Before Ezra fell through the World Between Worlds in the Rebels in 2018, there had never been time travel in Star Wars before. Except there had been. Relegated to non-canon status long ago, the Shistavanen Woflman named Lak Sivrak became unstuck in time in a banger Star Wars short story published in 1995. Today, all the cool kid Star Wars fans nodded their heads when The Acolyte referenced things like Vernesta Rwoh’s lightwhip from the High Republic books, but back in the mid-’90s, obsessive fans were talking about characters like Lak Sivrak, his one true love Dice Ibegon, and the implications of what his journey meant in the larger context of the trilogy. But then, in 1997, the Shistavanen wolfmen were low-key erased from existence, thanks to a tweak in the first George Lucas “Special Edition” of A New Hope.
Now, 29 years after the publication of the first Shistavanen wolfman short story, 27 years after the Special Edition erasure, and 47 years after the original Star Wars cantina scene, there’s a Shistavanen wolfman back on the screen in Star Wars canon. Or wait. Is this actually a Defel?
Brutus: Shistavanen or Defel?
As revealed by Entertainment Weekly, months before the launch of Skeleton Crew, the new Star Wars pirate show features at least one creature that looks very much like a wolfman. At the time, the internet exploded with geeky commentary; could this be a retcon of a retcon? Could the Shistavanen species finally be resurrected?
The answer right now is a little unclear. The character of Brutus in Skeleton Crew does look a lot like two different wolf-alien creatures glimpsed in the Mos Eisley Cantina in the theatrical cut of A New Hope: the Shistavanen wolfman Lak Sivrak, and also a red-eyed wolf creature named Arleil Schous, who is from a species called a Defel. Like Lak, Arleil was replaced in the Special Edition in 1997, though he can be seen at the bar briefly in the current special edition.
His famous red-eyed scene has been replaced by a different CGI alien called Melas, in the same way that Lak was replaced by a CGI alien called Ketwol. The original production of Star Wars reused many monster masks from horror films to populate the cantina with strange creatures, and the masks of the wolfmen Lak and Arleil were in fact different masks. But when Lucas created the Special Editions of the trilogy, he decided to replace these creatures because he felt they looked unrealistic and out of place. Naturally, like many of the retcons in Star Wars, this decision was met with derision, partly because authors, game designers, and fans had invested so much lore in every single corner of the cantina.
In any case, Brutus is the first on-screen wolf-alien creature in Star Wars since 1977, and as such, he could be either a Defel or a Shistavanen. The red eyes suggest the former, but his prominence in Skeleton Crew could suggest the latter.
But why does any of that matter?
Time-traveling, Light-Bending Wolfmen —From Space!
In the 1995 short story “One Last Night in the Mos Eisley Cantina: The Tale of the Wolfman and the Lamproid,” we learn that Lak Sivrak was recruited by a Lamproid named Dice Ibegon to join the Rebellion, and as such, fought in both the Battle of Hoth and flew an X-wing in the Battle of Endor. In the short story, written by Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens, Lak experiences a very Kurt Vonnegut moment in which he flashes back to his first meeting with Dice, his one true love, during events of A New Hope in the cantina. He experiences both his original memories and the possibility of other branching “worldlines” in which his life could have gone in a different direction. We learn that this is because Dice’s connection to the Force allows her to exist outside of time, which causes Lak to relive certain events in their life, including her apparent demise on Hoth. The story ends with Lak and Dice as kind of Force ghosts on Endor, but not before implying that Lak could have changed history and taken a different path and left the cantina altogether.
Meanwhile, thanks to continuity from the 1995 Star Wars Collectible Card Game, published by Decipher Inc., the other wolfman, Arleil Schous, is a totally different species. While “One Last Night in the Mos Eisley Cantina,” implies the Shistavanen species were the result of some genetic engineering at some point in the past, the Defels are a light-bending type of alien that can seldom be directly seen. This concept neatly explains the pseudo-canonicity of the Defels, but it also could suggest that at some point in a future unified canon that these two species might simply be the same thing, seen from different angles. (Correlatively, Darth Maul’s species was originally just a “Zabrak” but later retconned to “Dathomirian.”)
Skeleton Crew is unlikely to reveal whether or not Brutus exists to unify all our burning wolfman questions, nor is he likely to have memories or relations with either Arleil Schous or Lak Sivrak. But underneath all that fur, it’s possible that this new ruthless pirate has some kin who can bend light around themselves and time travel via the Force. Just by bringing back a random wolfman, Star Wars is returning to a type of canon that is delightfully specific, and utterly goofy.
