A Review of Episodes 1 and 2 of Ahsoka
Slight spoilers to follow.
Off the bat, I really enjoyed the first two episodes of Ahsoka. They felt more authentically Star Wars than a lot of the recent series. Mandalorian was recognizably in the Star Wars universe, but with a few exceptions it was always ever a side story. That itself was compelling, we rarely get Star Wars stories that don’t follow the grand space opera. Andor was amazing as political commentary, and remains in my opinion the best Star Wars series, but the tone was radically different from everything that came before with the exception of Rogue One. Kenobi and Book of Boba Fett were both cheap enjoyment, but both felt more like themed carnival rides than true Star Wars. Ahsoka ties so nicely into Rebels, in terms of characters, setting, and tone, that at times I forgot this wasn’t just another season. It FELT like Star Wars as we’ve known it since The Clone Wars debuted, to the point that I immediately wished this storyline had been the sequel trilogy.
I think a lot of ink will soon be spilled on the character of Sabine Wren. Natasha Liu Bordizzo did a fine job with the character, but I did feel like the writers weren’t quite sure what to do with her. The character is supposed to be older than Ezra at the time of Rebels, but now several years later she is written like a teenager. They caught her punk vibes well, but she is a mandalorian, undercover agent, and experienced front line veteran who has wielded the Darksaber, trained under Jedi, and built at least one super weapon. She matured a TON in Rebels, but once again she is a bratty punk who makes snarky comments at authority figures and craves validation at the same time. I’m sure they envisioned this as a reaction to the trauma of losing Ezra, but it felt like a repeat of Luke’s character in The Last Jedi. I didn’t mind Luke’s arc since it mirrored Yoda, but for Sabine it felt out of character. She lost her crush so she regressed to her teenage self and lost all connection with her mandalorian heritage? That does a disservice to an otherwise great character.
There is also the matter of her relationship to the Force. I don’t think we’ve seen enough to know if the showrunners are making her truly force sensitive, but if they do, then debating whether it’s a retcon misses the point. On the one hand, she has trained with Jedi before. She trained alongside Ezra under Kanan to master the Darksaber, and he expressed frustration at training someone who couldn’t draw on the force. She may not have the Darksaber anymore, but she does possess a lightsaber and it makes sense that a mandalorian would want to know how to use it. Since Luke and Ahsoka are the only open jedi left, and Luke is only training “serious Jedi” at his temple, it makes sense Sabrine would train under Ahsoka. The very fact she hasn’t gone to Luke or been scouted by him suggests she’s not classically force sensitive or trying to become a Jedi.
As I said, though, that’s the wrong way to look at her. We are treating Force sensitivity as a binary state when Star Wars has never treated it as such. Since the release of A New Hope, the Force has been “in all living things”. It was always a spectrum, we’ve just been told those high on the spectrum are identified and trained to become Jedi. We have never been explicitly told what happens to those low on the spectrum, because we didn’t need to be. That part of the spectrum covers everyone else in the galaxy. Without getting into midichlorian counts, everyone in the galaxy can feel the Force, most just experience it as intuition instead of telekinesis. Sabine is well established as being particularly insightful, it’s not a stretch to say a Jedi could train her to hone that skill. The EU is filled with characters who are strong at some Force Skills and weak in others. Corran Horn could barely lift a rock, but was so strong at mind tricks and illusions that they all saw him do it.
As for the other characters, Mary Elizabeth Winstead nailed Hera. The makeup artists did great with her, and her portrayal of the character is a direct continuation from Rebels. She was always the “mother” of the Ghost crew, and even now she falls immediately into the mother role (helped by canonical being a mother at this point in the timeline). I found this funny because she is also a few years younger than Ahsoka, but that doesn’t stop her from calling out her BS and reminding everyone to make good choices.
Ray Stevenson did a great job with Baylan, and I look forward to learning more about the character. He conveys well the sense of loss and regret we’d expect from a Jedi survivor. We’ve seen a lot of survivors now who responded to the rise of the Empire by hiding and acting as heroes from the shadows, or by switching sides wholesale and joining the Empire as inquisitors. Baylan appears to have taken a third path. He clearly has no interest in remaining a Jedi, but his remorse at fighting Ahsoka and killing another survivor seems genuine.
As for Ahsoka herself, Rosario Dawson continues to do the character justice. My only real comment is that her choreographer seems to have finally taught her how to hold and wield a lightsaber. In The Mandalorian, lightsabers looked awkward and uncomfortable in her hands. I put that down to Dawson not being experienced in armed stage combat, but in a show where she plays the title character whose main weapon is a lightsaber, her comfort with the prop is important. She does feel more natural with it now, but I still have concerns about the choreographer. We’ve seen three lightsaber fights (2 from Ahsoka and 1 from Sabine), and they repeated a ton of moves and stayed away from the complexity we saw in the prequels, Clone Wars, and Rebels. The choreographer loves a bind followed by a pushing contest.
I continue to find the New Republic fascinating. In all the media we’ve seen, New Republic military personnel are utterly useless, with the exception of pilots. They are trusting to a fault and shoot worse than stormtroopers. I get they were fighting Force users, but their response to “jedi coming aboard” was “we think these are imperial agents, but we will place the entire security detail and the captain within arms’ reach and with weapons holstered. They implicitly trust the Corellian workers and administrators to be loyal to the New Republic, and when 4 workers reveal themselves to be Imperial sympathizers, they arrest the entire workforce. Hopefully they look into who classified the hyperdrive, but I doubt it. We saw this same thing in The Mandalorian, when Doctor Pershing was entrapped. The New Republic appears unable to comprehend that anyone was ever truly loyal to the Empire and might still be. The NR seems to think that just because the Imperial Navy was destroyed as a coherent force at Jakku, the Imperial Remnant no longer exists and no one yearns for its return. We’ve seen a bunch of iterations of the Remnant now, and this one mirrors Operation Werwolf. It’s an interesting change from the warlords we are used to seeing, and explains how the warlords and ultimately the First Order stay supplied. The New Republic is blinded by its own moral superiority to the reality that most of the galaxy doesn’t care, and that some people actively preferred the Empire and want to see its return. It’s the Star Wars equivalent of“Barack Obama was elected president, so racism doesn’t exist anymore”.
Overall, I enjoyed the first two episodes and look forward to seeing more. I’m excited to see an action show where all three leads and half of the villains are women and none of them are sexualized. Ahsoka herself is, in my opinion, the best character in Star Wars right now, given such depth by The Clone Wars, Rebels, and Tales of the Jedi. She deserves a live action show that will do her justice.
