Sorry, nobody knows what the heck Mando and Grogu were doing during the sequel trilogy

Few fictional universes have had their timelines so aggressively documented as Star Wars; even if you discount all the stuff that used to be kicking around in the Extended Universe of books and games, etc., which Disney excised into the outer darkness as “Legends” years ago, there’s still god knows how many pieces of media that cover the spaces between the franchise’s various films.

The Mandalorian, Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni’s attempt to adapt the Western into the world of both light and dark sabers, sits in one of the most fascinating, least-explored of those lacunae: The space in between Return Of The Jedi and The Force Awakens, in which the Rebel Alliance seems to have fumbled the bag of total galactic victory so badly that Imperial remnant The First Order has an even bigger, better Death Star on its hands by the time Episode VII rolls around.

For the most part, the Disney+ series doesn’t trouble itself with fleshing out that weirdly empty portion of Star Wars lore (which Filoni at least partially tackled with his animated series Resistance), opting instead for standalone space adventure with Pedro Pascal’s Mando and his young charge Grogu. But as Favreau and Filoni both gear up for the show’s return this week, they do keep getting a persistent question: What were Our Guys doing during the whole “Emperor comes back to life and tries to take back over the galaxy using a variety of implausible puppets” portion of the saga?

Filoni’s answer is a pretty honest one, i.e., hey, who knows? Or, to be specific—and per an interview that the long-time Star Wars animation head gave to THR this week— “That’s a great question, and we talk about many different things. That’s a question for a bunch of characters by the way, not just Grogu. Where are they during these events? If anything, having made The Clone Wars and weaving a tale so intricately between two movies that were much closer together, I’ve learned that there’s expansive room in this galaxy for us to tell stories and have characters doing things.”

And while you’d think Grogu might check in from time to time with his old teacher Luke Skywalker from time to time—they did study together for two years in between seasons of The Mandalorian, per Favreau’s somewhat suspect timeline of the series—Filoni asserts that there’s no reason our two heroes even necessarily got involved in this galaxy-spanning conflict that ended with every good person in existence apparently getting a party invite to come hang out on Evil Lightning Planet. “We’ll just have to wait and see how the story evolves and what makes sense,” Filoni said. “But in my experience, there’s definitely a way to weave everything together and make it exciting. It’s possible it would never even have to cross over with what we saw [in the sequel trilogy] if the story has us somewhere else.”