Rexconned?  Everybody Just Calm Down…

Captain Rex is one of those very few characters (along with Ahsoka Tano) who seem to have transcended the The Clone Wars animated series. If you are a Star Wars fan who didn't watch a single episode of the show, you still know who Captain Rex is. Unlike his close comrade (and movie star) Commander Cody, Rex managed to avoid taking part in Order 66, and therefore was not relevant to the story told in Revenge of the Sith. His fate was essentially left to the imagination, until he made an appearance with some fellow renegade clones in the Rebels animated series. Here, an older Rex is depicted with a full white beard.

In the former Expanded Universe, a white-bearded (and, uh, white) Endor soldier was established as Nik Sant. He has a bit of a cult following, but frankly there's not much there that filled in any significant detail about his life story. He was named in a Star Wars card game, it stuck, and that's pretty much it, for all intents and purposes. This means that The Great Disney Canon Reboot of 2014 actually had almost no effect on Sant's story, since there really wasn't one. Other than his name, which remains, there's nothing previously known about Sant that would actually preclude him from being retconned as Rex. Either the name "Nik Sant" would be explained as some kind of cover, or the Lucasfilm Story Group could decide it's not his canon name any longer. Either way, with his appearance as an older man in Rebels, there was fan speculation that Rex and Sant were one in the same. The speculation might have started out as a joke, but it was out there.

In March of 2016, at an event for the premiere of the season two finale of Rebels, SlashFilm quoted creator Dave Filoni thusly:

I really do think that Rex is that guy on Endor. I really do. Why else is there a bearded old guy on Endor, Tano? Why? It makes no sense. If you don’t want that to happen, do you know what that means? I’m gonna make that happen. I’m getting like Palpatine, I’m getting power crazy.

Almost immediately thereafter, the earlier fan speculation exploded with confidence that Captain Rex might indeed have gone on to fight for the Rebel Alliance, and that he really was the bearded rebel soldier on Endor we see in Return of the Jedi. The theory gained a lot of traction, eventually leading to the Cavs winning the NBA title just a few months later.

At Star Wars Celebration Orlando in April 2017, Dave Filoni futher stoked the fires when he joked/commented on a piece of Rex concept art that was part of the Rebels slideshow presentation:

What’s that? That’s some kind of … don’t pay any attention to that. That shouldn’t even be in this folder! Why would he need camouflage? Doesn’t make any sense!”

For the record, Pablo "Beneath Notice" Hidalgo was on the same panel, and added, “Just speculate away, we’re putting it out there."

A few days ago, on August 5th, Rebels writer Steven Melchin blew up the internet (I like hyperbole, don't judge me) when he tweeted that same concept image of Rex from SWCO, merged it with an image of Nik Sant on Endor, and said: "This is happening." It wasn't long after that, he deleted the tweet, and issued a lengthy (well, it's Twitter, so...) retraction in which among other things, he states:

Friends, please allow me to clarify my provocative and badly-worded tweet from earlier today...So are Rex and Nik Sant one-and-the-same? Truthfully, I do not know the answer. I wish I had made that clear originally.

The theory has since taken a bit of a serious turn. There have been a few folks out there that have raised concerns that fans have no business "whitewashing" the character of Captain Rex. As the clones are sourced from Jango Fett, who was played by Temuera Morrison (a Māori), some are concerned it is an affront to Morrison's heritage to say that Nik Sant, a white guy, is now suddenly Old Man Rex. Some took to Twitter to express this view:



and some just wanted to joke about the absurdity of everything being an easter egg:



In any case, officially, there is no change to current canon that Rex and Sant are completely separate people.

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