Looks like we have some bad news for Darth Vader fans. Dave Filoni has all but confirmed that Vader will not be back in Star Wars Rebels Season 3. Vader had a decent amount of screen time in Season 2 when the story required him, especially when Ahsoka Tano became involved. Slashfilm interviewed Filoni and here’s what he had to say regarding Vader:

“You know, I’ve kind of gone on this course, which is pretty, pretty direct about certain things ’cause I don’t like to tease people along and then have them be disappointed. So it’s really an elected decision to not have Vader around because, as we get closer to A New Hope, I want him to serve as that story.”

Filoni goes on to say that he thinks Vader served his purpose in Rebels already.

“I know it sounds funny. I don’t wanna fill in every hole. I don’t know what we benefit from that. As much as you need to say, okay, this is a major point in his life when he’s confronted by his former apprentice. That is worth doing. Him chasing the rebels of the Ghost crew around is never something that really interested me. Mainly because I didn’t think they could survive it for very long. And now that I have Thrawn, it’s more interesting to me to setup this completely different kind of villain that’s gonna play a long game against our guys that they’re not typically used to.”

I actually do agree with what Filoni is saying, but at the same time we have two members of the Ghost crew that are actively training to become Jedi. You would think hunting down Kanan and Ezra would be Vader’s number-one priority right now. Not just that, but Ezra has the Sith holocron, which Vader would probably want to get back. I am very excited about Thrawn coming into the mix and how he plays into everything, though. Filoni also talked a little bit about the future of the Inquisitors on the show (which I am all for leaving them out of):

“I’m not gonna define if they’re done not or yet. But I feel like you have to start to phase those things out. Because you get the feeling when Tarkin’s talking to Vader in A New Hope that Force wielding usage wasn’t something that was very prevalent in A New Hope. He talks about it like something that’s a bygone era. So it was risky to me to have these kind of modern Force wielding guys around as close to the timeline as we were. And so I’ve kind of tried to push them away and kind of got rid of them a lot in one fell swoop last season. And now I’m bringing in more of a military man who I think actually fits that type of feeling and time period more like the Piett’s and those kind of bad guys. But, you know, ’cause when I was a kid and remember Tarkin says that line to Vader about their fire’s gone out in the galaxy. I felt like it was hundreds of years. You didn’t realize as a kid how recently it was. It was in Tarkin’s lifetime that the Jedi were running around. But yeah, it’s gotta be feeling like it was a while ago.”

I really hope that we have seen the end of the Inquisitors. I liked the Grand Inqusitior but I wasn’t a fan of the Seventh Sister or Fifth Brother. We still have a lot to be excited about regarding Rebels, with the return of Thrawn being the highlight. Star Wars Rebels Season 3 begins on Saturday, September 24th at 8:30 PM EST on Disney XD.