The Star Wars Rebels panel at the New York Comic Con unveiled a brand new episode of the show. The new antagonist, The Inquisitor, was finally introduced and he’s quite a menacing character who can take on Kanan easily. The episode also reveals the fate of the Jedi Luminara which you’ll just have to watch the episode to find out.

While the episode played, I started thinking about the future of the series. I’ve quickly become a fan of the series and while it’s not quite at the awesome level of The Clone Wars yet, I also think that it will surpass the previous series.

Here’s five reasons why:

1. Closer in Tone to The Original Trilogy

Right off the top, this is what I’m looking forward to most. I never liked the tone of the prequel trilogy and while I think they did a great job of fixing the character dynamics in The Clone Wars, it still doesn’t hold a candle to Han, Luke and Leia’s banter.

2. New Crew

The crew of the Ghost are all new characters. While The Clone Wars did a great job of fleshing out Anakin and Obi-Wan, you knew where they would be by the end of the series. You knew that Grievous or Dooku would not be captured or if they were, not for very long. This is why Ventress and Ahsoka were as popular as they were, because their fate wasn’t set in stone– no one knew where they would end up.

Same thing goes for every character of the Ghost. There’s absolutely no guarantee that Kanan, Ezra, Hera, Sabine or Zeb will make it to the end of the series.

3. Possible Cameos

Speaking of the original trilogy characters, we’re almost guaranteed to get more cameos other than R2-D2 and C3P-0. With Bail Organa already making an appearance in the series, how long do you think it’ll be before a young Leia pops up? Right now she’s the same age as Ezra so it’s not out of the question that the two of them will end up on an adventure together. We may also learn the fate of Ahsoka Tano who was last seen leaving the Jedi Order.

4. It’s Serialized

Another aspect of the new show which will make it superior to The Clone Wars is that each episode will build on the previous episode. Clone Wars did this up to a point but for the most part it was 3 episode mini-arcs. There’s a certain amount of status quo that needed to be kept for Revenge of the Sith to make sense.

5. The Series Will Change it’s Premise

Right now, the series is about how the Rebel Alliance got started but at some point that will change. They will be the Rebel Alliance and the organization will get larger and larger with many more interesting new characters and almost certainly some familiar ones.

Here’s an interesting question: if the series goes on for several years, what would stop it from crossing into A New Hope? We could eventually have a series that crosses over with the original trilogy films.

And that’s why Star Wars Rebels shows more promise than anything that came before it so far, in the Star Wars universe.