In Star Wars’ current canon, we stand on the precipice of a return years in the making: at the end of Ahsoka’s first season, Grand Admiral Thrawn had made his way back from a galaxy even further away to restore a remnant Empire to glory and imperil the New Republic. But what happened when Thrawn made a comeback the last time in Star Wars’ former canon?
We all know the Thrawn Campaign—the story of Timothy Zahn’s legendary Heir to the Empire trilogy that will serve as the inspiration for Lucasfilm and Dave Filoni’s own plans for the Grand Admiral’s impending machinations. But a decade after Thrawn met his artful end in the Star Wars Expanded Universe at the climax of that campaign, one of Star Wars’ most legendary foes nearly made a comeback… in the wild story that became how the Galactic Civil War actually came to an end in the EU, 15 years after the events of Return of the Jedi: the Caamas Document Crisis.
What Is the Caamas Document?
The Caamas document is named for the planet Caamas—a world decimated by Imperial planetary bombardment in the early days of the Empire’s rule after the end of the Clone Wars. What was largely unknown to the galaxy for decades, however, was that a group of mercenary Bothan agents—eventual allies of the Rebel Alliance, and by the time of the Crisis in 19ABY, a steadfast member world of the New Republic—had shut down the Caamasi’s planetary shielding to allow the Imperial Navy’s assault to begin.
Leia Organa discovered the evidence tying the Bothans to Caamas’ almost total destruction when she recovered a datacard within the deceased Emperor’s vaults on the planet Wayland at Mount Tantiss—which itself had been the hub of Thrawn’s forces during his battles against the New Republic a decade earlier. Leia’s evidence went far beyond just Bothan aid, however: it implicated some of Bothawui’s most powerful and influential clans in directly aiding in the genocide of the Caamasi.
How the Caamas Document Crisis Began
This was a huge problem beyond the fact that it implicated the Bothans as complicit in a horrifying atrocity: the Bothans, despite their importance to the New Republic, were deeply unpopular along plenty of member worlds, because, for the most part, Bothans are kind of incredibly douchey. When details about the bombardment of Caamas were made public, anti-Bothan demonstrations broke out across the New Republic demanding justice for the relocation of the Caamasi remnants. Member worlds eager to pounce on the Bothans for political gain attempted to use the furor to litigate old planetary grudges and disputes.
In the reign of the Empire, Palpatine’s iron fist could keep all these worlds in line through martial force and fear—but the New Republic, even having shouldered a decade and a half’s worth of crises together, didn’t have either the force or the moral judgement to engage in similar tactics. And so, as tensions rose, so did the threat of a civil war that could’ve torn the alliance apart altogether.
What’s Thrawn Got to Do With It?
The Imperial Remnant should’ve been the faction most likely to benefit from the simmering divides in the New Republic, but at this point it also had been through years of decline and infighting. After previous attempts to fight back against the New Republic like the Thrawn Campaign and his own alliance with Admiral Natasi Daala, Gilad Pellaeon—Thrawn’s former right-hand man and the current leader of the Imperial Remnant—had realized that the Empire’s fight against the New Republic was all but over, and proposed to the Remnant’s ruling council of Moffs that they sue for peace.
Reluctant but with the Moffs mostly in agreement, Pellaeon made ready to dispatch ships to the New Republic to relay his request for negotiations to open—only for those ships to be captured by the rogue Moff Vilim Disra. Disra wanted the conflict with the New Republic to continue, so working with his right-hand man Major Grodin Tierce, and a con man known only as Flim, the trio forged a wild plan to capitalize on the New Republic’s burgeoning crisis and convince the Imperial Remnant that there was still a change they could restore the Empire. They faked the return of Grand Admiral Thrawn, who the galaxy thought had been dead since the Battle of Bilbringi a decade prior.
Secrets Revealed
Only Disra and Tierce knew that the revived Thrawn was in fact Flim in elaborate makeup, but the ruse was enough to start creating issues for the New Republic and the Imperial Remnant alike. As the New Republic scoured the galaxy in the hopes of finding the full form of the Caamas document, Pellaeon waited for New Republic negotiators that were never going to arrive, and began to realise there were moves being made against him to keep the Galactic Civil War alive.
As “Thrawn” gathered several cloaked Star Destroyers over Bothawui—hoping that growing anti- and pro-Bothan forces would begin engaging each other and plunging the crisis into open war—the New Republic attempted to infiltrate Remnant shipyards at Yaga Minor in their own Star Destroyer, smuggler Booster Terrik’s personal ship the Errant Venture. As the crisis over the Bothan homeworld turned hot, Han Solo’s discovery of the cloaked fleet rallied the warring factions together to fight back; meanwhile at Yaga Minor, the Venture was aided by the arrival of none other than Pellaeon himself, who had discovered Disra and Tierce’s ruse. The public exposure of Flim’s deception, Tierce’s manipulation of copies of the Caamas document to falsely implicate leading Bothan figures and stoke sentiment against Bothawui, and even the fact that—unbeknownst to Disra—Tierce was actually a clone of the original officer made by the real Thrawn, the Caamas Document Crisis folded in on itself almost as quickly as it flared up.
Somehow, Thrawn Nearly Did Return
Flim’s final act as “Thrawn” was to stand down the Imperial forces Disra had rallied to his cause—with the latter arrested by Pellaeon’s forces and Tierce’s clone killed, the Caamas Document Crisis was practically over. But it would be weeks later until the true document was recovered by none other than Luke and Mara Jade on the planet Nirauan: the heart of the Empire of the Hand, a renegade Imperial offshoot hidden in Wild Space, built up by Thrawn in secret before his death as a shadow force to safeguard against perceived extragalactic threats.
The Hand not only had a copy of the original Caamas document denoting the actual scope of Bothan involvement, but something far more dangerous: an actual clone of Thrawn, which had been sent to the Hand in a Spaarti cloning cylinder a decade prior by the Grand Admiral, with the prophecy that he would return in 10 year’s time to lead them. Although Luke and Mara Jade refused to murder the sleeping clone, the choice was made for them when they accidentally activated defense systems in its vault. They were forced to flood the chamber to destroy awakened security droids, drowning the Thrawn clone in the process.
End of the Crisis, and the War
With the crisis ended and the true document in hand, negotiations between the New Republic and the Imperial Remnant could formally begin. After two weeks of negotiation, Pelleaon and New Republic Chief of Staff Ponc Gavrisom signed the Pelleaon-Gavrisom treaty, bringing an official end to the Galactic Civil War decades after it had first began. The treaty banned the use of cloaking devices for both the Remnant and the New Republic, and saw the New Republic formally recognize the current territories of the Remnant—over a thousand systems in total.
Internal conflicts sparked by the reveal of Bothan involvement in the Caamasi genocide largely abated with the exposure of Disra and Tierce’s manipulation of the original evidence, while surviving Bothans listed in the true copy of the document were put on trial. Although there had been relative peace for a while now, at last galactic-scale conflict was over… for now. Thrawn’s own fears of extragalactic threats would come to pass just six years later with the invasion of the Yuuzahn Vong, but the foundations formed in the wake of the Caamas Document Crisis would see the New Republic and Imperial Remnant ally against the invaders during that conflict, and eventually form the Galactic Alliance in its wake.
Could Any of This Matter to Star Wars’ Current Canon?
The answer is… no. Or at least it’s extremely unlikely. Although Caamas itself has been canonized in the comic Star Wars Adventures, and an allusion to the genocidal bombardment of the world was mentioned in source material for the Age of Rebellion roleplaying game, contemporary Star Wars canon rapidly sped up the official end of the Galactic Civil War compared to the EU, ending it after the Battle of Jakku in 5ABY. And while the Imperial Remnant as a concept is currently being explored in The Mandalorian and now Ahsoka with the return of Thrawn (original recipe Thrawn, to boot), it’s never been portrayed as anywhere near the size and scope of the Remnant as it appeared previously.
Add in the fact that we’re still dealing with a loose adaptation of the Thrawn Campaign in all this, trying to set up a future version of something like this crisis in any similar way runs into the eventual formation of the First Order and then the New Republic’s shattering in the sequel trilogy. The closest current continuity has to an equivalent is the public exposure of Leia Organa as the daughter of Darth Vader in the novel Bloodlines, laying the initial shockwaves of division in the New Republic Senate that would see the secession of an internal faction to the formation of the First Order. Hell, we don’t even know what a Bothan canonically looks like yet, let alone getting them involved in a major political crisis.
That’s not to say there aren’t elements of the ideas laid out here echoed in canon, however. Mount Tantiss was recanonised in The Bad Batch as an Imperial-era hub for cloning experimentation, and likewise in The Mandalorian season three Moff Gideon was seen experimenting with clones of himself akin to what we saw with Thrawn’s almost-return. Plus, The Rise of Skywalker has the whole “secret empire hidden away to gain power at the behest of a long-thought-dead cloned leader” market cornered right now for canon, so you can’t really do it with another character again so soon.
Can you?
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