically inhabited “gas station in the middle of nowhere; serving as the base of operations for thrill-seeking sky racers and other assorted troublemakers from all across the galaxy, is a relief. Star Wars may have gotten better as a pop culture property as its has deepened the complexity of its universe, but not every addition to that universe needs to be an epic of nuanced political, moral and space-magic intrigue. Sometimes, it can just be about a hotshot kid who wants to prove himself as an ace pilot, and his new metaphor-intolerant alien friend who wants to make that dream come true.

Which is, of course, exactly what Star Wars Resistance is: the story of almost-ace pilot Kazuda Xiono (Christopher Sean), whose accidental run-in with Poe Dameron (guest voice Oscar Isaac) in a dogfight with a First Order pilot lands the newbie on the aforementioned proto-gas station, the Colossus, as a newly minted Resistance spy meant to infiltrate its thrill-junkie ace pilot community and work out who might be friendly with the rising threat of the First Order. Once on the Colossus, Kaz teams up with a green tentacly dude named Neeku (Josh Brener), as well as Jarek Yeager (Scott Lawrence), a gruff old human pilot pal of Poe’s, and his young human mechanic, Tam Ryvora (Suzie McGrath). Bobby Moynihan, Donald Faison, Myrna Velasco, and Jim Rash are among the rest of the regular voice cast, while Adam Driver and Gwendoline Christie are both in line to reprise their film roles as guests, and Elijah Wood is set to guest as a sky racer Kaz meets later in the season. All great actors, all obviously enjoying their work, in a series that lets them play around in a part of the Star Wars sandbox that has long been a visual signature of the franchise—hotshot flying—but which has never been made a story’s singular focus.