Ahsoka Makes Me So Jealous of Filoni and Favreau

There will be spoilers ahead so don't complain about it, Phantom Readers.  Here's your spoiler space.

Ahsoka Tano

Hera Syndulla

After the long, looooong, dull run of Andor and ok season 3 of The Mandalorian, I was pretty excited for Ahsoka.  Finally a chance to wrap up the loose ends of Rebels like where Ezra and Thrawn went when the purr-gills (giant space whales) towed the Star Destroyer Chimaera away.  And catch up with Ahsoka, Hera, Sabine, and Chopper, only in live action instead of animation.

My initial reaction is that it's not perfect, but for fans of the animated series, your ship has almost literally come in.  And also fans of Star Wars who don't care about boring politics and bureaucracy and want some fucking lightsaber fights and space dogfights.  Yeeeeeeeah!

Like The Rise of Skywalker or Picard Season 3, you can make the charge that there's too much attempt at fan service.  While I still think The Last Jedi was a dumb, albeit nice-looking piece of crap, The Rise of Skywalker with its attempts to retcon was pretty bad too, only in a different way.  So I mostly agree with this meme someone posted in a Facebook group:

The Rise of Skywalker tried way too hard to please all the pissed-off fans after The Last Jedi.  It was trying to give people what studio suits thought they wanted and instead it satisfied almost no one.  Picard season 3 felt a little bit like that with some over-the-top fan service after a lot of people didn't like the second season--I didn't even like the first one.

In the case of The Clone Wars, The Mandalorian, and now Ahsoka, I don't think Dave Filoni and John Favreau are worrying so much about servicing fans in general so much as they're doing what pretty much anyone who was a kid in the late 70s/early 80s and loved the original movies would do.  Things like:

• Bringing Boba Fett back to life
• Showing Luke as a Jedi and not a whiny bitch
• Redeeming the prequel movies
• And now setting up an ersatz Heir to the Empire

I think they realize they were given a huge opportunity to play with the most awesome toybox in the whole universe and they're just going for it.  That makes me insanely jealous.  All I can do is scribble my little ideas on a stupid blog no one reads.  They actually get to bring their ideas to life!  Even if I don't always agree with everything, I admire that they're getting to do what so many of us fans never will.

I can't say this is a perfect show.  If you want to say Andor is better in terms of depth of story or such things, then maybe it is.  Andor was also boring as hell.  And you might say, "You just want lasers going pew-pew!"  And I'd say, "No, I want lightsabers going whoosh-whoosh!"  Honestly, I took inventory and realized the shows I liked the most were those that feature Jedi and Sith because to me Star Wars has first and foremost always been the Jedi and Sith and those freaking cool lightsabers.  I love that and I make no apologies.  I mean, come on, why do you think the Scarlet Knight has a magic sword that glows and cuts through almost anything?

So obviously I was set up to like this almost from the beginning because you have Ahsoka with her twin white lightsabers.  And then you have Sabine with Ezra's green saber.  And now two rogue Jedi--or whatever they are--with orange sabers.  They had never used orange before, but I did in a 1995 fanfic, so there.  That's 5 lightsabers right there!  Yeah, baby.

The first four episodes are a little slow at times as they maneuver the pieces to create the ship and recover the map to find where Thrawn and Ezra went.  The bad guys, led by a witch of Dathomir who I guess isn't Asajj Ventress in live action (Where the hell is she?  Google says she was killed off in a book.  Lame.), are trying to make a big hyperspace ring like the sort Jedi fighters used first in Episode II and then in The Clone Wars series.  Only this is pretty much a ship unto itself with enough power to make a long, harrowing journey.  Ahsoka, Sabine, and Hera are out to stop them, though Sabine is less sold on this as she wants to rescue Ezra.

I really ought to have rewatched the end of Rebels and such before this because I wasn't sure when Ahsoka took Sabine on as a student.  Or when Ahsoka met Professor Huyang (voiced by David Tennant), who's a droid who taught generations of Jedi how to build lightsabers and stuff.  They just sort of throw you into this and you either go with it or not, I guess.

It starts with Ahsoka doing sort of an Indiana Jones to try to get an artifact.  To try to decipher what the artifact means, she goes to Lothal, where Sabine is hanging out in Ezra's old lair.  Only then the rogue Jedi show up and take the artifact from Sabine and nearly kill her.  (Good thing she was just stabbed and not cut in half like Darth Maul or she'd have needed to get a set of robot spider legs.)

Once Sabine recovers, she and Ahsoka go to Corellia and like episode 3 of the latest season of The Mandalorian we see the problems in the New Republic in regard to former Imperials still in positions of authority.  It's sort of "the deep state" or really the problems that existed during Reconstruction and after in the South where you had to figure out what to do with all the Confederate supporters.

The fourth episode has Ahsoka and Sabine going to some faraway planet to track down the bad guys only for Ahsoka to seemingly die and Sabine to let herself get taken captive while giving the bad guys the map they needed.

The fifth episode is mostly a dream or vision or some such thing where Ahsoka confronts Anakin and we even get live action flashbacks to The Clone Wars!  It's a little weird then because they show Rex but only in his armor because I guess they didn't have money to deepfake Temura Morrison who was the live action clones, whereas Dee Bradley Baker voices Rex in animation.  While maybe that doesn't move the plot forward a ton, it's pretty awesome.  And I choked up a bit to think of the redemption this gave Hayden Christiansen.  See, you give the poor guy some decent material and he's not that bad!  I mean I'm not going to give him an Emmy but still, he was a lot better than in the prequels because he wasn't saying dumb things about sand for instance.

Young Ezra Bridger

I was worried with the sixth episode that they were going to string us along for 40-50 minutes and only show Thrawn at the end and probably not Ezra.  But Thrawn shows up about halfway through and then Ezra closer to the end.  Other than Thrawn looks a little paunchy in live action I don't really have any problems--so far.  It was cool they actually made the Chimaera look beat up and the armor of the Stormtroopers is all scarred and patched like with duct tape.  You know, how it should look when you're stranded far from home for a long time, unlike, say Voyager where most of the time the ship and everything looked pristine despite there wasn't a Federation dry dock for thousands of light years!  I wondered if they'd make Ezra all whiny like Luke in The Last Jedi and maybe have him lose an eye or two or a limb or something, but he seemed whole and not a whiny bitch, so woo hoo!  It was neat to see in the credits Enoch, Thrawn's troop commander with a gold faceplate, is played by Wes Chatham, who played Amos in The Expanse.  So you have a Dr. Who and an actor from The Expanse in a Star Wars show.  That's epic.

The start of the penultimate episode is a little sad when C3PO shows up as Leia's proxy during Hera's trial.  While it's neat to have Threepio there, it brings home the fact that those of us who grew up with the original Star Wars are never really going to get much of our favorite characters in these shows or movies.  We might get a deepfaked Luke here or there or a mention of Leia or Han or Lando, or a droid or Wookie who can easily be played by another actor or CGI, but the only real stories for those old characters are going to be in books and comics.  Oh, what might have been if Lucas hadn't waited until 2012 to sell out to Disney!

Anyway, the rest of the episode then focuses on Ahsoka, Sabine, Ezra, and Thrawn.  They pretty obviously rip off the asteroid field thing from Empire, complete with Huyang saying one of the lines from that.  We get to see the tactical brilliance of Thrawn that like Rebels and the books is only spoiled by the failures of others (notably Baylan Skoll this time) or just plain good luck for our heroes.  There's a rematch between Baylan and Ahsoka that isn't that satisfying and a rematch between Sabine and Baylan's apprentice (with Ezra chipping in) that also isn't that satisfying.  But it sets up the final episode where surely Thrawn will return to take command of the Imperial Remnant.

And yea, verily, it came to pass!  Someone online mentioned Infinity War and the final episode was sort of like that, only less contrived.  Anyone with a brain knew Thrawn would have to return to the galaxy far, far away to set up the movie.  The way it happens is pretty awesome, especially if you like zombies.  That's right, zombie Stormtroopers!  It's not unheard of for Star Wars to have zombies.  I read a book pre-Disney about that and in The Clone Wars the Nightsisters raised the dead to fight Dooku and his troops.  This was just an extension of that.

I really need to consult some superfan site about what some of the stuff at the end means.  What was all that stuff in Thrawn's ship?  Bodies to reanimate?  The big statues were two of the three entities from those Clone Wars episodes on "Mortis" where Anakin has a chance to bring balance to the Force or whatever and they were shown in paintings on Lothal and such.  I'm not sure what the significance is or the significance of the female one being missing.  Or the significance of the white owl Ahsoka sees.  I'm sure it's supposed to call back to something or other.

I did read one mostly clickbait article that did help somewhat.  The owl is a symbol of "Daughter" who is the light side of the Force on Mortis.  It's probably significant that the owl is alive while the other two are stone statues.  Or maybe it's not.

Anyway, I'm sure Ahsoka and Sabine are only stuck there until the purr-gills come back to take them home, probably for the movie, though maybe there will be a season 2.  The obvious problem now is that Ray Stevenson is dead, so do they recast his character or deepfake it or what?  Probably the biggest weakness of the final episode was it didn't include him or the other rogue Jedi until the very end and we still don't really know much about what their deal was.  It was great, though, to hear Thrawn's version of trash talk to Ahsoka.  "Long live the Empire."  And then his ship jumps.  Mic drop! 

(Fun Fact:  If you read Timothy Zahn's canonical novel Thrawn: Alliances, it features a young Thrawn teaming up with Anakin Skywalker to recover a Republic shield generator before Thrawn joined the Empire.  Later Thrawn worked with Vader on the TIE Defender project and I'm pretty sure figured out Vader's true identity.  This was sorta referenced in how Thrawn knows Anakin and by extension, Ahsoka.)

I really enjoyed the series, to the point that I made sure to watch that final episode the night it aired because I didn't want to wait.  That's the mark of a good show these days when you can wait days, weeks, months, or years to stream it.

Thinking about it a few times, I thought that what Filoni is doing now is not replacing the crappy sequel movies but it does help to explain some things that weren't really explained in the movies.  Such as why the capital of the New Republic seemed to have moved, why the New Republic was in general so ineffective in combatting the First Order, and the origin of the First Order.

A devastating war with Thrawn akin to the 90s books by Timothy Zahn would help explain these things.  I think it's in Dark Force Rising, book 2 of Zahn's trilogy, that Thrawn blockaded the capital of Coruscant with cloaked asteroids.  Something like that (or even striking Coruscant with the asteroids like rebel Belters do to Earth in The Expanse) would explain why there was a new capital to get blown up by Starkiller Base.  It would also explain why the New Republic was so leery to do anything about the First Order, to the point Leia had to start her own resistance group.  And the defeat of Thrawn and the Remnant would leave the door open for Snoke and the First Order.

So instead of trying to retcon those movies out of existence like naïve fans thought might happen, I think Filoni and Favreau and others are trying to build a more solid bridge to those movies and redeem them like they have the prequels.

My theory is that we're going to see Thrawn and the witches create an army of zombies instead of clones like in the original Zahn books in order to try to bring the Empire back.  But of course it won't work and our heroes will somehow stop him, but not until there's been plenty of damage.  Basically any character who wasn't in the sequel movies like Ezra, Hera, Zeb, Mon Mothma, etc could be killed off.

Anyway, at least for now I'm excited to see where this goes and really, I wish I could have the chance to do something like this.  [sob]