“Just like old times,” Ahsoka Tano tells Hera Syndulla early in Tuesday’s two-part premiere of Ahsoka, the latest Star Wars series on Disney+. “Unfortunately,” Hera responds.
That Ahsoka seems like Star Wars Rebels, which went off the air before there were such things as live-action Stars Wars series, is indisputable. Whether that’s unfortunate or, in fact, profoundly fortunate depends on your perspective. If there was any doubt that Ahsoka would basically be the fifth season of Rebels, the beloved animated series that ended in 2018, it’s settled by the premiere’s penultimate scene, in which Rosario Dawson’s Ahsoka and Natasha Liu Bordizzo’s Sabine Wren almost perfectly re-create Rebels’ epilogue.
So, why go through the trouble and expense of making “Master and Apprentice” and “Toil and Trouble” roughly 90 combined minutes of live-action TV, only for the two-parter to build toward a meeting Rebels fans saw more than five years ago? Because these episodes, like Ahsoka writ large, are about a journey of discovery, for fans and on-screen characters alike. And even though the premiere’s destination may be familiar to some Star Wars watchers, the path we take to get there holds a wealth of thrills and surprises.
Through its first two installments—a quarter of its eight-episode season—Ahsoka is in some respects bizarro Andor. Andor, which was written and run by self-professed non–Star Wars fan Tony Gilroy, required next to no knowledge of preexisting Star Wars stories and lore. Ahsoka, written and run by über-fan Dave Filoni, draws deeply on Filoni’s own previous Star Wars stories and leans heavily into lore. Andor entirely ignored the Jedi, the Sith, and the Force; Ahsoka’s premiere features no fewer than six Force wielders and six blazing lightsabers. (Andor repeatedly defied fan speculation about characters’ secret Force sensitivity; Ahsoka confirms Force sensitivity in multiple characters who weren’t widely believed to possess it.) Andor was devoted to location shooting; Ahsoka incorporates plenty of practical effects and dazzles at times too, but unlike Andor, it tends to depend on Industrial Light & Magic’s StageCraft technology, like The Mandalorian, The Book of Boba Fett, and Obi-Wan Kenobi before it.
There’s one crucial way in which Ahsoka isn’t bizarro Andor: It’s not a bad show. Ahsoka caters to a particular kind of Star Wars fan, whereas Andor didn’t cater specifically to Star Wars fans at all. The former is more likely to send you scurrying to Wookieepedia in search of Star Wars arcana (including, literally, a planet named Arcana); the latter is more likely to make you commit stirring monologues to memory. But both are adept at delivering the disparate stories they’re trying to tell. In answering some questions, the opening acts of Ahsoka raise or leave open others: about canon and continuity; about its core characters’ goals and places on the spectrum of Force use; and about the series’ appeal to viewers who aren’t already attached to Ahsoka, Sabine, and Hera. What this introduction doesn’t do is shake fans’ faith in what they’ve known to be true for 15 years: When Filoni, Lucasfilm’s executive creative director, takes the lead on a project, he almost unfailingly demonstrates that there’s no better storyteller in the classic Star Wars mold.
Ahsoka starts with an opening crawl—a first for a canonical on-screen story outside of the Skywalker saga. The text isn’t yellow, but red, which usually signifies that something dark is about to go down. The use of a crawl suits the series, not only as an ode to tradition, but as a concession to the context required to understand Ahsoka. As the crawl reminds us, the New Republic has taken the Empire’s place, but the recently installed government’s foundation is fragile. The return of exiled Grand Admiral Thrawn could strengthen the Imperial Remnant and rekindle galactic conflict, if Ahsoka doesn’t find him first.
Once the crawl concludes, we get a vintage Star Wars establishing shot of a spacecraft exterior, followed by first looks at the overconfident Captain Hayle and two of Ahsoka’s lightsaber-toting antagonists: Baylan Skoll (played by the late Ray Stevenson) and his apprentice, Shin Hati (Ivanna Sakhno). Although these faces aren’t familiar, we’ve seen this setup before. The arrival of two cloaked figures—one much taller than the other—on a larger ship hearkens back to the beginning of The Phantom Menace. (This time, the figures are setting a trap, not walking into one.) The way Skoll soon lays waste to the Republic guards echoes Darth Vader’s rampages at the beginning of Episode IV and the end of Rogue One. Moreover, this is the third time in the Mandoverse alone that we’ve seen a captive sprung from a New Republic prison ship.
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In Ahsoka, the captive in question is Morgan Elsbeth, the servant of Thrawn whom Ahsoka outduels in the second season of The Mandalorian (and a distant second in my ranking of favorite TV characters named Elsbeth). Thus, these episodes take place after Ahsoka’s encounter with Din Djarin and Grogu (and her run-in with Elsbeth) on Corvus, though—as we’ll discuss—not necessarily after The Mandalorian’s most recent season. The ease with which Skoll and Shin free Elsbeth from New Republic custody drives home the theme that Filoni and Jon Favreau have hammered in The Mandalorian and that Filoni re-reinforces in the Corellia sequence of this premiere’s second part: The Republic, riding its post-Endor high, vastly underestimates the threat the Empire poses. On a plot level, Filoni and Favreau’s primary project in the Mandoverse appears to be explaining how the First Order ascended only a few decades after the Empire’s decisive defeat. Hayle’s lax security stands in for the failings of the Republic as a whole.
Two bits of dialogue in this sequence deserve special attention. The first is Skoll’s pronouncement to the hapless Hayle: “We are no Jedi.” It’s a clear callback to Ahsoka’s defiant declaration to Vader in Rebels Season 2: “I am no Jedi.”
More broadly, the line speaks to Ahsoka’s rejection of the standard Sith-Jedi binary, symbolized by its eponymous protagonist’s white sabers. (White light, of course, is a combination of common kyber crystal colors blue, green, and red.) Although the series is lousy with lightsabers and full of Force users, none of the latter—Ahsoka, Sabine, and the villainous quartet of Elsbeth, Skoll, Shin, and ex–Imperial Inquisitor Marrok—are still affiliated with a certain sect. As Ahsoka soon reminds her droid companion, Huyang, “The order doesn’t exist anymore.” In the temporary absence of the Sith, the Jedi, and the Empire, no order exists anymore. The dust is still settling after catastrophic strife, and the galaxy is far from being in equilibrium. Chaos creates opportunity—for the future First Order to fester, yes, but also for Ahsoka to plot a course that steers clear of the franchise’s typical light side–dark side duality.
Second: When Elsbeth tells Skoll that he’s true to his word, he answers, “And well paid for it.” He, his apprentice, and Marrok are merely mercenaries, not Imperial ideologues. We know Elsbeth wants to restore Thrawn, and Ahsoka and Sabine want to thwart Thrawn and find Ezra Bridger; by contrast, the mercenaries’ histories, lightsaber hues, and motivations (money aside) are a mystery, which makes them extra intriguing. When Shin asks her master in “Toil and Trouble” what will happen when they find Thrawn, he answers, “For some, war. For others, a new beginning.” For them, though, locating Thrawn could provide “power, such as you’ve never dreamed.” The precise source of that power, and the way they would wield it, remains inscrutable.
As with some Season 3 episodes of The Mandalorian, the title of Ahsoka’s first episode refers to more than one person (or pair). Ex-Jedi Ahsoka and Sabine used to be—and, by the end of the premiere, are once more—master and apprentice; so are ex-Jedi Skoll and Shin. In the last scene of the two-parter, Skoll sincerely says of Ahsoka, “To kill her will be a shame. There are so few Jedi left.” A dark side user who doesn’t relish slaughtering light side users just because their respective codes are in conflict? Sign me up for this Gray Jedi showdown.
After introducing the dark siders and flashing the title card, Filoni—who wrote both episodes and directed the first, with Book of Boba’s Steph Green helming the second—reunites us with Ahsoka for some Indiana Jones–style temple plundering. The temple is located on Arcana, which we later learn was a stronghold for the Nightsisters of Dathomir, from whom Elsbeth is descended. (When asked if she’s a witch, Morgan describes herself simply as a survivor. In other words: I’m no Nightsister.) Ahsoka recovers a map in the form of a small golden sphere, but no sooner does she surface than she’s accosted by several HK-87 units, the assassin droids that served Elsbeth on Corvus.
After some slicing and dicing, Ahsoka is rescued from the remaining droids’ explosive self-destruction by her own droid sidekick. Huyang, who originated in a Season 5 arc on The Clone Wars—and is voiced, in both series, by David Tennant—plays an unexpectedly prominent part in Ahsoka as the K-2SO to her Cassian. Huyang, who proudly retains 75 percent of his original parts despite his advanced age, dates back about 25,000 years to the beginning of the Republic and the Jedi order. (Which means he might well appear in James Mangold’s movie about the dawn of the Jedi.) He’s claimed to have “instructed younglings for over 1,000 generations,” and his role in helping countless learners (including Yoda, Mace Windu, and Ahsoka herself) obtain their kyber crystals and construct their lightsabers makes him eminently qualified to identify Skoll as a former Jedi based on security footage of his hilt. We don’t know how Huyang survived Order 66 or reunited with Ahsoka, but somehow, Huyang returned.
In addition to being a handy-dandy font of information, Huyang is a walking, talking reminder of Ahsoka’s past and her continued affinity for the order she left more than a quarter century before Ahsoka starts. (The same goes for her ride, a Jedi T-6 shuttle.) However, his adherence to the tenets of the Jedi also illustrates the contrast between the buttoned-down order and the less inhibited Ahsoka. When Huyang asks how she got Elsbeth to talk, Ahsoka answers, “Let’s just say I didn’t follow standard Jedi protocol.” Presumably, we’re not talking torture, but whatever technique Ahsoka used, it sounds like it wasn’t one she would’ve learned from the Jedi. Then again, Huyang has lessons to teach her too. When she asks him to watch her back, he responds, “That is the job of a Jedi Padawan learner. Which I am not.” However, he and Ahsoka know someone who was and could be again.
A briefing on Rebel/Republic flagship Home One brings Ahsoka into contact with Hera; Ahsoka still responds to her old Alliance-era call sign, Fulcrum, though the war has long since been won. As a Rebels lover and longtime advocate of nonhuman leads in Star Wars and other sci-fi, it brings warm feelings to my heart to see these two together—with one reservation. I don’t know why, but whereas when I look at Dawson, I see Ahsoka and when I look at Bordizzo, I see Sabine, when I look at Mary Elizabeth Winstead, I just see Winstead with green paint and head-tails. Still, kudos to her and hubby Ewan McGregor for getting the bag from Disney on the Star Wars couples plan.
Ahsoka tells Hera that she’s found a map to Thrawn, much to Hera’s dismay. (We don’t yet know how Morgan became aware of the temple on Arcana or how she knew the map would lead to Thrawn—her Nightsister ties? a tip-off from her extragalactic hotline?—though the excavation and decoding are depicted in possibly excessive detail.) “That’s not possible,” Hera says. “Thrawn died at the Battle of Lothal.” If you’ve seen Rebels, you know there’s no reason to think that: Thrawn and Ezra jumped to light speed, wrapped in the tentacles of the hyperspace-faring purrgil, but aside from the fact that they haven’t made contact, there’s no evidence that they’re dead. “If Thrawn survived, does that mean Ezra …” Hera asks, trailing off. Perhaps she’s convinced herself that Thrawn perished so as to absolve herself of her failure to find (or keep searching for) Ezra, her de facto adopted son.
Hera hesitantly recommends that Ahsoka seek help from Sabine in decoding the map. (After all, it was Sabine who figured out how to unlock the World Between Worlds in Rebels Season 4, unraveling a riddle that Ezra and even Emperor Palpatine couldn’t crack.) “I’m not sure she’ll want to help,” Ahsoka answers. Uh-oh, there must be baggage there. But the baggage isn’t burdensome enough to stop Ahsoka from making a beeline for Lothal, Ezra’s homeworld and the base of operations for the Spectres who made up Hera’s ragtag Rebels group. By coincidence—unless Qui-Gon was right that nothing happens by accident—Ahsoka arrives just as Lothal is celebrating the anniversary of its liberation by the crew of the Ghost and dedicating Sabine’s mural as a monument. Sabine is scheduled to speak, but she no-shows, leaving two supporting players from Rebels to vamp in her place: Jai Kell, now a senator, and Governor Ryder Azadi (the latter of whom is played by his Rebels voice actor, Clancy Brown, a man of many Star Wars roles).
Accompanied by a killer space-rock score, Sabine is busy speeding down the highway where Ezra outraced his Imperial and Spectre pursuers shortly after running afoul of both in the Rebels premiere:
In Rebels, Ezra eluded speeders and TIEs; in Ahsoka, Sabine slides under an E-wing, as Filoni rescues the Republic fighter from obscurity and gives it a first look in live action after more than three decades of appearances in what was once known as the Star Wars Expanded Universe. (The E-wing squadron’s call sign is Spectre, another nod to the Ghost crew’s Lothal legacy.) Sabine and an incredibly cute animatronic Loth-cat have posted up in the abandoned communications tower on the outskirts of Lothal City—the same tower Ezra used to call home. Some things have changed: Sabine’s painted Mandalorian helmet is stowed under a table, and her hair has grown out. One thing hasn’t: Ezra (Eman Esfandi), sporting his unflattering LEGO-helmet hair from latter-day Rebels, is still speaking to her, via a holo he made before leaving with the whales. “I’m counting on you to see this through,” he says, describing Sabine as a sister. “May the Force be with you.”
And guess what: It is. Ezra’s often comped to Luke Skywalker, as their paths share many parallels. (And like the older Luke at the start of the sequel trilogy, Ezra starts Ahsoka off the grid.) In Return of the Jedi, Luke told Leia that the Force was strong in his family: “My father has it. I have it. My sister has it.” Ezra isn’t really related to Sabine; this is strictly a found family, not a biological one. But Ezra’s spiritual sister has “it” too. As we learn when she visits Ahsoka’s shuttle (the closest thing Ahsoka has to a home), Sabine is Force-sensitive. For an unspecified period—long enough for her to have doodled on the wall of her old bunk on the T-6—she was Ahsoka’s apprentice. And however long it’s been since she and her former master parted ways, Ahsoka hasn’t wiped those doodles away.
The revelation of Sabine’s past apprenticeship puts the parallels with Ezra—the highway chase, the communications tower base—in a different light. When Sabine wakes up from a nap, startled by a proximity alarm that alerts her to an approaching ship (and maybe by a ripple in the Force), she sees Ahsoka’s shuttle passing overhead, escorted by two X-wings. It’s another nearly shot-for-shot re-creation of the same moment in the Rebels epilogue.
It’s also an allusion to the first shot of Ezra in the Rebels premiere, when he stands on the same platform, in front of the same railing, and sees a different ship block out the sun—in his case, a Star Destroyer. Thanks to Ezra’s actions, and those of his friends, Lothal is Star Destroyer–free. But Sabine is still following in his footsteps, studying under Ahsoka instead of Ezra’s master, the late Kanan Jarrus.
On the one hand, the revelation that Sabine is Force-sensitive—and, for good measure, Morgan Elsbeth too—plays into a well-worn Star Wars trope. There’s no shortage of characters, from Leia to Kyle Katarn to Finn, who’ve suddenly discovered a latent capacity to touch the Force. The frequency with which that seems to happen in Star Wars stories, despite the ostensible rarity of real attunement to the Force, fosters the perception that any capable character must have a high midi-chlorian count—which, in turn, conditions fans to watch a Force-averse series like Andor and see a secret Jedi lurking in Luthen Rael.
On the other hand, Sabine seems to have just a smidge of Force sensitivity. A few more midi-chlorians than the average Loth-cat, maybe, but nowhere near as many as Ezra—in fact, fewer than all the Padawans Huyang has known. (That’s a lot of Padawans.) The best comp could be Chirrut from Rogue One, who had a healthy respect for the Force but at best a limited capacity to draw on its power. That makes it plausible that Sabine could have been an Imperial cadet, and a close associate of Kanan’s, without anyone clocking her as a potential Jedi. It also semi-retcons some subtle plot points from Rebels that could, in retrospect, be reframed as foreshadowing. And, maybe most important, it makes Sabine’s relationship with Ahsoka complex and opaque enough to draw the audience in. We don’t know why Ahsoka decided to train Sabine. Nor do we know why the apprenticeship ended, aside from Sabine’s allusion to how Ahsoka quit on her and Ahsoka’s remark that Sabine was stubborn. Which one regrets the breakup more? As Ahsoka says, “Sometimes even the right reasons have the wrong consequences.”
We’ll learn more in the rest of the season: These two are traveling long distances, so they’ll have plenty of time to talk. However, the inciting incident that sends them on their way occurs when they’re apart. Against Ahsoka’s wishes, Sabine makes off with the map to study it in solitude—and at considerable length. Although the two-part premiere packs in plenty of action—a prison break, multiple lightsaber duels, an aerial pursuit—the pacing seems deliberate, largely because there’s so much map stuff. (It’s very Rise of Skywalker, which is not a note I’m eager to give.) After staring at a diagram of the three figures and faces Ahsoka saw—which reminded me of the Mortis gods, though these beings look a little different—Sabine employs the same move that fails me whenever I make the mistake of messing with a Rubik’s Cube: Maybe if I twist this thing here? For her, this strategy works, unlocking a map that points to a different galaxy—one that’s far, far, far away.
Naturally, there’s no time to celebrate. Shin, the smoldering cipher who does Baylan’s bidding, shows up with deadly droids in tow to claim the deciphered star chart. Sabine’s saber skills are rusty, but she holds her own in the apprentice-on-apprentice battle until the script calls for her to leave herself wide open for a saber through the side. End of Episode 1! Fortunately, the two-part premiere spares us the insult of an unconvincing cliff-hanger. Saber stab wounds aren’t what they used to be—see Reva’s and the Grand Inquisitor’s post-impaling bounce-backs in Obi-Wan Kenobi—so after Shin flees from Ahsoka, Sabine pulls through without so much as a stint in a full-body bacta tank or a trip to Tatooine’s Modifier.
Most of “Toil and Trouble” rehashes the theme of New Republic incompetence that occupied part of The Mandalorian Season 3. Although the map is lost to our heroes, along with any record of the route it displayed, Ahsoka brings Sabine the head of a droid that was hiding in Sabine’s base. The convalescing Sabine uses it to trace the droid’s history to Han Solo’s homeworld, Corellia, where Morgan’s former factories have been repurposed into New Republic shipyards. (Huyang’s “Because you’re a hologram” line to Hera after she tells her friends to try the dangerous droid hack was one of the few in the somewhat somber premiere that made me laugh.) Admittedly, nobody’s actually verified that Morgan’s old operation is on the up and up, but if I know the New Republic Amnesty Program, everything’s perfectly all right.
On Corellia, regional supervisor Myn Weaver (played by Peter Jacobson, who was born to be an officious bureaucrat) tries to assuage Ahsoka and Hera’s concerns about the shipyard’s ex-Imperial staff—a necessity, he says, for continued operations. “An empire doesn’t just become a republic overnight,” he says. “You will still find ex-Imperials at every level of the New Republic government.” Very reassuring. Elsbeth’s facility used to supply raw materials for Star Destroyer hyperdrives, but now it repurposes those cores for the Republic’s defense fleet. How wholesome! There’s just one problem: The Super Star Destroyer core that’s about to be airlifted off the planet is too big to be used in any Republic vessel. Also, its destination is suspiciously classified. Also, there might be some secret HK droids skulking around. Also also, the entire control crew attacks when Ahsoka and Hera ask too many questions.
On the ride to the facility, before the jig was up, Weaver insisted, “The average worker doesn’t care about the nuances of galactic politics. They have loyalty so long as they’re paid.” Even after the jig is up, Ahsoka makes the same claim when Hera asks her, “How can they still be loyal to the Empire?” Ahsoka says, “It’s not loyalty. It’s greed.” Maybe, but if so, the dude who cried, “For the Empire!” as he blasted away must have been expecting a pretty hefty paycheck. If Andor taught us anything, it’s that some Imperials really liked being the baddies.
Ahsoka’s dilemma runs deeper than traitorous shipyard officials: Marrok is in town too, with one of his HK droids. As Ahsoka fights the mercenary to a standstill, Hera and Chopper, the cheeky Spectre astromech, chase the runaway hyperdrive in the Phantom. Just before it jumps to light speed—and Shin swoops in to pick up Marrok—Chop places that Star Wars standby, a tracking device, on the transport’s hull.
While Ahsoka and Hera were getting acquainted with the locals on Corellia, Morgan, Skoll, and Shin were at the “reflex point on Seatos,” a collection of standing stones that Elsbeth says was built by “an ancient people from a distant galaxy.” There, they place the map into a pedestal to project the “pathway to Peridea,” which Skoll recalls from “fairy tales” told at the Jedi Temple. “Tales which are based on truth,” Elsbeth says. All it takes to follow the map’s directions is a massive space gizmo called the Eye of Sion—and the final hyperdrive needed to get the ring running is en route. One might well wonder how Elsbeth knows Thrawn is there, but it seems she can hear him whispering across the intergalactic gulf. Or, at least, she can hear someone or something she thinks is Thrawn. As far as we know, he isn’t Force-sensitive, but there’s really no telling who’ll turn telepathic next.
The villains are ready to punch it straight out of the galaxy, but they won’t go unopposed: By the end of the episode, the other master-apprentice pair is back together again. On Corellia, Hera asked Ahsoka if she’d bring Sabine back on as her pupil, and Ahsoka said Sabine wasn’t ready. But how, Hera inquires, can she tell when someone is ready? “You just know,” Ahsoka says. “So do they.” Toward the end of the episode, Sabine retrieves and reassembles her armor. She chops off her hair with her knife—a deeply symbolic samurai move—restoring her Rebels epilogue do. And then she calls Ahsoka and utters two words: “I’m ready.” (There you have it, Hera; she made it easy to tell.)
In Rebels Season 3, Kanan instructed Sabine in lightsaber combat, but he did so much more slowly than he had with Ezra. Not because Sabine couldn’t use the Force like Ezra could, but because she resisted his teaching. “The Force resides in all living things,” Kanan said. “But you have to be open to it. Sabine is blocked. Her mind is conflicted. She’s so expressive and yet so tightly wound. She’s so …” Hera finished the sentence: “Mandalorian.” Sabine is still Mandalorian, but belatedly, she’s open to Ezra’s entreaty and willing to put in the work it will take to track him down.
I’ll leave you with four final reflections, in bullet-point form:
- In the canonical Catalyst: A Rogue One Novel, which was published in 2016, a smuggler asks Moff Tarkin, “The Empire won’t stop until it reaches the edge of the galaxy, is that it?” Tarkin responds: “Why stop there?” Yet current canon mostly does stop there, so it’s tantalizing to see Ahsoka push past that boundary. In the Unknown Regions, empires like Thrawn’s native Chiss Ascendancy and its enemy, the Grysk Hegemony, rise and fall far from the notice of the Skywalker clan, but the distance to another galaxy makes the trek to the Unknown Regions look like a local stop. (To give you a sense of the scale: The closest galaxy to ours in real life, Andromeda, is more than 20 Milky Ways away.) There’s precedent for extragalactic goings-on in the EU archives that Filoni loves to rummage through. (Remember, he resurrected Thrawn.) As Ahsoka says in Rebels’ Season 2 finale, “There’s always a bit of truth in legends”—and Filoni often finds truth in Legends. The Eye of Sion is seemingly a ship, not a portal, but it still resembles something out of Stargate, The Expanse, or Contact. The “ancient people from a distant galaxy” sound like precursors, a sci-fi staple that Star Wars has dabbled in before but barely explored lately. Maybe Thrawn and Ezra aren’t back because the purrgil took them too far to return with conventional technology—or maybe they encountered a greater threat, such as extragalactic invaders like Legends’ Yuuzhan Vong. Live-action Star Wars has taken its first step into a larger world, and I’m excited to strap in for this outbound flight.
- I noted at the top that the Ahsoka-Sabine scene in the mural room almost perfectly recreated Rebels’ epilogue. Why almost? Because it deviates in a few significant ways. If you watch the scenes side by side and play “spot the difference,” you’ll see that in the Rebels rendition, Sabine wasn’t wearing Ezra’s saber at her hip, as she is in Ahsoka; she puts her helmet on when she turns, instead of carrying it at her side; and Ahsoka’s cloak looks white, not gray. Assuming this is, in fact, the same scene the original Rebels version showed, and not some other time Sabine tenderly touched Ezra’s portrait and turned to board Ahsoka’s shuttle, these deviations are kind of confounding. Maybe Filoni simply decided that it was more important to tell an interesting story in the present than to be bound by every decision he made in the past. Now that Sabine has decided to embrace her training, it makes sense for her to be wearing Ezra’s saber. Keeping her helmet off allows Ahsoka to notice and remark on her haircut and for Sabine to respond, “It’s more me.” And as for Ahsoka’s cloak color—well, if she’s going to get her own series, it’s probably better to see her go from Gandalf the Gray to Gandalf the White than to have that happen off-screen.
- When does Ahsoka start? Most of Rebels’ last season takes place a year before the Battle of Yavin, but the epilogue is set after the Battle of Endor—presumably a good deal later, because Kanan and Hera’s son, Jacen, who was born before the time jump, appears to be several years old. (He must be at day care during Ahsoka’s premiere.) We can’t put a precise date on it, though, and Azadi’s speech on Lothal is no help: “On this day several years ago, the Empire was defeated,” he says, very vaguely. As far as we can tell, The Mandalorian’s third season is set about eight years after Endor, 11 years after Yavin, and a little longer than that after Ezra and Thrawn depart. The Shadow Council’s conversation in Season 3 doesn’t make it clear where Thrawn is sequestered, but it sure would be weird if Ahsoka, Sabine, and Hera waited almost a dozen years to decide to search for their friend! In 2020, Filoni cautioned that the Mandoverse’s interconnected narrative is “not necessarily chronological,” explaining, “When you look at the epilogue of Rebels, you don’t really know how much time has passed. So, it’s possible that the story I’m telling in The Mandalorian actually takes place prior to that. Possible. I’m saying it’s possible.” Ahsoka comes after Elsbeth’s capture, though, so if it’s set after (or during) The Mandalorian Season 2, it would still be almost a decade after Ezra’s disappearance. Theory corner: When Grogu had his purrgil sighting in The Mandalorian’s Season 3 premiere, I thought it was a sign that he’d eventually help Ahsoka and Sabine commune with the creatures. But maybe it means that he already has.
- “This isn’t just about finding Ezra,” Ahsoka says to Sabine, delivering a logline for her spinoff series. “It’s about preventing another war.” The thing is, we’ve seen the sequel trilogy, and we know the war will happen. Which means that, as with most series, the success of Ahsoka will come down to the quality of its writing and relationships. The writing hasn’t sung so far, but the relationships resonate—from a certain point of view. Longtime fans of the Filoniverse and sicko Star Wars lore come to this series pre-invested in the search for Ezra and Thrawn, the squabbles between Ahsoka and Sabine, and whether Hera has a babysitter. Others may have a harder time getting into it all. As I watched, I tried to put myself in the headspace of someone who hasn’t spent tons of time with these characters, and I’m not convinced I would care nearly as much. Aside from a mention of Ahsoka’s former master, Anakin, the premiere goes easy on exposition, which is wise. But when Ahsoka says, “I don’t understand why things have to be difficult,” and Hera responds, “Well, considering your history, I’d say that’s expected,” how many viewers will wonder, Wait, what’s her history again? And will any of them bail before more morsels of story quench their curiosity?
“The past is the past,” Huyang advises Sabine when she dwells on her old spat with Ahsoka. “Move forward.” Ahsoka’s premiere embraces that advice in some respects and rejects it in others. With its opening crawl, its John Williams–esque Kevin Kiner score, its Lucas-style screen wipes, and its deep debt to The Clone Wars, Rebels, Timothy Zahn’s Thrawn novels, and other legacy sources, Ahsoka is steeped in backstory—so much so that it takes two episodes to reach where Rebels left off. Now, the protagonist and her Padawan are moving forward physically and spiritually, though as Hera warns, Jedi don’t follow straight lines. “I think I’m going on a trip,” Sabine resolves. So are we—and as Morgan says, “Nothing can prevent our journey.” So far, I wouldn’t want it to.
