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Star Wars continuity is complicated. As of 2025, there are over 200 hours of content across television and film, and that’s not even counting the thousands of pages of novels and comics. Keeping track of everything is almost a full-time job, and trying to fit it all in one cohesive timeline without contradictions is even harder.

That’s where Clayton Sandell comes in. Sandell is an Emmy Award-winning broadcast journalist who spent years working with ABC News. After his time with ABC ended, Sandell helped Lucasfilm put together Star Wars Timelines, a book that untangles the complicated Star Wars chronology. The DK book also features contributions from Cole Horton, Jason Fry, Kristin Baver, and Amy Richau.

That’s right, the Star Wars timeline is so complicated that it takes multiple writers to make sense of it.

“For Timelines, we were basically going back to all of the primary sources for lack of a better term,” Sandell says during a panel at Tampa Bay Comic Convention. “The movies, and I read more comics working on that book than I’ve ever read in my life. All the novels. Essentially, with every item that we were trying to put in there, we were trying to place it with a specific date.”

Coming up with dates was complicated because some stories contradict others when it comes to dating information. Lucasfilm has its own in-house continuity committee known as the Story Group, which was a big help to Sandell during the project. However, there were times when even they weren’t sure what dates certain stories took place in.

“Sometimes we would get a range, sometimes we would get pretty close, and sometimes things would conflict. I would say the Story Group does a pretty good job of making sure that there aren’t too many conflicts like that. The main problem was just trying to place things on the timeline, so what we would do typically was just let the Story Group folks be the final arbiter of where that was going to go. Sometimes that meant they would give us a specific date, and sometimes they would say, ‘Well it’s estimated to be this date,’ and so we would put it in the chapter as an estimated date.”

According to Sandell, the Story Group was cautious about locking in dates for certain events, because they didn’t want to limit writers and filmmakers who were currently working on their own projects.

“Sometimes [the Story Group] refused to answer, because one of the things they want to do is make sure that they are keeping options open for either stories that were in progress that might be right around that time, could be a streaming show, could be a movie, could be a novel. Whatever it is, they want to exercise a certain amount of caution and flexibility so that they’re not locking themselves into a date or a time that they then have to work around. That was the main thing; it was just trying to place things and not always getting a clearance.”

Sandell made it clear that he doesn’t blame the Star Wars Story Group at Lucasfilm, and he understands why their hands are tied.

“I don’t think it’s incompetence or anything like that, it’s sort of a deliberate we don’t want to get into that just yet, so try to steer clear of it.”

It’s like Yoda says in The Empire Strikes Back, “Always in motion is the future.”

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