A Female-Centric Star Wars Series Is On The Way, Let’s Hope it’s Doctor Aphra

Following the massive success of season one of The Mandalorian, Disney Plus is working on a new female-centric Star Wars series.

Variety states, Russian Doll co-creator, showrunner and executive producer Leslye Headland will be taking control of the series as both writer and showrunner.

Theirs is no exact details of the plot of the series besides being a female-centric show and that it’ll take place in a different part of the Star Wars timeline than other projects.

This is an exciting pick for Lucasfilm and Disney Plus as Headland directed multiple episodes of Netflix series Russian Doll and became a huge success for the streaming service as it was nominated for 13 Emmy Awards, winning three.

I’m excited about Headland wrote and directed the fantastic rom-com Sleeping With Other People and is one of the handful of brilliant modern romantic comedies.

As well as being female-led, the interesting line is that it’ll take place in a different part of the Star Wars timeline with the only possible guess being the sequel trilogy timeline.

Because The Mandalorian (which has been picked up for a third series) takes place shortly after the original trilogy. The Kenobi series will be between episodes three and four. The Cassian Andor series will take place before the events of Rogue One (because he blew up), so that’ll be around the prequel era.

That’s if we don’t include the animated shows, Clone Wars takes place during the clone wars…, Rebels was before A New Hope and Resistance took place across the sequel trilogy, but before Rise of Skywalker.

Another possibility, if not sequel trilogy, is between the events of A New Hope and Empire Strikes Back during the days where the Empire were at the strongest but recently suffered a blow losing the Death Star.

If this a possibility and being a female-centric series, there’s only one character that deserves the live-action treatment – Doctor Aphra.

If you don’t know who she is, Aphra comes from the popularity of the Darth Vader comics getting her own comic series. It centres around the rogue archaeologist find artefacts for the Empire, black market or other evil forces.

Think of her as a gay, immoral Indiana Jones but just as fresh and badass that includes her own crew of two murder bots and a Wookiee bounty hunter.

Aphra is the perfect character to adapt for live-action either as a D+ series or big screen movie and will be beloved by wider fans who don’t read the comics.

It’s surprising, if it is Aphra, that it wasn’t announced alongside the Headland report. The only reason it might not have been is that they want to unveil the news at Star Wars Celebration, but it looks like the weekend-long event won’t be happening with COVID-19 having a firm grip around the world.