See Wedge Antilles' New Canonized Backstory In This 'Star Wars Rebels' Clip

At Star Wars Celebration Europe, DisneyXD released the first trailer for Star Wars Rebels season three, revealing not only Thrawn's return to Star Wars canon but also that we'd begin to see some of the Rogue Squadron. The next episode of Star Wars Rebels is titled "The Antilles Extraction," and as you might expect from the name, this will be Wedge Antilles introduction to the series.

DisneyXD has released a new clip from the upcoming episode, alongside some new images. See Wedge Antilles in Star Wars Rebels after the jump.

In "The Antilles Extraction," the fourth episode of Star Wars Rebels season 3, "Sabine goes undercover as a cadet in the Empire's elite flight academy to help break out several young pilots wanting to defect to the rebellion." Wedge Antilles is voiced by Nathan Kress, who played Freddie on iCarly and Trey in the 2014 film Into The Storm. The clip reveals some of Wedge's new canon backstory as an Imperial TIE Fighter pilot with the hopes of defecting to the Rebellion. When I talked with Star Wars Rebels showrunner Dave Filoni at Celebration, he had this to say about Wedge's new backstory:

It's kind of a fun thing. One of the biggest things and it may be the rain cloud in the room, but, every writer that comes on, they pitch I'd love to see this, I'd love to see that. What about Biggs? What about Porkins? You know and but you wanna be careful not to make it like the Celebrity Laugh-In show where celebrity guests are appearing. But we hadn't had someone of that nature. Kind of like a pilot. We have a lot of Rebel pilots. And well maybe some of these guys crossover. So you get Wedge and you get Y-Wings, which is kind of showing us again that we're building towards that New Hope moment where the Rebels seem to be structured in a different way than we were in the beginning of Star Wars Rebels, which is they were just a band on their own with very little communication to a major core. And I've said for a couple seasons now that they're building towards a more Rebel Alliance. But at the point we started you didn't have Alliance. You had ragtag groups spread throughout the galaxy that had different ideas about politics. But all they could agree on was the Empire's bad. And you'll see that as we go that some of those characters that you know more famously from the Rebellion start to come into play now from Star Wars Rebels 'cause they have to. And Wedge is just, you know, everybody loves Wedge, 'cause he somehow inexplicably survived all three films. So he gets a lot of fan love for that.

And here are those Star Wars Rebels season 3 images I promised:

The next episode of Star Wars Rebels airs on October 8th, 2016 at 8:30 pm ET on Disney XD.