Warning: The below contains full spoilers for Ahsoka Episode 4, which aired on Sept. 5 and is now streaming on Disney+.
Episode 4 of Ahsoka had multiple lightsaber duels, a droid fight, a high-stakes rescue mission, a big villain reveal, and a whole lot else. But its twist ending and Hayden Christensen’s emotional guest appearance are what really have fans talking in the aftermath.
The episode, titled “Fallen Jedi,” ends with Ahsoka (Rosario Dawson) being sent off a cliff after Baylan Skoll (Ray Stevenson) gets the better of her. It seems she could be dead, but we find her in what has to be the World Between Worlds, a sort of mystical crossroads of time and space. There, she has a massive reunion: one with her former master, Anakin Skywalker (Christensen), but a version of him before he becomes Darth Vader.
Given that this episode is a collision of both the various storylines Ahsoka has been building and of major Force powers in another dimension, it almost makes sense that Peter Ramsey, the Oscar-winning co-director of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, would be the one to direct “Fallen Jedi.” But according to Ramsey, the fact that he was given the episode that delves into another realm is mere serendipity.
“I told Dave [Filoni], 'man, you gave me a foolproof episode,’ ” he told IGN in an interview today. “I so lucked out because I got the one where all these different strands of the story kind of converge and it blows up. You'd have to really mess up in order for it not to be compelling in the end.”
Not only was that reunion a big one for fans, but for the actors as well, Ramsey said, speaking to what it was like to shoot that scene with Christensen.
"He’s a really sweet, low-key guy,” Ramsey said. “He was pretty happy about being there after all this time. It had a lot of meaning for him.”
As fans of The Clone Wars animated series know, Ahsoka and Anakin have a long, complicated history, going back to Ahsoka’s teenage apprenticeship in that series and leading up to their painful confrontation in Rebels. But again, this is a different Anakin, one before the events of Revenge of the Sith, and Ramsey had a certain strategy of evoking a tenderness out of Christensen.
“We just talked about what it's like for him to be seeing Ahsoka after all this time, that it's a reunion for them,” he said. “And I just told him, 'it's like you haven't seen your daughter in two years. She'd gone off to college and you're seeing her again and she's like a different person but still your daughter.' “
That note of direction, as Ramsey added, had a bit of extra meaning given the fact that Christensen has a young daughter of his own.
“On the Rosario side of it,” he continued, “she knew what it meant in the story and it was just about selling the idea that she was waking up somewhere really having no clue as to what was going on, not understanding 'am I dead? Am I alive? Am I where I think I could be?' And the way that expression changes at the very end when she sees him and says his name is so sweet and it was just like her turning back the person she was the last time she saw him."
In a nice callback to The Clone Wars, Anakin greets her by saying “hello, snips,” the nickname he gave her back in the day. I had a slight hunch that that opening line had a bit of Matt Lanter, the actor who voiced Anakin in The Clone Wars, in it, but Ramsey said that as far as he knows, it was just Christensen.
As for the digital de-aging of Christensen for the scene, Ramsey couldn’t speak too much to that decision, as he “hadn't heard too much talk about that when I turned over my cut,” and that it was something that happened in post via ILM’s visual effects.
“It was a decision made at some point. I don't know. Maybe it means something,” he guesses.
The Fight Before the Reunion
I also asked Ramsey about that confrontation between Ahsoka and Baylan, who’s played by the late Ray Stevenson. Among the many action sequences in “Fallen Jedi” was the duel between those two characters and in Baylan’s fighting style, Ramsey said Dave Filoni wanted him to feel like a “medieval knight,” welding a lightsaber modeled after a claymore – basically, a massive broadsword.
“It's a whole different style of fighting, and it really lends itself to Ray's physicality,” Ramsey said.
In regards to how Ahsoka and Baylan interact, Ramsey said they wanted to “approach this as two people who were beyond an egotistical need to prove how good they are.”
“It was really sort of, you know, a chess game as opposed to like, a frenzy or anything like that,” he said. “So really stretching out the time before they even strike a blow. That was the one where we were like, 'okay, we really want to dig into the Kurosawa bag for this. We're just gonna milk this as long as possible until, you know, we just start embarrassing ourselves, but really let them have a great standoff moment.’ It was all about them checking out each other's weaknesses and sussing out, figuring out who's gonna win this battle before it even starts. And letting it unfold from there.”
“Fallen Jedi” is a big episode for Stevenson and Baylan, revealing a ton about the character’s motivations and allowing for the actor to add quite a lot of complexity into his performance.
Remembering how Stevenson approached Baylan, Ramsey said, “the idea that he was evil or a bad guy was never part of the discussion.”
“It was just like, no, he has an agenda and he has a belief system that he's very rigorous and sincere about. And it's just a different one that the other characters have,” he said. “So in the way that Ray played him, he was playing a person who was at peace with his own decisions and had a real goal and a real philosophy and he wasn't gonna betray it. It wasn't, 'at last I can destroy the Jedi' or anything like that. It's what Baylan says in the episode: 'I see things differently than you do. I disagree with your way' and he actually does believe he's serving a greater good.”
What that plan ultimately is, however, Ramsey actually doesn’t know: Filoni is very secretive even with his fellow creatives, he noted, and not even Ramsey knows everything about where Ahsoka will go.
“There’s gunna be surprises for me down the line,” he added.
And Ahsoka Episode 5, which airs tomorrow night, will no doubt be a big one, as it’s directed by Filoni himself and is getting a limited theatrical release.
For more on Ahsoka in the meantime, check out our review of Episode 4 and the big Rebels Easter egg that fans think they’ve spotted. Plus, stay tuned for more from our chat with Ramsey, including that big Marrok reveal.
Alex Stedman is a Senior News Editor with IGN, overseeing entertainment reporting. When she's not writing or editing, you can find her reading fantasy novels or playing Dungeons & Dragons.
