The Force Re-Awakens
A review of "Star Wars: Ahsoka"
Ahsoka may well be the most Star Wars Star Wars has been in a good long while—and that’s very much a good thing.
It’s a series that clearly takes cues from the franchise’s early days, with showrunner and newly-minted Star Wars éminence grise Dave Filoni drawing on the same samurai epics and World War II-era dogfights that originally inspired George Lucas back in the 1970s. But even with its opening crawl, John Williams-esque score, and blind Jedi training sequences, Ahsoka doesn’t just go back to Star Wars basics; it expands on and elaborates the mythos in new and intriguing ways. After an unimaginative sequel trilogy and with The Mandalorian seemingly spinning its narrative wheels, Ahsoka reminds us why Star Wars seized such a hold on popular consciousness in the first place—and gives good reason for guarded optimism about its future.
The show more than lives up to its title: while it incorporates a number of characters and picks up narrative threads from the animated show Star Wars: Rebels, this series clearly belongs to its title character. It’s very much Ahsoka Tano’s story, a chronicle of how Anakin Skywalker’s one-time Jedi apprentice accepts her complicated and compromised past in full while reconciling it with the compassionate person she has always been at heart—someone who kept faith with the chivalric ideals proclaimed by the Jedi Order when the order itself failed to abide by them.
When we first meet Ahsoka in her own series, she’s been fighting one antagonist or another virtually non-stop for decades straight. Imbued by actress Rosario Dawson with a certain world-weariness and fatalism, Ahsoka comes across as much more reserved than in her previous live-action appearances. Fearful she has nothing to offer but lessons in death and destruction—or worse, given the fate of her old master—Ahsoka pushed away her own apprentice, Sabine Wren, before taking her on again by the end of the second episodes.
Matters come to a head during Ahsoka’s lightsaber duel with Baylan Skoll, a mercenary former Jedi (excellently portrayed by the late Ray Stevenson) who picks at and preys upon her own doubts before pushing Ahsoka off a cliff and to her seeming demise. Ahsoka finds herself in the World Between Worlds, a liminal space in the Force first introduced in Rebels. There she encounters Anakin, who teaches her to accept the good as well as the bad of her conflicted past via flashbacks to the Clone Wars and lightsaber fights with him and his dark side alter ego Darth Vader. She may have thought she was trained as nothing but a warrior, but her former master and mentor reminds her that that’s not the case—and that ultimately it’s up to her choose her own path forward.
This more subtle character shift plays out in some fairly obvious ways, like Ahsoka’s change from a grey to a white outfit or her return to a more easygoing and optimistic demeanor. But there’s more to the Force than telekinesis and mind tricks and, as Ahsoka tells Sabine later on, wielding a lightsaber. It’s a point the show elegantly illustrates when Ahsoka communes with the giant space whale (another of Ahsoka’s homages to the original trilogy—a number of new fantastical creatures) that will take her on a journey to a different galaxy in order to stop chief antagonist Grand Admiral Thrawn and his allies from returning to resurrect the Empire. By the end of the series, we see Ahsoka largely at peace with herself, even though she and Sabine remain stranded in a galaxy far, far away.
Ahsoka also expands and builds on the Star Wars mythos in a number of fresh and intriguing ways—and it gets at the tensions and contradictions in that mythos better than any of the half-hearted gestures made in the misbegotten sequel trilogy. Antagonist Baylan Skoll, for instance, possesses a melancholy and doesn’t fit easily into the light-dark binary of the rest of the saga; himself a Jedi before the fall of the order, Skoll has become a lightsaber for hire who respects the ideal of the order despite its sordid reality and mourns the fact that there remain so few Jedi left in the galaxy. Likewise, the series literally expands the mythos to another galaxy and connects it to elements previously established in The Clone Wars and Rebels like the Nightsisters of Dathomir, the Mortis gods, and the purrgil space whales.
Perhaps most importantly, though, Ahsoka democratizes the Force in a much better and coherent way that director Rian Johnson clumsily attempted in The Last Jedi. Ahsoka’s apprentice Sabine isn’t Force sensitive in the same way as the Jedi and Sith we’ve seen so far; indeed, the ancient Jedi droid Huyang bluntly states her aptitude for the Force ranks at or near the bottom of all the potential Jedi he’s encountered over the millennia. But Sabine eventually taps into the Force and demonstrates that it doesn’t take midi-chlorians and special bloodlines to wield it; with enough time and dedication, anyone can use the Force. That’s not at all opposition to the wider established Star Wars mythos, either: as Ahsoka reminds Sabine and us, “the Force resides in all living things—even you.”
Ahsoka isn’t above criticism. It relies far too much on computer-generated effects to create its worlds, for instance; it’s painfully obvious when scenes are shot on the high-tech soundstage known as the Volume. Some of that’s inevitable given the nature of a space-fantasy mythos like Star Wars, but it does stand in contrast to the real-world locations used in, say, Andor. The show’s pacing could use work as well; narrative threads and character beats that get lost in or obscured by an eight-episode season might have been more apparent in a miniseries with fewer breaks between longer individual episodes. At very least, it’s easier to see these threads weave together and persist when streaming episodes back-to-back-to-back.
Ahsoka’s largest single problem, however, is that it’s clearly meant to service a larger Star Wars narrative—and that includes a second season of Ahsoka itself. It doesn’t end in a “Best of Both Worlds”-style cliffhanger, but this season does leave major plot elements unresolved. While Ahsoka herself has a satisfying and complete character arc, the wider narratives for both her and the wider universe remain incomplete. Then there’s the tragic fact of Ray Stevenson’s passing, meaning his character Baylan Skoll will need to be recast if he’s to return.
Still, Ahsoka remains a worthy expansion of the Star Wars mythos—one that more than does justice to its beloved title character. It opens up new storytelling frontiers that have the potential to shake the franchise out of its present creative doldrums, though it remains to be seen whether the powers that be will take advantage of these possibilities.
For my own part, I’m just eager to see where Ahsoka goes from here—and hopefully we’ll find out soon enough.