Our modern digital Prometheus: when the technical wizards behind the CGI of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story learned that they could reanimate deceased actor Peter Cushing to reprise his role as gaunt-cheeked Empire command Grand Moff Tarkin, they never stopped stopped to think if they should. The resultant spelunking into the uncanny valley was as polarizing as it was unexpected. Some were wowed by the boundless possibilities of computer programming and the effective triumph over the permanence of death; others immediately flashed back to high school memories of reading Mary Shelley. The debate over the ethics of artificially contriving performances from dead actors continues to rage, and a figure close to the situation has now weighed in.

You’d have to plug your ears to be totally unaware of the many calls for increased diversity that have been sounded in Hollywood over the past few years. Representation has become the name of the game — giving women, nonwhite viewers, or LGBTQ viewers someone that they can see themselves in onscreen. But this process has mostly played out in the forum of public discourse, explicated in articles or spoken about on daytime television or uncomfortably joked about at the Oscars. After long enough, a person can lose sight of the real-world ramifications of this sea change, and forget about why we’ve collectively resolved to work toward it in the first place.

If you thought Star Wars Rebels taking on a few Rogue One characters was big, you haven’t seen the half of Season 3. I mean, you literally haven’t, but you’ll need to after watching this new 2017 trailer, featuring more familiar sights, Mandalorian action, and one of the biggest Star Wars cameos of all!

If you go back and watch the trailers and TV spots for Rogue One after you see the movie, a couple of things are glaringly obvious: First, you’ll notice a ton of scenes that don’t appear in the theatrical version, and second, it’s easy to sort of piece together the film’s original ending (recently confirmed by director Gareth Edwards) — all of which suggests that the reshoots were a bit more extensive than Lucasfilm wanted us to believe. According to the film’s editors, that’s certainly the case, and those reshoots changed a whole lot more than just the ending.

The headline here is that Rogue One: A Star Wars Story held onto the number one of the box office top 10 for the third weekend in a row, which was expected. However, the real story is that the past few days made for one of the most impressive weekends of the past year, closing out 2016 (and starting 2017) with a bang.

Most everyone has had a chance to sit with the many surprises of Rogue One, but if you want to know how it really all began, we’re headed back to Geonosis. So discovers Star Wars Rebels, as a new 2017 premiere trailer takes us from where Saw Gerrera saved the rebellion to when the rebellion saved him.

Rogue One will have to settle for being the second-highest grossing film of the year — damn you, cultural juggernaut Finding Dory! — but it does have the distinction of being among the better-reviewed films in its franchise. Many critics have praised director Gareth Edwards’ vision of some unexplored pockets of George Lucas’ universe, singling out Darth Vader’s castle lair that appears in the film on a violent, molten-lava planet. (The planet bears a strong resemblance to Mustafar, the magma-covered site of the final showdown between Anakin Skywalker and Obi-wan Kenobi in Revenge of the Sith.) Now, one of the key designers from Rogue One has provided a little background on the memorable locale and how it came to be.

Rogue One made impressive effort not just to tie into the original Star Wars films, but also the animated Star Wars Rebels in at least three instances. We’ll even meet a younger Rogue One character on Rebels in 2017, though the film’s visual guide might also tease another Rogue favorite making an animated debut at some point in the series.

All is right with the galaxy far away: Rogue One has dominated at the box-office, as expected, and earned mixed-to-positive reviews from critics, also as expected. But watching the film, especially in light of the revelations that Lucasfilm ordered massive reshoots that stretched on for weeks, it’s clear that there’s a Rogue One that’s gone unseen. The unused footage from the trailers, Tony Gilroy stepping in with rewrites to the point where he earned a co-writer credit, friction between Lucasfilm and director Gareth Edwards — it all points to an alternate version of the film laying on some Los Angeles editing suite floor.

While Rogue One is just a standalone and won’t be getting a sequel (you could argue that the original trilogy is technically all the sequel it needs), Saw Gerrera, one of the more intriguing characters in the movie, will be back for more projects in the Star Wars universe.