Was my memory wiped or was the Star Wars sequel trilogy just that forgettable?

The Force Awakens and its follow-ups had so few memorable characters, it’s a wonder Disney – and Oscar Isaac – are still talking about potential spin-offs

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here might just be a strange irony to this week’s news that Oscar Isaac, AKA the tousled X-wing pilot Poe Dameron, is up for a return to Star Wars if the script is right. Because before the actor’s comments in a new interview with Variety, it was quite possible to forget that the sequel trilogy ever existed. Was The Force Awakens really a film, or just two hours of Disney rummaging through George Lucas’s recycling bin? Did The Last Jedi split the fanbase so violently that Brexit looked like a parking dispute? And could The Rise of Skywalker really have stunk that badly?

The problem with the post-Lucas films is that they never quite decided what they wanted to be. The Force Awakens tried nostalgia cosplay. The Last Jedi tried to set fire to nostalgia cosplay. The Rise of Skywalker then tried to urgently stitch nostalgia back together again. The result was messy, divisive, and – crucially for Disney – almost impossible to spin off.

Isaac might be up for returning as Dameron, but the truth is that nobody can remember why that might have ever seemed like a good idea. He had a nice leather jacket, right? When all’s said and done, and six years after JJ Abrams’s final instalment vanished down the memory hole with all the grace of Jar Jar Binks attempting parkour, this most dysfunctional and directionless of trilogies really does seem to have fewer memorable characters primed for Disney+ spin-offs or standalone movies than the Mos Eisley cantina band’s roadie crew.