Star Wars Resistance is beautiful

Just look at this amazing image of the Colossus mobile aircraft refueling station in last weekend’s episode of Star Wars Resistance. Hiding from a First Order Star Destroyer in the upper atmospheric layers of a nearby planet, and illuminated for the TV audience briefly by a flash of alien lightning, this shot from the CG-animated series on Disney XD — now playing out its second and final season — clearly pays homage to nebula hide-and-seek scenes from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and Star Trek: The Next Generation’s “Best of Both Worlds.”

Resistance hasn’t been garnering anywhere near the attention that the cinematic Episode IX — The Rise of Skywalker and the live-action Disney+ series The Mandalorian have — and that’s a shame, really. It’s a solid adventure, if a little more obviously geared toward younger audiences than its brethren.

Hopefully its audiences will be rewarded with some payoff that ties into those other stories, as it takes place during the First Order’s triumphant march across the galaxy ahead of TROS. It tells a smaller story, true, but sometimes that offers a chance to explore interesting ideas like Sith artifacts and strange life forms that give the Star Wars universe its richness.

Star Wars Resistance - The Relic Raiders

The Art of Star Wars Rebels coming March 2020 with deluxe edition from Dark Horse

Not everyone has been sleeping on Star Wars Resistance: The series has been nominated for a Daytime Emmy for outstanding children’s program, and it won the Saturn Award for best animated series.

With its colorful and distinctive, almost Robotech-inspired, character-driven animation style as well as beautiful background vistas like those above, I’d say it’s more than likely when Resistance wraps up its run this year that we’ll get an “Art of Star Wars Resistance” book the way we’re getting The Art of Star Wars Rebels from Dark Horse this spring.

And, with Lucasfilm’s first CG-animated series The Clone Wars returning for a long-awaited grand finale in February on Disney+, perhaps the art-book gods will be even more generous and give us an update to the now-hard-to-find Art of Star Wars: The Clone Wars, a show with a creator — Dave Filoni — famous for his character sketches. (Don’t forget, also, that The Mandalorian, though the first live-action Star Wars TV series, is already a wealth of behind-the-scenes concept art in its closing credits every week — don’t for one second imagine that won’t be used to take more of our money!)

Enjoy a few more of the beautiful (and sometimes terrifying) screenshots from oceanic planet Castilon and beyond we’ve been sharing along with our weekly previews of Star Wars Resistance, and stay tuned for more as the series reaches its finale in 2020!