This week’s episode of The Mandalorian set the stage for season three’s finale with big stakes and reveals not just for Din Djarin and his Mandalorian friends, but the whole galaxy—and in the process, revealed the ace up Moff Gideon’s sleeve. But what precedent has there been for the Remnant’s new leaders in Star Wars history? Here’s what you need to know.
The Galactic Empire has had plenty of sinister leadership groups in both the current and old Expanded Universe canons—and as you’ll see, the one seen in The Mandalorian isn’t even the first to be called the Shadow Council. Across contemporary canon however, the Empire and the Imperial Remnant’s leadership can be tracked through four distinct administrations:
Remember those guys in funny hats from Return of the Jedi that Palpatine dismisses to turn his office into a father-son death match arena? That is the Imperial Ruling Council, the group of advisors and political ministers that answered to no one but Palpatine himself, and were tasked with the administrative work of managing the vast reaches of the Galactic Empire.
Vader also technically sat on the Ruling Council as the Commander-in-Chief of the Imperial military forces, but it was led in part by Palpatine’s closest advisor, the Grand Vizier Mas Amedda, and a legion of advisors and bureaucrats. The Ruling Council acted as the final administrative link between the Moffs that controlled the various Imperial Sectors and Palpatine himself, and were by and large the actual people who kept the engine of Empire ticking along, as Palpatine obsessed over Sith relics and his desire to achieve immortality.
The Battle of Endor, and the deaths of Palpatine and Vader, threw the Ruling Council into disarray. It effectively imploded, as Mas Amedda found himself besieged on Coruscant by the nascent New Republic and eventually became the face of the eventual provisional government that officially lead the Imperial Remnant at the end of the Galactic Civil War. Other advisors on the Ruling Council scattered, attempting to carve out regions of the Empire as their own personal kingdoms.
The Ruling Council was briefly replaced by the Future Council, known as the IFC, an attempt to combine the efforts of multiple Imperial loyalists in the wake of the tumult caused by the Rebellion’s victory at Endor. Formed at the planet Akiva by Imperial Admiral Rae Sloane, the IFC was made up of Sloane and several other naval officers, the former Ruling Council member Yupe Tashu, Grand Moff Valco Pandion, and Imperial financier Arsin Crassus.
The IFC’s rule was short-lived, however. Already stalled by internal disagreements, Sloane’s council was all but eradicated at Akiva when the New Republic sparked an uprising on the world, which seceded to the new galactic government and chased the IFC off-planet. Caught by a New Republic Fleet, only Sloane escaped death or capture, and was recruited to join...
Orchestrated by the Emperor’s counsel and Fleet Admiral Gallius Rax, the first Shadow Council was, as the name implied, meant to manage the Imperial Remnant’s counteroffensive against the New Republic from the shadows, with only Sloane, now a Grand Admiral, as its public figurehead. But although not as short-lived as the IFC, the first Shadow Council was doomed from the beginning, intentionally.
Rax, operating on direct orders from Palpatine posthumously released as part of Operation Cinder—Palpatine’s plans to destroy the apparatus of the Empire in the wake of his death so that Rebellion couldn’t co-opt it, and so it could be reborn in the Unknown Regions alongside himself—intentionally established the council to wipe most of its members off the board at Jakku, in a bid to destroy the planet itself, as well as the New Republic and Remnant fleets, in a singular conflict.
Rax was killed by Sloane above Jakku when she discovered his plans, and while most of the Shadow Council was killed at the battle as well, several survived. Grand Moff Randd fled to the Expansion region—the galactic space between the Inner and Mid rims—and formed his own Imperial Remnant. Meanwhile Sloane and her fellow councilor Brendol Hux, alongside his young son and several child soldiers, also escaped the chaos.
The destruction of the first Shadow Council at Jakku also saw a formal end to the Galactic Civil War; the Galactic Concordance, a treaty between New Republic Chancellor Mon Mothma and former Grand Vizier Mas Amedda, was signed shortly after the battle. But four years later in the time of The Mandalorian season three, we have been introduced to a second iteration of the Council, now seemingly led by Giancarlo Esposito’s Moff Gideon. Who’s who in this one? Allow us to introduce them...
You know him, you love him, you probably prefer to love to hate him: The Mandalorian’s big bad and former ISB agent, now Moff of the Imperial Remnant, Gideon is seemingly the second Shadow Council’s leader. A vital player in the apparent genocide of the planet Mandalore and its peoples, as well as the former wielder of the Mandalorian lightsaber known as the Darksaber, he leads the Shadow Council’s operations to restore the Empire to galactic rule.
An Imperial Naval Captain and seemingly the man in charge of the Shadow Council’s fleet assets, Captain Pellaeon’s role on the council is largely one as a herald: his party is the one that represents Grand Admiral Thrawn, making a return to the galaxy after years missing in the wake of the events of Star Wars Rebels.
If you want to know plenty more on Captain Pellaeon’s history in current and former Star Wars canon, don’t worry—we’ve got you covered right here.
You’ve heard at least part of this name if you’re familiar with the Sequel Trilogy—this Hux is Brendol, future General Armitage Hux’s father, and the spearhead of the future training programs that would create the new military legions of the First Order. The former commandant of the Arkanis training academy in the days of the Empire, Hux would go on to train his own son in the brainwashing methods that the First Order would use on captured children to transform them into Stormtroopers.
When we meet him in The Mandalorian, Hux Sr. is seemingly in charge of the Shadow Council’s army assets in a mirror to Pellaeon’s command of the navy, as well as the mysterious “Project Necromancer.”
The remaining members of the second Shadow Council go unnamed in the credits of “The Spies,” but they are referred to in dialogue by a title familiar to fans of the old Expanded Universe: Warlords.
Warlordism was the primary mode of rule for the various splintered Imperial factions in the EU after the Battle of Endor, as Imperial military commanders and Moffs scrambled to proclaim the territory they previously ruled over in the Emperor’s name as the last true bastions of the Galactic Empire. Warlords consolidated power into individual factions that plagued the nascent New Republic for years, until 13 of the most powerful Warlords in the galaxy were executed by Admiral Natasi Daala, aided by Pellaeon, in what would go on to be the formation of the formal Imperial Remnant in the decades after the Battle of Endor.
So far from what we can tell in The Mandalorian, the Warlords fulfill a similar role in canon, even if a slightly more cooperative one: seeking personal power and wealth for their own fiefdoms rather than particularly being willing to unify into a singular Empire once again.
Although unseen in this week’s Mandalorian, it’s heavily implied there is a major seat at the table in the Shadow Council for Grand Admiral Thrawn... whenever Pellaeon’s promises of his return actually come to pass, that is.
A former officer in the Chiss Ascendancy who was tasked to leave his people’s territories in the Unknown Regions to explore a potential alliance with the then-nascent Empire to combat another threat in the Unknown Regions, the Grysk Hegemony, Thrawn rose through the ranks of the Imperial Military to become a Grand Admiral of its Navies. Tasked with rooting out the nascent insurgent organization that spawned on the planet Lothal, Thrawn vanished alongside the Jedi apprentice Ezra Bridger during an engagement between Rebel forces and Thrawn’s fleet, sent through hyperspace to parts unknown by a herd of beings known as the Purgill.
We’ll be seeing him soon enough.
Sloane survived the destruction of the first Shadow Council, and her absence from this second one is certainly telling—especially with the appearance of Brendol Hux, who she escaped with to the Unknown Regions. What’s currently known of Sloane in canon after the events of the Battle of Jakku is little more than the fact that she became one of the first major leaders of the rebuilt Imperial military that would terrorize the galaxy decades later as the First Order. What happened to her during its prominence and eventual destruction at Exegol is unknown.
If Hux Sr. is working with Gideon’s Shadow Council, there’s certainly a chance she could be operating in a similar manner to Pellaeon’s relationship to Thrawn for the group—influencing its duties from even further in the shadows, instead of playing a direct role. Time, and other Star Wars streaming shows, will no doubt tell.
It’s hard to say. Given that the first Shadow Council was explicitly established as part of Palpatine’s posthumous plans to burn what was left of the Empire away entirely, we’ve not quite seen enough of the second to really say if its members are aware that the Emperor is not quite so permanently dispatched. But one intriguing line of dialogue in “The Spies” could give us a hint: Brendol Hux, who we can presume by this point is well at work developing the future First Order military in the Unknown Regions, is said by Captain Pellaeon to be working on something called “Project Necromancer.”
Given the way Pellaeon briefly discusses this as potentially separate to his eventual work on the First Order Stormtrooper program—he describes Thrawn’s return as the resurgence of the Imperial Military, rather than Necromancer—and given the connotations of a name like “Project Necromancer,” alongside Moff Gideon’s own oft-teased plans of cloning research with Dr. Pershing, could it have some connection to the long-planned resurrection of Palpatine in a viable cloned body?
Perhaps. But it’s just as likely that Project Necromancer is instead what Hux calls the program that creates the mysterious Praetorian Guards, given it is he that has to specifically dispatch a trio of them to Gideon’s base on Mandalore. Once again, time will tell.
It’s clear The Mandalorian’s revitalization of the Shadow Council idea first explored in Chuck Wendig’s early canon Aftermath novels is to set the stage for a much larger conflict in the world of the show and its sister series Ahsoka, and now, a new movie from Dave Filoni as well. But just how viable will it be, given the much more truncated timeline between Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens in contemporary canon? Well, that remains to be seen again.
There’s a lot at play here, from the return of Grand Admiral Thrawn to the early stages of the First Order’s formation. Whatever we’re going to see of it going forward in The Mandalorian, Ahsoka, and beyond is going to give us an insight into this most fascinating era of the current Star Wars canon at a level we’ve simply not seen since the galaxy far, far away’s long history was rebooted.