Unlike other Star Wars series, there’s actually a good reason for Ahsoka to exist
The Disney Plus show is set to answer one of the biggest mysteries in Star Wars lore: What happened to Ezra Bridger?
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Star Wars doesn’t like loose ends. The franchise actually has something of an over-explanation problem: In the first Star Wars film, Obi-Wan tells Luke that Darth Vader killed his father. In The Empire Strikes Back, Vader tells Luke that he is his father. It was, at the time, a jaw-dropping twist. In retrospect, it was an omen.
Since then, various parts of the Star Wars universe have doubled back on themselves, retconning events that were seemingly set in stone—Rey’s parents were nobodies, oh no wait she’s a Palpatine—and creating elaborate backstories for characters that didn’t need them. As Patton Oswalt said when talking about the prequel movies exploring Boba Fett’s childhood, “[I] do not give a shit at all about that. Could not care less.”
This obsessive need to revisit well-known characters has led the franchise to tread the same ground for years. Disney+ dipped back into the Boba Fett well with disastrous results; even Obi-Wan Kenobi was met with a shrug. And from the outside, the streamer’s upcoming Ahsoka series, which debuts August 22, ticks a lot of the same boxes as The Book Of Boba Fett and Obi-Wan Kenobi. It’s a self-titled series about a fan-favorite character, the details of which were nebulous when it was first announced, and it’s got a lot of cameos from other well-known Star Wars characters. But as we’ve gotten closer to its release, and as Disney has revealed more about the series, it’s become clear that there is something more going on with Ahsoka. Unlike The Book Of Boba Fett and Obi-Wan Kenobi, this is not just a fuck-around vanity project for Ahsoka Tano.
Ahsoka’s not-so-secret weapon
The thing about Ahsoka is that it’s not really about Ahsoka. She’s the main character, sure, but the series is about discovering what happened to Ezra Bridger, a Jedi that went missing at the end of Star Wars: Rebels. It’s an actual mystery that deserves an explanation. Rather than starting from the character and trying to create a story around them, Ahsoka is using the character as a vehicle to tell a story about something fans have been curious about since Rebels ended in 2018.
The Rebels ending was an anomaly in Star Wars lore; big questions like that never get left unanswered for long. Between the films, TV series, and tie-in novels, there’s always somewhere to tell a Star Wars story. And even when we do get big cliffhanger moments like at the end of The Empire Strikes Back, it’s always clear when the story will be resolved. In the case of Empire, it was resolved three years later with Return Of The Jedi. But with Rebels, there was no clear succession plan, no follow-up series announced. And that left the franchise in a place it had rarely been before: with an interesting story to tell and seemingly no plan to actually tell it.
Ezra Bridger’s disappearance
Rebels takes place just before the original film trilogy, at the height of the Galactic Empire’s power. It centers on a small, scrappy group of resistance fighters on a ship called the Ghost pushing back against the Empire. The group includes former con artist Ezra Bridger, who spent most of his childhood on his own after Imperial forces imprisoned his parents, and Jedi Kanan Jarrus, who realizes Ezra is Force sensitive and begins mentoring him. As Ezra grows and learns to control his powers, he also develops a close friendship with Sabine Wren, another Ghost crewmember. Ahsoka Tano flits in and out of the series, mostly doing her own thing, but occasionally showing up to help the Ghost crew.
By the end of the series, Ezra has risen in the ranks and taken command of the ship, and he’s the one ostensibly in charge as the crew faces off against the series’ big bad, Grand Admiral Thrawn. Ezra ultimately traps himself in an air pocket with Thrawn and disappears, saving the rest of the crew, but leaving a big question as to what actually happened. It left a massive impact on Sabine, who was determined to find Ezra.
What makes Ahsoka different
Ahsoka is still relying heavily on Star Wars nostalgia; it’s still, in many ways, following the playbook that led The Mandalorian, The Book Of Boba Fett, and Obi-Wan Kenobi astray. Andor succeeded because it found a new story to tell, largely eschewing cameos and focusing instead on its own characters. Ahsoka may not explore a new corner of the galaxy, but its goal is fundamentally different than The Book Of Boba Fett and Obi-Wan Kenobi.
With Boba Fett, the impetus for the series seemed to be, “What happened to Boba Fett after he escaped from the Sarlacc pit?” And the answer, for a lot of people, was, “I don’t care, because he should’ve died in there.” With Obi-Wan, the goal seems to have been to explore part of Obi-Wan’s life between the prequels and the original trilogy. The problem was that there just wasn’t a very interesting story to tell there, and it didn’t add to our understanding of the Star Wars canon.
Ahsoka, though, has a chance to expand Star Wars lore in an important way. What happened to Ezra and, by extension, Thrawn, matters. Sabine, who also appears in Ahsoka, deserves closure about what happened to her friend. And Ezra Bridger, whom fans grew to love over the course of Rebels, deserves a more definitive ending. Whether or not it’s a happy one doesn’t really matter; it’s just that leaving things open-ended isn’t what Star Wars does. We’ve come to expect answers in this franchise, and Ahsoka might actually give us what we want.
170 Comments
Loved Rebels. Kanan Jarrus became my favorite Jedi and remains the only action figure I have ever bought for myself from Star Wars. (Even though I should have bought original figures from the original movie when I was 12.) Idiot.Looking forward to the Ezra Bridger mystery being resolved although I suspect it will be in underwhelming fashion.Thrawn is a bad ass enemy. I think the best since Vader. Hopefully he plays a big part.The best ‘resolution’ to Obi Wan’s time on Tatooine babysitting Luke from afar is “Kenobi” by John Jackson Miller. That would have been a better story than what we got.
My issue with Obi-Wan Kenobi is the same one I have with prequels in general – where’s the tension? I watched the first episode and there was what was supposed to be a thrilling scene with Obi-Wan and young Leia escaping people who were after them, but we know those two are going to be okay. It’s television and they’re main characters so they’re probably going to be okay anyway because this isn’t The Walking Dead but at least with new characters who we don’t know what will happen in their future, there is still a chance.Star Trek has the same issue started back with Enterprise. The crew could die, yes, but there was only so much they could do with Klingons or Romulans. Strange New Worlds has that problem plus the known crew mates (Spock and Uhura will be fine). I will give it this though, it’s been a fantastic romp. The best thing they did with Discovery was launch them into the future, except that now every new show should start taking place from where that leaves off.
You could tell the Obi-Wan scripts had been kicked around a lot. It’s my least favorite live action Star Wars series.
I blame Game of Thrones for this bullshit. We used to not get all bogged down in stakes and wondering if someone would die or not.
I was there in the years between Empire and Return of the Jedi. We all knew Han would get out the carbon freeze. Go watch a vintage trailer. He’s all over it. The fun was seeing how they got him out of it.
If that was done today, production would be shut down because Ford would have strangled the studio exec who told him he had to come to set under a tarp or something because FartHead18311037811 wrote in the comment section about spoilers.
Yes and no, the obsession with spoilers and all characters being killable is newish – but stakes have always mattered in good writing and if you’re just coloring in between the very narrow and well-established lines of “Obi Wan at the end of Revenge of the Sith” and “Obi Wan at the beginning of New Hope”, there’s not much room for stakes. “He putters around Tatooine and makes sure the Empire doesn’t find out about the Skywalker twins, which we already know he succeeds at doing” isn’t very compelling.
I had one bright canon line for Obi-Wan. Vader could not suspect he had children. They kept to that.I maintain that OBK improved New Hope. It explains why Vader didn’t just wipe the floor with Kenobi. He was terrified his old master would pull something else out of his hat.
Have you never seen a Hitchcock movie? Stakes and suspense were always a thing.
I don’t necessarily think the lack of “this character is safe” is usually the problem with prequels, but rather that there’s often very little room to play with the characters in other ways that fits with established chronology, and very little creativity on the part of show runners and writers in how to work around that. Something like Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom is a pretty middling film in my opinion, but it at least works as a prequel to Raiders because it shows a different, bit more selfish and single-tracked Indy who subtly changes into the character we see in Raiders. But oftentimes the motivation of prequels is just “give us more of this character”, so evolving the characterization is tough or just not done, and more characters and situations get retrod or break continuity (I like a lot of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, but bringing back Spock and Chapel and Uhura AND Kirk AND Scotty has absolutely been increasingly frustrating… a lot of what they’re trying to do with the characters [specifically Chapel] doesn’t need to be that character at all, and it just creates more problems.) Boba Fett could have stayed in the Sarlacc pit, but the issue wasn’t they brought him back (which plenty of fans wanted) but that basically didn’t do anything interesting and was marginalized in his own series in service of trying to kickstart other franchise stuff.
I think there are two Star Wars movies that perfectly demonstrate how a prequel can/can’t work depending on where the narrative priorities are.Rogue One: We knew none of those main characters were getting out alive. YMMV but I think it does a pretty effective job of showing the “war” and grappling with some meaty ideas. Some memorable one-off characters and a mini horror movie at the end. That embrace between Jyn and Cassian on the beach is incredibly moving.Solo: Did you want to know how Han got his last name? No? Well too bad, have we got the movie for you!
That “Solo” thing was just so…it was just…why? Literally no one wanted Han Solo’s last name explained. He’s a space man in a space movie. Space people can have weird names. Skywalker is a weird name. Yes, there’s some Screenplay Writing 101 thematic resonance to the name, given that the character is a loner, but no one thought that his name was literally supposed to be the English word “solo,” because that’s asinine.
Obi-Wan was just absolutely tied up in knots by the existing continuity. It’s not just that we know Obi-Wan and Leia will be okay, it’s that there was a long list of things that couldn’t happen — characters who couldn’t meet each other, knowledge that couldn’t be revealed, battles that couldn’t happen — without contradicting the other material. It was an especially awkward point in the timeline to explore, because if anything too crazy had happened then we’d have to wonder why nobody ever mentions it in the original trilogy.This is just one example, but late in this series Reva learns that Luke is Anakin’s son and in hiding on Tatooine. So of course, we know Luke can’t die, because Star Wars. But this plot thread’s issues run deeper than that, because all of the following rules must also be followed: Owen and Beru cannot believe there are additional Sith Inquisitors on the way (otherwise they’d move), Anakin and Palpatine cannot learn about Luke, Luke cannot receive any hints about his parentage or importance to the galaxy, and Obi-Wan cannot establish a close relationship with Luke in the process of saving him. Which is why the episode ends with such a wet fart. Nothing of consequence could happen in order to upset the ANH status quo.
The most intriguing part of the Obi-Wan series, to me, were the early scenes showing his life in hiding, trying to blend in, trying to be as “normal” as possible, the tension with the Lars…When Leia showed up it was interesting, but it ran out of steam quickly.I wish the Obi-Wan show had told a more self-contained, less galaxy-spanning story that showed Obi-Wan just trying to do good while also protecting his secrets, and the difficulty involved in that, instead of trying to shoehorn him back into the galactic conflict.
The idea I had for the Obi-wan show (for years, even before it was announced as actually happening) was to have him investigating a Jedi-adjacent situation involving the Tatooine criminal underground in Mos Espa. It went like this:Ben has been living in anonymity in Mos Eisley for the last five years (since Luke’s birth). He visits the Larses every couple of months to check in on Luke; now that Luke is old enough to wonder who he is, they just say Ben is a friend of theirs who comes by for dinner once in a while.But Ben starts having visions of a Force-sensitive child who’s in danger. Like all visions, they’re vague, of course, but they prompt Ben to start bothering the Larses more, and hanging around more, and generally being a kind of nuisance, because he assumes it’s Luke. They’re worried he’s going to freak Luke out. Eventually Owen gets mad and tells Ben he needs to stay away for a while; Luke will be fine.Ben eventually realizes that the child he’s been having visions about is not Luke, but is in fact another child on Tatooine who has been abducted by members of the criminal underworld. Ben only knows that the child is in Mos Espa and is a girl, and that the criminals plan to sell her to the Empire. Ben isn’t familiar with Mos Espa or its criminal factions, so he goes to the Larses and apologizes for upsetting Luke, and asks for their help, explaining the situation.Owen doesn’t want to get involved, but Beru does: she grew up in Mos Espa and had family members (a sibling, a cousin, etc.) who were involved with the criminal gangs. She knows the territory and can help Ben investigate. Owen’s reluctant but Beru tells him she’s not about to let some little girl get abused by criminals.So Ben and Beru go to Mos Espa and investigate. They eventually find the child and figure out how to rescue her; but because they discover there’s a Sith Inquisitor hanging around, Ben has to close himself off from the Force and can’t use his lightsaber. They eventually manage to find and rescue the girl, but Beru is seriously injured; Ben gets her to a bacta tank where she recovers, and after helping the girl and her family flee the planet, they return to Owen. He finds out that Beru was almost killed and becomes enraged, telling Ben that he’s not welcome there any more and had better not come around, even going so far as to threaten him with a blaster, thus leading to the status quo of ANH where Owen refers to Ben in ways designed to keep Luke away from him.
And Ben and Beru totally bang, she has a girl she names Rey and gives up for adoption.The ugly side of the fandom then gets mad over Disney turning Owen into a “beta cuck.”But that’s not a bad plot outline and if they do a season 2, I’d watch that.
There’s so many obvious choices that would have been so much better, let alone ones that involve a bit of creativity. Just having Obi-Wan get dragged into a Seven Samurai- or Yojimbo-style story (on or off Tatooine) would have made so much sense, and would’ve paid homage to the Kurosawa roots of the series. But that wouldn’t have allowed for the Obi-Wan/Vader grudge match advertising they so clearly were depending on, so we got what we got.
And I’d argue that even the stuff they do include is -at best- annoyingly wonky in the timeline. It’s been said before, but c’mon- Leia sends a message to Obi-Wan in ANH, but talks about how he served her father in the Clone Wars but nothing about how he rescuers her from Imperial kidnappers?
Don’t even get me started on that! Even within the very narrow confines established by prior movies, in order for anything fun to happen during the series they still had to bend canon to the point of breaking by having Leia and Obi-Wan go on a wacky adventure that nobody ever mentions again, *and* staging two separate lightsaber duels between Obi-Wan and Vader that are forgotten by ANH.But if you’re setting a series during a time period where nobody can meet each other or die or learn significant new information, that’s the kind of story issue that’s going to pop up.
“I’ve been waiting for you, Obi Wan. We meet again, at last…well, since a few years ago, and the time right before that. We meet pretty often, actually….”
Obi Wan’s very existence broke canon, but your point stands.
AND Luke has to run out of power converters, so he has a reason to visit Toshi station!
The thing that annoyed me about Obi-Wan was that I thought it did a good enough job justifying its own existence by telling a story involving Leia. Yeah, we knew they would both be okay, but it actually built on the fact that she seemed to know who he was in ANH. And then in that last one or two episodes it goes, “Let’s put Luke in danger too.” It wasn’t necessary!
I generally agree on all prequels- we generally know who lives and who dies, or who affects future events, etc. House of the Dragon, The Hobbit, Enterprise. All sort of enjoyable but also totally low stakes. That’s why I’m a little surprised how much I enjoy Strange New Worlds. Devoting entire episodes to characters we don’t already know of has helped, and I’m now genuinely interested in what happens to them that they’re not on the Enterprise when Kirk takes over. Plus… the Lower Decks crossover alone justifies the show’s existence.
And the musical episode! It’s nice for one of the newer shows (that isn’t animated) to remember that it has tribbles and a planet of old-timey gangsters in its DNA so getting silly is fine. My biggest issue with the series is that it allowed a main Starfleet character to manipulate a situation to where he could kill someone without it being technically “murder”.Hemmer dying also did give the show stakes. There are characters that we care about that weren’t on previous series so we don’t know what happens to them. I’m getting some push back on this because on most shows main characters don’t die like I didn’t already address that, but that’s not the point. The point is if they can. There’s a huge difference in whether Chapel or Ortegas are in danger. (Sorry, this was more to someone I didn’t want to bother with.)Anyway, I’ve got to give Strange New Worlds huge plaudits for this… When the new Kirk first showed up I thought they really went all out when ordering this actor from the blandness factory. Then they had an alternate timeline version of him go back in time and the current timeline version of him sing and now I’m all in. He’s won me over.
Yeah, I am extremely invest in the La’an/alternate timeline Kirk relationship. Also, turning the Gorn into terrifying fucking monsters that also wear spacesuits is a great move. In general, most things about La’an rule, and I do want to know why she’s never heard of after this era. Maybe she finds ANOTHER alternate timeline where she gets to be with another alternate Kirk.
I’m very much enjoying Strange New Worlds, but I may be helped along by the fact that I never really watched the Original Series.
I actually never watched TOS either, besides a few eps here and there to get references from the other shows/movies. It’s basically the only Trek show I’ve never watched. (Though I never watched all of Enterprise, because as mentioned above, I generally don’t like prequels.)I kinda want Strange New Worlds to somehow run into the Kelvin timeline from the JJ Abrams movies so Pike gets a happier ending. (or at least… a sad ending that’s farther away.)
Prequels definitely kill narrative tension, but with Obi-Wan, it goes way deeper than just not being concerned for the characters’ well-being.The show was clearly reverse engineered from one clear goal: another Obi-Wan/Darth Vader lightsaber duel, and you could almost literally hear the plot stretching as they crammed it in there.
It’s amazing that Disney has taken all of George Lucas’ worst tendencies (hyper-commercialization, repeating story beats, shrinking the world instead of expanding it, and wantonly ignoring previous plot points with barely a hand-wave), and doubled down on virtually all of them, all without allowing for any of the weird idiosyncracy that at least makes the prequels interesting, if not particularly effective. It says something that the closest they came was The Last Jedi (which I consider respectably ambitious but ultimately a failure).
I find that to be a ridiculous argument since main characters don’t die in 99% of pop culture. Did you really worry week to week that Captain Picard was going to die surprisingly or did you honestly think Darth Vader was going to kill Luke Skywalker in “Return of the Jedi?”
My issue with Obi-Wan Kenobi is the same one I have with prequels in general – where’s the tension? I watched the first episode and there was what was supposed to be a thrilling scene with Obi-Wan and young Leia escaping people who were after them, but we know those two are going to be okay. Gotta be honest, I hate this attitude. Yes, you knew that Obi-Wan and Leia live to be in A New Hope. But honestly… the first time you watched A New Hope, did you EVER really think there was a chance that Han and Chewie would really fuck off, never to be seen again? Did you really think there was any chance that Darth Vader would shoot Luke down during the trench run? That the Death Star would blow up Yavin IV with Leia still on it?
It might seem like this show matters, and that people care, but they don’t. It’s all over for Star Wars.
Is a live action series about a cartoon clone wars character trying to find a rebels cartoon character a hard sell for non star wars nerds? I am trying to tell people how good the series were but many just are not cartoon fans.
When you describe it that way, yes. I wasn’t super interested before, but knowing that’s even more inside baseball makes it even less appealing to me.
Exactly. It’s more franchise navel-gazing from Filoni & Favreau. They have literally no idea what to do with the franchise. Thank god they’re not the only creators working on it.
This issue is coming up in my family too. My Mom is the one who fostered my love of sci-fi-she adores Star Wars, Star Trek, Dr. Who, BSG-all the core series. But she absolutely does not watch animation, no matter how often I try to convince her that it is good. She is from a generation where cartoons were only for kids, and it is deeply ingrained.It is such a shame-those who do not watch Rebels are really missing out. The crew of the Ghost is a wonderful family that I really enjoy watching.
My wife will watch all the live action stuff with me but not the animation and to be honest Star Wars Resistance was bad.
Same-although my Mom refusing to watch Star Wars is much more surprising than my wife refusing to watch Star Wars. My wife is just not that into it-but fortunately my kids are so I always had company!And agreed on Resistance. I generally like SW animation-Rebels is GREAT, Clone Wars is good (but with some big tonal shifts throughout) and I did not like Bad Batch at first but it has grown on me. But Resistence just wasn’t good.
Resistance was hemmed in by the concept, though. In terms of the timeline of the ST, the Resistance existed for, what, six months? And didn’t really do much of anything, at least outside what was glimpsed in the movies. Whereas you can imagine nigh infinite numbers of stories involving the Rebellion or the Jedi and Clones vs. the separatists.They tried to set the show in an interesting world/corner of the galaxy, so props for the effort, at least, even if the results were less than impressive.
The original selling point for Resistance was that it was about a bunch of starfighter racers, and the main character would be doing some spy stuff on the side/in the background. Then in the show there’s like 3 episodes total where the racing is anything remotely relevant to the plot. And the spy, the New Republic’s best and youngest pilot, is a goddamn human Jar Jar who constantly blunders through every situation, trips over his own feet, and is instantly hated by 99% of the people he meets. Jar Jar at least was always a fuck-up, but Kaz is supposed to be a trained navy man. It’s baffling why they would make the main character so inept and unlikable.
The racer thing was a fun idea and they had to do something because you couldn’t make a show actually about the Resistance, since the Resistance barely exists and doesn’t really do anything up until TFA.
Basically, the show was just poorly conceived from the jump, but I give them a lot of leeway because they had a very bad/nonsensical sandbox to play in.
Resistance was futile!
The whole “animation is for kids” thing is even weirder because shows like The Flintstones and The Jetsons were made for families, and earlier stuff like Looney Tunes were clearly geared more toward adults, even if it later it all became more standard kid fare. I’d bet that people from previous generations didn’t pick up the idea that cartoons are for kids until the 80s glut of animation, when many of them were raising their own. Not that any of that will change the circumstances, but it is still strange that people have such strong biases against animated stuff.
Move forward. Leave them behind. They will only slow you down.
I’m a Star Wars nerd and it’s a hard sell for me. I just didn’t keep up with the cartoons, and the more and more Filoni turns them into the backbone of the non-movie lore (or uses them to shore up flimsy film lore) the less I feel like part of the club.
Well said. I only know the cartoon star wars stuff because I covid lockdown binged through it. I am glad I did but I could have easily missed it.
Agreed. It just seems like more and more of the Disney snake eating its own tail. I’m sure the animated series is great, but when you’ve got a franchise that consistently can’t get over it’s own navel gazing, maybe having Filoni just keeping pulling it back into his own even smaller sandbox isn’t the best way forwad.
Exactly. The franchise under F&F continues to crawl further and further up its own ass and they can hardly blame the general public for not wanting to go spelunking.
Or maybe you should look at all of this the other way around:
Filoni is one of the people primarily responsible for moving the work forward. He’s proud of some of the stories that he has begun to tell, and wants to continue to tell those stories. The people who have actually engaged with those stories have widely praised those stories, which is why he’s still being asked to move the work forward. Now he’s being offered the opportunity to play in a different sandbox. He wants to do that while playing with some of his favorite toys.
Filoni is not Disney. He’s not an example of the scattered, nonsensical approach reflected by the sequel trilogy. His work is not navel gazing. If you’re “sure it’s great,” why are you lumping it in with your experience of the elements of the franchise that A) weren’t great, and B) he didn’t have anything to do with?
Because my experience with the Disney plus shows I have watched (as well as the description provided here of this one) leads me to believe that the same mistakes are being made in the TV shows as with the features.
He may have moved the story forward with those animated shows, but drawing so many characters from them, rather than introducing new ones, creates a barrier to entry. Much like the MCU, watching this stuff increasingly feels like homework, rather than something I can just sit down and enjoy.
“Much like the MCU, watching this stuff increasingly feels like homework, rather than something I can just sit down and enjoy.”
Have you ever considered the possibility that what you can “sit down and enjoy” might actually be a product of your own attitudes? Wishing that Dave Filoni was reacting to his success by abandoning characters that he created and developed is like wishing Elton John had decided to become a bass player. You’re allowed to want it, I just don’t understand why.
Look, if this is the Rubicon for you, so be it. It’s just a profoundly odd choice. You’re basing your assessment of whether or not you’re going to like this newest part of that thing based on the writings of… Jen Lennon, AVClub? I like simplifying things whenever possible, and this seems really simple to me: You like a thing that a lot of other people also like. You haven’t consumed part of it, and you’re publicly declaring that like it’s some badge of honor. It isn’t. It’s just a TV show that you didn’t watch. Now that not having watched it might have some consequences, you’re mad at the people who made it. And the people who did watch it and enjoyed it. How’s that working for you?
Here’s my bottom line: You get to decide which media you consume; you don’t get to decide what gets made. And in this case, you’re actively deciding NOT to consume a thing – and complaining about that thing’s existence – because it wasn’t made the way you think it should have been made, according to the terms you laid out in total anonymity. You don’t care if it’s good – it wasn’t even out when you decided you didn’t want to do “homework” – you just care that you don’t think you’re ready for it because you voluntarily chose not to consume some of the parts of the greater whole that came before this one. And that’s Dave Filoni’s fault or something… C’mon, bru!
Who’s declaring a badge of honor or trying to decide what gets made?I said I don’t like a direction a multi-billion dollar franchise is going, and it’s caused me to lose interest. You’re the one turning it into some weird hill to die on.
Okay.
If Disney wants to entice me back with a new Star War they need to set it either 500 years in the future or 500 years in the best. Clean break. No baggage. No spin-offs, or prequels, or midquels, and not even whiff of someone with the last name “Skywalker.” Good lord, just make something new…Or just make another season of Andor. I’d be okay with that.
Good luck with that. Even if they set it 500 years in the future, somehow every character will be a descendant of one of the original SW characters.
The problem with that logic, of course, is that you’re excluding yourself from a club that is improving the thing you say you care about. To be honest, the work Filoni did in Clone Wars provided actual context for Anakin’s turn. He basically rehabilitated the prequel trilogy as a meaningful story with an actual arc. Whereas he went from an annoying kid to a whiny punk to a domestically abusive psychopath in the span of three films, Filoni allows you to actually see the experiences that made Anakin mistrustful, resentful, etc. He has real reason to feel ambivalent about the Jedi Order as you watch Clone Wars, partly because they were shit communicators and partly because they were fundamentally dishonest with him.
“Making the prequels work” is just not on my xmas list, and kinda further alienates me from the project.
It’s funny: The more reactions I read, the more convinced I am that people have just decided how they’re going to feel and are adopting positions that fit their general disposition.
The prequels exist. And they are part of a larger story. When evaluated on their own merits, they’re not great art. Us finding them lacking, and repeating that ad nauseum on the Internet, is not an act of courage or creativity, and it’s not a particularly good use of resources. Generating material that improves their overall fit within the story is an excellent use of resources, especially if it’s done by someone who cares about the overall story. If something cannot be undone, “can it be improved” is a logical question, and a logical outcome to desire. Whether you like it or not, that’s what happened with the media you’re actively complaining about.
Now, if you – as in you, personally – don’t want that outcome, and/or if you’re determined to ignore the supplemental material that improves the overall story by improving the prequels (as they sit in the larger/growing story), you get to sit with the part of the story you’re willing to accept and consume. That’s fine as far as it goes. It’s just a weird attitude to trot out into the public square. “Look at me, proudly ignoring this thing my fellow travelers enjoy, and desperately needing to tell everyone I’m not interested…” It’s like the 90s are back, but with worse music!
You’re projecting a *lot* of effort and motivation onto my apathy towards this project, and the adversarial, condescending stance you’re taking towards me saying “the fandom is increasingly alienating” really illustrates my point in ways I guess I’m failing to express.
I could go on a block quoting spree, but my real bottom line is this:
You should watch whatever you want to watch. You should feel however you want to feel.
I don’t actually care. I don’t care what you watch. I don’t care if you’re alienated by my enthusiasm. Disney+ loads at the same speed at my house, regardless of your enthusiasm. I just think it’s a little weird that you came into a public forum where people are excited about something and seemingly expected to just stroll in, wave your apathy around, and only be greeted with a chorus of fellow meh-ers. We get it, Drake. You fuck.
….I replied to someone asking if the average fan or non-fan was interested in this show. And if you’re thrown by someone on (as you point out) a public forum expressing an opinion…well, I’d say you may need to acclimate to the internet a bit more, but the way you keep flying off the handle in response to me makes me think you’re pretty fluent.
If this is your idea of “flying off the handle,” your handle must be pretty short. I’ve actually been pretty civil with you. That said, I wrote it before, will write it again:
You should watch whatever you want to watch. You should feel however you want to feel.
I’ve been pretty ambivalent about watching Ahsoka because my only exposure to the character was that awful Clone Wars movie and The Mandalorian, which really isn’t enough to make me want more. But it stars an actress I like, and fans go out of their way to tell me what an amazing character she is.Learning that it’s about her looking for a Jedi main character from another show I didn’t watch who mysteriously disappeared makes my eyes glaze over and gives me flashes of the setup for The Force Awakens. *Maybe* I’ll watch it someday, but this article torpedoed any interest I had.
This argument I just don’t get. If there was a news star wars show about a NEW jedi you never heard of, and the plot was centered on her search for an old friend who mysteriously disappeared while a new emporer-level threat lurked in the background… you’d watch it. That’s an awesome setup. So what that she has a backstory? That plot alone is compelling. What is so off-putting about this particular character having a background explored elsewhere?
No, I wouldn’t. I was willing to treat the show as simply a show about a NEW Jedi that I never heard of, but in general, TV shows that revolve around a central mystery simply don’t interest me.In theory, I would agree that a show about Ahsoka looking for one of the main characters from Rebels should be no different than a show with brand-new characters that begins in media res. In practice – especially with anything Star Wars – the storytellers tend to dole out information to the audience at a different pace when the backstory has already been told somewhere else than when it’s being revealed for the first time.Also… I’m fucking burnt out on Star Wars. The sequel trilogy was awful. I thought both Solo and Rogue One were mid. The Mandalorian is delivering diminishing returns every season. The reviews for Book of Boba Fett were so bad I skipped it, and the project that I was looking forward to the most post-Disney’s acquisition of the franchise, Obi-Wan Kenobi, tried to hide the stretch marks of turning a two-hour movie into a six-episode miniseries with bafflingly bad direction and low production values – and I say that as someone who enjoyed it for the prequel nostalgia. So I’m not going to watch Ahsoka just because it’s Star Wars. I haven’t watched Andor despite all the people raving about it because I didn’t care about Diego Luna’s character from Rogue One enough to want to see more, much less 13 episodes. That’s Star Wars’ curse now. It carries too much baggage for me. I’m not wishing ill on Star Wars. Short of just taking a years-long break, I think I would give Star Wars another chance if it actually broke away from anything we’ve seen before and explored a new time period, or some new characters. Maybe in ten years I’ll revisit what I’ve missed and regret not watching Andor and Ahsoka. I’m willing to take that chance.
All of that is fair criticism. And good on you for skipping Boba Fett, even the terrible reviews can’t quote capture what was so bad about that show.If arcs based around a central mystery don’t really work for you, then yeah, that might be your exit point. I will absolutely agree that almost anything post-disney purchase of star wars had been shockingly underwhelming at best, and fucking terrible at worst. Ahsoka (the character) is honestly one of the few very bright spots. People will say that the series’ she came from were great… they were honestly middling at best, and good for kids. I watched them while my infant son napped on my chest every afternoon because it was the pandemic and there was nothing else. You’re not wrong burning out from star wars. Someone once argued in a comment on this site that the only reason it stuck around is because there was like 30 years in between each set of movies. Now that we get them more than once a year the stress shows. I personally am willing to hold out and watch it all because I’m a completionist and because I’m wildly depressed, but I will argue that it can’t be understated how good Andor was. If you watch no other SW for a decade, watch that. It’s really that good and is much more than just Andor the character.
I just wanna thank you for being so chill. I realize in rereading my comment that I opened myself up to criticisms like, “wElL wHy arE yOu On aN aRtiCle aBoUt SW iF yOu’rE sO bUrnt oUT?” and being part of the problem by giving Obi-Wan Kenobi and the Psuedo-Boba Fett & Pseudo-Yoda show chances but not Andor or Ahsoka. It’s nice to just have a conversation that doesn’t involve insults.
I’ve watched basically nothing with Ahsoka in it except those episodes of The Mandalorian and Boba Fett. I wonder if I’ll like it.
I think as long as it’s compelling entertainment in its own right, I could like it.
I wouldn’t get your hopes up.
I think it’s a kind of hard sell in this particular case because Clone Wars very much did start as a kids show. Rebels too, but to a lesser extent. I agree though that animation gets no respect when it absolutely deserves it even from the supposed “fans” who are seemingly willingly ignorant/oblivious to how the tons and tons of CGI in these live-action shows IS animation but it’s different for… reasons!
the supposed “fans”
“You’re out of the club unless you like all the stuff our subset says you have to like” isn’t the best sales pitch.
I’m sorry, but the way to overcome the gatekeeping you’re pretending is happening here is to watch a thing that’s part of a thing that you say you want to be part of. The club is entirely voluntary. Membership is based on participation. It’s attendance. You don’t get to be offended that someone else is excluding you when you can include yourself by watching television.
lol fair I got a little heated there
It’s not animation that’s the problem for me. It’s the unappealing animation style. It took a while to get on board with the idea of animated properties telling good stories that weren’t just for kids. And I’ve enjoyed some stuff. But with the Star Wars stuff – starting with Clone Wars, I couldn’t get into it specifically because of the animation style. Having grown up in the 80s and taking a long break from animated stuff, I found a lot of it visually unappealing.
The fact that this long review offers not even a hint of a reason that anyone other than Rebels fans should watch this, yes, it’s a hard sell.
Star Wars animated fans generally love those shows, but they are a distinct minority of Star Wars fans. Doing a live action show for just them is an interesting choice, unless the writing in this is a lot better than in the rest of Filoni’s shows.
It is their loss if they don’t want to watch Rebels. Just pity them.
Maybe we just want to casually watch a new live-action SW show without doing years of homework.
Sneaky fact of life for most: You get to decide what you consume. You don’t get to decide what gets produced.
Well, someone has to make those decisions about what gets produced. And arguably it should be me, since I possess excellent taste.
I’m holding out for live action Mickey Mouse.
I can not wait for the animation version of the “live action” CGI version of the animated Lion King.
It’s a hard sell even for casual SW nerds, of which I count myself. I watched all of Clone Wars and tried Rebels but couldn’t make it past S1. So realistically this show should have something for me. But then I read sentences like this and a chill goes through me:The Disney Plus show is set to answer one of the biggest mysteries in Star Wars lore: What happened to Ezra Bridger?Ahsoka being billed as an extension of the final Rebels season tells me they’re no longer inviting anyone new into the tent. I desperately want Star Wars to show me something new and considering all these live actions shows are in service of a Filoni crossover, I’m convinced we will forever be chained to Skywalker Saga characters.
That’s a great point. While I have many, many issues with “The Mandalorian”, at least it was totally accessible and very, very easy to digest. You didn’t need to know anything about the lore beyond the broad strokes. But since they, they keep generating content for smaller and smaller swaths of the audience while “The Mandalorian” itself has become more and more insular.
You might enjoy Andor, if you haven’t seen it already.
I tried to watch both shows and they just weren’t for me – they’re skewed too young. Now, that’s perfectly fine. I think Star Wars SHOULD be primarily for kids. Further, the kids that watched these shows when they were new are now in their 20s so this is perfect for them.
But for me, it’s making it more difficult to care about all these characters and what they’re up to.
I liked the show perfectly fine and watched the entire run, but I have absolutely zero interest in seeing a live-action continuation of Rebels. Do not care one bit. Can’t imagine those fans out there who didn’t watch the show will care, either.
Zoomers maybe? If you were 12 to 16 and watched Rebels, maybe now that you’re 20, this is a bigger deal?
My point is people who DIDN’T watch the show – and there are literally millions of people who consider themselves SW fans who didn’t – will not be invested in this one bit.
That’s fair. DX Disney Extreme of whatever dumbass name they gave it wasn’t exactly at the forefront of mainstream cable.
True. But there are also plenty of people who like SW and just don’t want to watch a SW cartoon. And maybe you can say, “but it’s great, don’t be prejudiced against animation,” but people are entitled to have that opinion.Rebels, although I liked (but didn’t love) the show was also pitched at a younger tone/audience, which also isn’t to everyone’s taste. Also fine for people to skip it for those reasons.But now as F&F continue cranking out content, they are making their shows more and more insular and deliberately less accessible to a wide audience. It would behoove them to remember that “The Mandalorian” was a crossover hit amongst people who are casual SW fans and just thought the idea of a space western with a cute puppet was a pleasant way to spend 35 minutes. It was simple and unchallenging and a very easy port of entry for those with only modest familiarity with the franchise.
If they had started with a show like Ahsoka, which all but requires you to be an expert in obscure corners of the lore, I don’t think we’d be on our 5th SW tv series at this point. I think the whole enterprise would have sputtered and died.
I kinda wish it was just a show about her doing her own thing. A show were she’s just wandering the galaxy, giving villainous characters a bad day while solving problems. One episode she runs into an rogue Inquisitor harassing a town thats harboring a force sensitive kid, the next she’s fighting a gang of slavers to rescue a Hutt that eloped with a fully sapient droid or something. No overall plot heavily tied into the fate of a character from another show. Need a cameo? Add an episode where she gets cornered by the Empire and only manages to escape after repairing an ancient droid to use it as a distraction only for it to turn out to be HK-47, who happily murders everything in his way before leaving to get upgrades and catch up on all the killing he’s missed offline.
So, you want Ahsoka to be S1 of The Mandalorian?
I mean… maybe? Maybe a bit faster paced. As much as people love Grogu, he basically turned the show into a toned down sci-fi Lone Wolf and Cub ft. Space Magic. Which isn’t really a bad thing so much as a repetitive thing.
Ahsoka’s story up to this point leaves her with a lot of freedom in terms of force use and plot points so doing S1 of The Mandalorian with a trained force user that doesn’t entirely stick to the old order’s beliefs and without a constant escort quest sidekick could result in something good.
Honestly, she’s a character with a lot of potential and it seems kinda wasteful to turn her solo show into a search for another show’s main character. Particularly when one of the most overused plot points in shows , that I’m going to assume they’re going to use is “We finally found this person who was hiding only to lead the villains directly to them”. Heck, it happened a lot in various Star Wars media already.
Never saw the cartoon. She was Anakin’s apprentice before he went to the dark side or something? That seems like a decent in; does that particularly matter or is it drowned under all the other lore we have to constantly deal with?
Yes Anakin’s apprentice, framed for a bombing and left the jedi after exoneration. Friends with Padame. Part of the resistance.
Move forward. Leave them behind. They will only slow you down.
I don’t mind cartoons or even the occasional anime if it’s recommended highly enough. But Star Wars cartoons have just never even so much as piqued my interest in any way. So when the big mystery to be solved is what happened to [Character I have never even heard of] my brain automatically turns off.Give me another original property in the universe done well, like Andor.
In the first Star Wars film, Obi-Wan tells Luke that Darth Vader killed his father. In The Empire Strikes Back, Vader tells Luke that he is his father.What Obi Wan told Luke was true. From a certain point of view.
Right? It’s actually an example of building on previous story/lore in order to heighten possibilities moving forward. It doesn’t explain or retcon; it recontextualizes.It’s why I thought “Rey is nobody” was an amazing story twist: I was interested to see where it took the characters. Bummer they did the “loose end tying” thing in Skywalker.
They backed up “Rey is nobody” at the end with Broom Boy. Anybody can be special! Not just nepo babies.But then a few people got upset when that meant that icky girls could be special too. So JJ tried to play the hits and make everybody happy, which didn’t work even a little bit.
You’re putting too much effort into JJ’s thought process there. He has always been the guy who runs on nostalgia, vague nonsense that doesn’t go anywhere, and easily predicted endings.
Though I honestly thought Rey was gonna turn out to be a presumably failed clone of Palpatine given how there was a shift towards Palpatine’s backup plans in other Star Wars media. Either that or another instance of the Force seeming to correct an imbalance like EP 1 Anakin was implied to be.
I’d pay money to know what JJ had planned when he first set all that up in TFA, if I thought for a minute he had anything figured out ahead of time.
I don’t think he had a plan at all but if he had stuck with the entire trilogy… Snoke would’ve probably had a variant of one of his pre-RoS indicated backstories. Before he got retconned into being a Sith alchemy creation, he was heavily implied to be a dark side practitioner unrelated to the Sith that was learning around the same time as Palpatine. I remember there was stuff on the wiki back then about him being a practitioner that Palpatine didn’t even learn about until shortly before the destruction of one of the Death Stars but now all that is there is post-RoS lore for him.
Rey being the child of someone important would be the generic Star Wars trope. Her being a clone (either failed/discarded or ‘freed’) of someone important would’ve been an okay twist of the trope. Even simply being another person suffering from Star Wars force-using protagonist syndrome (which makes them good at everything with minimal on screen training) it would’ve been good. Going from “Your parents aren’t special” to “You’re the daughter of a failed clone of Palpatine.” is just weird. Particularly because Snoke was going to have her killed in TLJ prior to narrating his own death. Snoke being a Palpatine puppet in that context just makes that whole encounter at the end of TLJ even messier.
Granted, the person who told her that her parents weren’t special was a nutcase who never completed his training from either of his teachers and was overpowered by her mentally the first time she figured out how to use the force….
I’m assuming Abrams have actually made the arcs in TLJ make sense though. For all the franchise tropes it subverted, none of the main characters made coherent decisions since the opening text. Instead of the main characters doing anything, cameo characters take over and do nothing but lecture the newcomers about how things really work. It was like the film existed to mock the franchise formula then
immediately embraced them at the very end because it knew it had to at
least pretend to care about setting up the next film.
Poe started off stupid, doubled down on the stupid, launched a mutiny
against a cameo character who was also stupid (but had an awesome death
scene), and immediately failed the moment Leia woke up.
Finn lost all the characterization he gained in the previous film. Finn and Rose’s arc went off on a war profiteering tangent that was totally out of place. They also got captured immediately because of parking. Cameo Del Toro just kinda, took over entirely. Also, Phasma somehow knew to steal Boba Fett’s mojo because he apparently wasn’t going to use it in is own series years later. She not only ‘died’ in a Boba-like manner, but managed to have crazy feats in extended media before her death that made her the sequel trilogy’s criminally underused character who was a legit badass but got treated like a joke on film.
Rey bailed on training (after like… a week max? Hard to tell because time just didn’t exist) to go save a guy she promised to murder the previous film. She also got captured immediately because her arc was a copy of Luke’s at the end of RotJ. Her storyline ended with… a fight against a bunch of random guys (who would do random weapon kata in the middle of a fight while waiting for choreography cues) where she was carried by her Vader equivalent and he immediately went psycho once his leash was broken.
Then there’s RoS… which honestly should’ve been split into two films even if it would break the trilogy format. A natural splitting point with a killer cliffhanger would’ve been Chewbacca’s apparent death and Rey using force lightning, setting the state for a slow reveal of her history that could actually make sense. This would’ve also left room for development of things like Lando’s missing daughter being that ex-Stormtrooper (since the film made it seem like he was hitting on her instead). Not to mention the Knights of Ren being an actual threat to provide some explanation for how Kylo managed to destroy Luke’s entire order (seriously, the films make it seem like Ben was the only order member at the time and the D+ shows make it seem like Luke was an awful teacher anyway). Hux could actually get time to shine since he was turned into little more than a joke.
TL;DR, aside from TFA which was actually a decent start even if it leaned heavily into nostalgia, episodes 8 didn’t seem to want to be part of a trilogy and episode 9 seemed like it didn’t want to do anything new/coherent/good. If Abrams (or the person in charge of overseeing the franchise) had set up an actual plan/roadmap to follow for the films we probably would’ve had consistency at the very least.
Though I’m left wondering what the hell is the point of Jedi force ghosts if they’re never actually helpful when it comes to important things. The legacy lore sometimes had them be useful as well as holocrons but the films just make it seem like the ghosts exist just give a thumbs up after the protagonist wins.
I still think Rey should’ve been a gender-swapped Luuke. It would easily explain why Luke’s/Anakin’s lightsaber would call to her, still tie into Palps cloning projects, and her being a “nobody” or Force royalty are both true, depending on your point of view. Plus it would’ve spared us having to ask “does Sheev fuck?”
Failed Clone Sheev does.
If Evil Lightning Wizard Sheev did, I think it’s been established that he’s not fond of non-humans. So he was obviously boring.
You’ve already put more thought into this than Disney asked anyone else to.
I’ve said it before, and I’m sure I’ll say it again, but it absolutely floors me that Disney spent 4 billion dollars on Star Wars (ok, technically Lucasfilm, but… c’mon), and didn’t bother to have anyone write down a plan for the three sequel films that could have fit on so much as a cocktail napkin. It’s just baffling to me.
“lens flare”
I mean, Finn is almost as literally a nobody as one can be in the Star Wars universe and instead of elevating him or telling a story about him becoming a Jedi, Rian Johnson backed up “Rey is nobody” with… Broom Boy.Last Jedi is overrated.
Please, his canon name is Broome Sweepo
I mean, Finn is almost as literally a nobody as one can be in the Star Wars universe and instead of elevating him or pursuing a story about him becoming a Jedi, we got… Broom Boy.Last Jedi is overrated.
The problem is that line is about as far as the credibility for SW can stretch. You hire seasoned British actors like Alec Guinness so they can obscure that you’re toeing that line, and he barely pulls it off. The Disney shows fly past that line on a speeder bike and head straight into a tree.
WELL FROM MY POINT OF VIEW THE JEDI ARE EVIL!
GEORGE LUCAS: You see, the most important principle of script writing is “tell, don’t show. “ If characters aren’t constantly saying what they’re thinking how else is the audience supposed to know what’s going on inside their heads?SCRIPT ASSISTANT: Actually, Mr. Lucas, I’ve heard it’s supposed to be the other way arou—LUCAS: Listen, kid, when you go out and create a billion-dollar merchandi–er, film franchise, you can tell me how to write.
What true is : a) Jedi are assholesb) Obi-wan is a Jedic)Therefore Obi-wan is an asshole
How many weeks will this show run? Wanna know so I can come back for the inevitable “Were Ahsoka’s Unsatisfying Answers Really Necessary?” article.
I expect those hot takes this coming Wednesday.
They’ll be two minutes after the episode releases and have spoilers in the headline.
The hot takes are already flooding the comments.You genuinely can’t have an AV Club article without a healthy dosage of fucknuttery, clawing for those stars.
Well the potential of Ahsoka, is far beyond that. Ahsoka is the launching pad for a JJ-free exit from the Skywalker saga into a true sequel for Star Wars in new waters.
If they blow this, they kinda blow the franchise.
8 episodes, according to Wikipedia, although the first two eps drop on Aug 22 so it’ll run for 7 weeks.
I am a huge fan of Rebels-I watched it all with my kids (Clone Wars too), and the series is just great Star Wars. I can’t wait for this.Also: Chopper (who is in the Ahsoka trailers!) is the best droid in Star Wars. Sorry R-2.
Yeah I’m there to see Chopper in real life, and for Ahsoka. The Ezra question is interesting, but I’m mostly interested to see what Ahsoka did after she left the Jedi order.
You. You are the only one in this comment section who gets it.
I watched Rebels over the last couple weeks. I wasn’t prepping for Ahsoka, just picking back up on a show that didn’t quite grab me the first time. Once it gets going (about two-thirds through the first season) it’s everything a Star Wars show should be. It’s funny, touching, and every adventure seems like something you’d want to see in a live-action movie.Also, Chopper is indeed great. The episode where he liberated AP-5 had me tearing up at the end…over a couple damn robots. That feat was accomplished in, what, 22 minutes?In short, I’m excited for tomorrow.
Ageed on all counts! Glad you got to watch it, it is really great Star Wars.
Star Wars doesn’t leave things open-ended. Like how in Rise of Skywalker Finn definitely told Rey whatever the fuck was so important than he had to spend the whole movie shouting “REY!” at her while she was trying to do other stuff. Oh wait, he didn’t? His character just smiles and stands there at the end? Dang.
No no no, he was desperately trying to tell her he was Force-sensitive, it’s obvious. It DEFINITELY wasn’t that he was going to say he liked her or anything, he just wanted to let her know when they were about to DIE that he was Force-sensitive. That’s something you need to let people know when it could be your last words.
The greatest force in the Galaxy Far, Far, Away isn’t The Force, it’s the forced ret-con explanation.
So unlike many recent Star Wars projects which put unnecessary focus on fan-favorite characters and franchise loose-end-tying, Ahsoka will put necessary focus on fan-favorite characters and franchise loose-end-tying. Got it!
The “good reason” for Ahsoka to exist should be that it’s a well-told story made by competent professionals. How it ties into the increasingly stupid lore of Star Wars is a distant second (or maybe third, or fourth).
It’s brought to you by the folks behind the Book of Boba Fett, so you know it’ll be great.
Ah yes, the show that had me and my family screaming “WHAT THE HELL IS HAPPENING”
I don’t know about you, but I always wondered if Tusken Raiders knew how to drive and, if so, who taught them.
QUESTION ANSWERED.
Our “tear hair out in screaming madness” moment came about two thirds of the way through the BOBF episode that was actually a Mandalorian episode, when we realized that we probably weren’t going to be seeing Boba Fett in this Boba Fett show. In retrospect we understand the production realities that ultimately led to it happening, but at the time we were like “why are we watching an episode about an unrelated character doing things that have absolutely no bearing on this show’s story?”
Nothing. Nothing was happening.
The Book of Boba Fett? Oh you mean The Mandalorian 2.5!!!
Honestly, they should have just done that. The series was a total bore until Mando showed up.
In Boba Fett’s defence, it’s probably the closest thing we’ll ever get to another Alita movie.
I’m still a bit shocked people knowing Robert Rodriguez was involved with BOBF went into it thinking it wouldn’t be “Once Upon a Time in Mos Espa”.
Yeah, I didn’t have a lot of hope for the premise of this article when clicking the link, but “because it explains what happens to that annoying kid character from that cartoon you watched three episodes of nine years ago” dipped under that exceedingly low bar.
“even Obi-Wan Kenobi was met with a shrug.”
“Even”???? Did you watch it? It was as bad as Book of Fett.
Second sentence: “The franchise actually has something of an over-explanation problem” Rest of article: “We really need this explanation though, thank goodness!”
My only issue with all these shows and the characters in them is there is large group of Star Wars fans that only watch the live action stuff. I am cool with using these characters but the shows need to make me care about them from their actions and experiences in the current show and not assume I watched 100 episodes of several animated shows. The current crop of Star Wars shows has been hit or miss with this. I feel like Mando has done a pretty good job with it but the Boba Fett show, not so much. Of course Boba Fett had a lot of issues
This has to be a joke, right? I’ve been a SW fan for almost 40 years, but I never watched The Clone Wars. I’ve never heard of Ezra Bridger, and this article almost single-handedly makes the case that Ahsoka isn’t going to matter to me.
Yeah, no. I will venture to say that “finding out what happened to Ezra” is NOT the driver to viewership you might think it is. I don’t really know that story nor am I invested in its resolution. And I think that puts me in the majority of Star Wars fans. I certainly don’t mind that there are properties that I have not seen, like Rebels. But if Ashoka is going to do well, it will need to make its own character exciting and interesting for her own sake. I enjoyed the first two seasons of the Mandalorian, but have not gotten around to the 3rd. I liked the first half of Book of Bobba Fett, but then it ran off the rails for me. Andor was fantastic. Hoping for more of that.
Pretty much all of this. ^
Rather than starting from the character and trying to create a story around them, Ahsoka is using the character as a vehicle to tell a story about something fans have been curious about since Rebels ended in 2018.How to Creatively Kneecap Your Show 101
With Boba Fett, while a lot of people wouldn’t care because he should’ve died there… the guy had a Jetpack and the Sarlaac was just established in filmas a massive open mouth with tentacles. The expanded media made it a far worse fate but that same media established that he escaped and had some pretty great stories afterwards. Book of Boba Fett didn’t do the years of EU hype for the character justice though. He went from basically being the John Wick of bounty hunters on paper to someone that is a few years from current Steven Segall movie character status.
With Ahsoka… she grew into a great character over the years. She’s portrayed by a good actress who seems to enjoy the character and is honestly someone I found more interesting than Ezra. Keep her away from Luke’s order since he already started making the same mistakes the prior order did and we already know how his ends. The major downside I see is that the sequel trilogy heavily implies that both Ahsoka and Ezra are dead by the time TFA starts. Unless a future show/film just establishes that they built lives outside of Empire controlled space and are busy training a new form of Jedi without the previous order’s baggage, it becomes hard to care about them despite wanting to know more. The same for that relatively new kids show about young Jedi children that Disney started. I know those characters are headed towards a bad end eventually. Why should I even give it a chance? These SW shows are all set in a time period where the only way for the force-using characters to survive is to basically bail on the galaxy and have adventures in the uncharted areas. I’d be all for more shows focused on Bounty Hunters and non-force users since they aren’t stuck on the same galaxy-wide space-magic ISP as their mortal enemies. Otherwise, lets go to a new time period. Preferably one either in the far past or far future so we aren’t stuck adhering to canon characters with pre-set fates.
“It’s an actual mystery that deserves an explanation.”No, it doesn’t.“What happened to Ezra and, by extension, Thrawn, matters.”It really, really doesn’t.
“this is not just a fuck-around vanity project for Ahsoka Tano.”You’re right there. It’s a fuck-around vanity project for Dave Filoni.
So, this is merely the “next season” of Rebels, then? Great news for Rebels fans, I guess, but I wouldn’t say that’s quite enough to justify this as a new series.The way it’s described here, this feels less like a new story with it’s own premise/setup and more like the Serenity to Rebels’ Firefly. A continuation, the modified wrap-up to a prematurely cancelled storyline.
This article misses a lowkey selling point in that all they said upstairs is true AND the franchise is throwing a tow cable to the Heir to the Empire published storyline. Plus this is Feloni really hanging his ass out there this time. (Speaking of Heir to the Empire – yoink!) He’s gambling a great deal of his banked cred from Clone Wars and Rebels. If this tanks, everything gets set back again. A whole table leg in the franchise collapses.My only (worry is too strong a word) … well I got an eye on: Ashoka was like a Star Wars dream – seriously like perfect version of Nancy Drew crossed with sword fighter – who got into some serious shit. But she was always up for it! She had maybe a good 20% “daring do” in her personality. Dawson in The Mandalorian played her more like Caine from Kung Fu. All-wise etc. A little too “Jedi” for my taste. But she did crack a smile while talking to Grogu telepathically. Which was great, but a little too subtle. If she had barked out a laugh and then covered her mouth and reigned it in quickly, while being in Grogu’s thoughts, that would have been a clearer line to her youthful personality.So I look forward to that – hints of a past that made her a badass, sure, but hints that she had friends… or if not, hints that she has ptsd.Now what I’d be pleasantly surprised for, if they can get there: Three Women Headlining a Star Wars!!! Fuck, guys. Give us a scene where they can talk shop. Like competent grownups can talk shop. And three real, pretty well defined characters with a rich history – and nobody can realistically start “shipping” any of them hooking up with each other. It may be disappointing for some, but these seem to me like really competent work-friends. Hera and Ahsoka aren’t going to fuck. There is no thruple going to happen here. Leave that to the pros over on Deviantart. Ahsoka and Ventress, sure, makes some sense in a twisted way. These women are too put-together for that kind of drama.
Look, if you saw the preview where Ahsoka and Sabine met and Sabine called her “Master” and you didn’t instantly believe those two had angry sex several times before this reunion, I don’t know what to tell you.
i believe its “derring-do”, sorry jus bein pedantic
I know you are right instinctively. Thank you for this correction. It’s probably something weird like “Heinrich Derring: inventor of the pirate shirt!”
that oompah loompah makeup ugh!
it would be kind of cool if she sang a clever little ditty after dispatching an opponent, usually referring to the poetic justice of their fate
I’ve waited five long years for this. Give me my lil orange chaos gremlin and his mom, and I’ll be happy.
Andor gave people what they didn’t know they wanted which might be even better.
“Ezra Bridger” makes me giggle a little. Ezra Bridger. Tee hee.
I feel like they can do better.
theres no way this show’s not gonna suck. But Rosario Dawson’s in it, so okay, i guess?
Maybe it’s because I’m not especially into Star Wars, but reading this article felt a bit like someone saying “You know what the reason to watch this new Star Wars show is? Unlike those other Star Wars shows, which entangle themselves in boring fanwank and pedantically filling in semi-obscure plot gaps from spin-offs that will go over the heads of most people and that only nerds actually care about, this Star Wars show will entangle itself in boring fanwank and filling in semi-obscure plot gaps from spin-offs that will go over the heads of most people but which I actually care about!”I mean, there’s pretty much no reason to watch this show offered which doesn’t revolve around a loose thread from a cartoon I’ve never really heard of. I’m really starting to think that Star Wars fans were the kind of kids at school who got beaten up because they kept reminding the teacher to give the class more maths homework.
I wasn’t the kind of kid who reminded the teacher they forgot to assign math homework, but I was the kind of kid who would get beat up for talking about Star Wars too much. For as huge a phenomenon as the movies were, there weren’t a lot of people that lived me who gave two shits about the old movies or the (at the time) new ones, much less all the expanded universe books I would read obsessively.It’s a cruel world that made fandoms like Star Wars mainstream and accepted, while simultaneously making Star Wars fucking suck.
Seems like a lot of older fans on this thread. Hahaha it’s extremely obvious that any negative views on this show are born from a place of jealousy because you didn’t want to watch a cartoon. Newsflash: the cartoon got really good, and this 90’s kid prequel fan is finally excited by Star Wars again for the first time in years.
I’m sorry to OT fans who feel alienated by this but some of the fandom is loving this.
People love Ezra that much? I didn’t watch the whole series, but he seemed like a bit of a whiny brat, and why they gave him command is beyond me.
The thing about Ahsoka is that it’s not really about Ahsoka.Oh, so exactly the same problem as Obi-Wan and Boba Fett then…
I hope this is good – it has the advantage of not being hobbled by the Skywalker story. But as Jen mentioned, Star Wars has a long history of getting people interested in unexplained mysteries and then returning to overexplain them in the dumbest and most boring ways.
“Unlike other Star Wars series, there’s actually a good reason for Ahsoka to exist”Too bad it took a massive turd on that reason, general sensibilities, and just about everything else it had going for it.The first two episodes are already Star Wars’ Inhumans and the series has a chance to go full-on Iron Fist or potentially even worse.Wow. I really was not expecting it to be QUITE so bad. Just… wow.
Ahsoka is a snooze-fest. As someone who never watched a frame of Clone Wars stuff, I found it dull as dishwater. Flat-footed in the writing and directing, and nearly devoid of humor. Other than Rosario Dawson and Ray Stevenson (RIP), it also felt badly cast.
Ahsoka is a snooze-fest. As someone who never watched a frame of Clone Wars stuff, I found it dull as dishwater. Flat-footed in the writing and directing, and nearly devoid of humor. Other than Rosario Dawson and Ray Stevenson (RIP), it also felt badly cast.
Ok.