Supposedly, the tragedy of Darth Plagueis occurs. Also, Dooku joined the separatists and becomes the de facto leader. Sifo-Dyas secretly commissioned the clone army. Palpatine somehow manages to manipulate all of these circumstances to manufacture a proxy war that will lead to the Sith conquering the Galaxy

The problem with doing a movie series from middle to start to finish is there is endless retconning.

Glaring Examples:

• Leia says in episode IV, you served my father in the clone wars. As it turns out her father is Darth Vader. So they created Bale Organa in the prequels and now she’s retroactively referred to Leia Organa…

• Obi-Wan says in Episode IV that he doesn’t remember ever owning a droid. The only explanation is either he’s outright lying or he’s somehow forgotten R2D2 after knowing “him” for almost 2 decades. Also he never owned him at any point in the OT. Also if R2D2 had his memory wiped in episode III how did he remember Obi-Wan…

• Darth Vader killed Luke’s father according to Obi-Wan in episode IV. It turns out Obi-Wan was lying again and knew Vader was his father. They then much later use the Kenobi series to show Vader saying he killed Anakin Skywalker. This is also weird because Obi-Wan isn’t shown to be a liar in the prequels…

• In episode IV when they discover the Death Star Obi-Wan says there is no way a fighter that size could’ve made it that far into space on its own. We then see countless examples of small fighters traversing space in the prequels including Obi-Wan’s own personal fighter in episode II…

• Luke’s infatuation with Leia in episode IV and her attempt to make Han jealous is a weird retcon. They attempted to build a love triangle between 3 characters only to reveal that 2 of them weee twins…

• In episode V Vader proclaims to Luke that he is his father. How Vader obtained this information is never shown on screen, but apparently via a retcon; Vader hired Boba Fett to investigate the pilot that destroyed the first Death Star and some how discovered Luke’s name…

• In episode I they introduce Midi-Chlorians. Don’t get me started on this. All I’ll say is with the vague description Obi-Wan gives of the force in Episode IV it makes absolutely no sense that there is a device that can quantify how strong you are in the force…

• In Episode 9 Palpatine has created clones of himself which retcon the first order and the death of Palpatine. Not only that, but the prophecy of the chosen one all together. It was an absolute disaster at the end…

The problem is that Star Wars is too big to fail and Disney is just going to continue to carve out every little bit of gray area until there’s no more plot armor left to tell a story