Star Wars: The problem with The Rise of Skywalker trailer

The third trailer for The Rise of Skywalker has an altogether too common Star Wars problem.

The third trailer for Star Wars: Episode IX – The Rise of Skywalker has premiered on ESPN’s Monday Night Football. It has a very familiar problem to most stories set a long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.

(We also forgot that Monday Night Football still existed, but that’s not important here.)

Rey (Daisy Ridley of Murder on the Orient Express), Finn (The Circle’s John Boyega) and Poe (X-Men: Apocalypse’s Oscar Isaac) do lots of running, leaping and piloting of various vehicles.

The trailer has lots of familiar elements – voiceovers, dramatic orchestral music, spaceship chases – and one, in our opinion, COLOSSAL flaw.

But first, watch for yourself.

What’s the obvious flaw?

There are no dogs in it. 

Though, to be fair, there are barely any canines in this galaxy whatsoever, which really seems unlikely given the variety of evolution among the species.

Canine-like creatures were seen in the astonishingly bland 2018 spinoff/prequel Solo: A Star Wars Story, when a young Han Solo (Alden Ehrenreich) and his girlfriend Qi’ra ( pronounced Kira, played by Game of Thrones‘s Emilia Clarke) are escaping Corellia in a stolen speeder.

Some security Bulldog/lizard creatures chase after them for a nanosecond and are outwitted.

Still, this proved that domesticated doglike creatures were capable of existing in George Lucas’narrative landscape.

The first actual canines onscreen came in 2017’s Star Wars: Episode XIII – The Last Jedi, in the cave-dwelling crystal foxes on the salt planet Crait.

These crystal foxes (which Entertainment Weekly says are technically a “vulptex,” and “vulptices” in plural) are fully wild and non-sentient, but the pack have a fairly direct indirect bearing on the plot, though it’s a small contribution that quickly fades into the background.

According to Wookieepedia, crystal foxes are omnivorous, eating small mammals and potato-like vegetation.

Their main den was in an abandoned Rebel fortress outpost, and when Kylo Ren and the First Order showed up, they scurried away to a hidden back exit, which would have been impassable for the humans if Rey hadn’t used the Force to shove the accumulated rockslide away.

The sentient, vaguely wolfish species of Bothans have long had a presence in the Expanded Universe of the Star Wars novels since Timothy Zahn’s Heir to the Empire in 1991, and they come from the Mid-Rim planet of Bothawui originally and were officially neutral during the Clone Wars, according to Wookieepedia. 

Though Bothans have never appeared onscreen yet, they are known to be a cunning and political people, well-used to spying, and at least several members perished in the intelligence-gathering mission that allowed the Rebel Alliance to obtain the information that the second Death Star was under construction, paving the way for its destruction in Star Wars: Episode VI – Return of the Jedi. 

Maybe the upcoming Disney Plus series The Mandalorian will feature a Bothan or the crystal foxes.

For more in-depth coverage and analysis on all things Star Wars as we await The Rise of Skywalker, see our FanSided Network sister site Dork Side of the Force, and for secondary coverage check out Bam Smack Pow and Culturess.