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SYFY WIRE Star Wars: Episode IX - The Rise of Skywalker

Did you catch those Star Wars Resistance ships in The Rise of Skywalker’s biggest battle?

By Benjamin Bullard
Millennium Falcon in The Rise of Skywalker

When the action begins to heat up in the skies above Exegol, Palpatine’s secret base in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, things start moving quickly. The Exegol battle becomes the movie’s cross-cutting set piece for conflicts on scales both intimate and epic, and the fight scenes in the orbit around Palpatine’s evil outpost are some of Skywalker’s most chaotic.

That’s why, as the brewing space fight gets underway, you might never have noticed a cool but fleeting moment: a neat little crossover visit from the animated side of the Star Wars universe. In a new up-close look at lesser-known facts about the second and final season of Star Wars Resistance, Lucasfilm Story Group and all-around Star Wars canon guru Pablo Hidalgo points out that there’s a trio of Rebel ships that should look super-familiar to Resistance fans — if you can spot them in all that coordinated chaos.

The Fireball ship in The Rise of Skywalker
Yeager's ship in The Rise of Skywalker
Torra Doza’s ship in The Rise of Skywalker

“Well, one thing we do know is that among the 14,000 ships that arrive with Lando Calrissian over Exegol in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker are the Fireball, Jarek Yeager’s racer, and Torra Doza’s ship,” Hidalgo points out at starwars.com. That same post reveals that Yeager’s own R1-J5 droid (yep, we’re talking about Bucket) is up there among the enormous armada, piloting the Fireball from the ship’s droid socket — while Yeager joins the fight in his private ship.

In order to place the three Resistance ships into the live action Skywalker setting, ILM “created photo-real versions of these vessels to populate the movie’s space battle,” the post adds. And as a bonus, there’s one more blink-and-you’ll-miss-it crossover: “[K]eep your eyes peeled for a number of mining guild freighters from Star Wars Resistance in the epic clash!”

Lucasfilm likely wouldn’t dare let us near the switchgear of a bucket of bolts like the Fireball — let alone the controls of a seriously expensive piece of kit like an Imperial Dreadnaught. But thanks to Lucasfilm’s fresh heads up, we know just what button to push when we finally get to see the battle over Exegol at our leisure on home video — and yep, you guessed it: it’ll be the pause button on our trusty remotes.