This column contains spoilers for Ahsoka.
It’s October, it’s the 13th issue of Streaming Wars, and I’m a huge horror nerd. As you’d expect, I’d previously planned on this edition to be focused on all of the delightful tricks and treats of the season. Unfortunately, I still can’t get the taste of Ahsoka’s season finale out of my mouth, so we’ll spend more time on the spooky stuff later this month. For now, the trick we’re going to talk about is the one the whole of the Ahsoka series played on the audience.
At the beginning of the season, I wrote Can Ahsoka Survive Being Rebels Season 5. Amazingly, that didn’t end up being its problem, at least not its biggest one. Ahsoka wasn’t hamstrung by being a fifth season of a show not everyone watched, or people not understanding some character motivations or who other characters were entirely. In the end, the problem was that whether it was called Ahsoka Season 1 or Rebels Season 5, it didn’t end up being a season of television at all. Instead, it was individual nostalgia plays sprinkled through long patches of nothing. And what makes that so frustrating is that creator Dave Filoni absolutely rocks at delivering impactful, emotional, engaging and most importantly original Star Wars stories. Or at least he usually does.
I want to be clear: I love the character Ahsoka. Hera Syndulla — criminally underused in this season — is one of the best contemporary Star Wars characters. I quickly grew to love Ezra Bridger after catching up on Rebels and meeting him in live-action in this new series. And there were even a couple of episodes of Ahsoka that really tugged at my Star Wars loving heart. The first two episodes really felt like Star Wars, which never stops being a great feeling. And yeah, of course the Anakin episode got me in my feelings (it’s the music, it’s always the damn music).
But getting me in my feelings is easy, as I’m secretly a huge sap (that’s between us), and television seasons have a job to tell a complete story regardless of whether or not they’re meant to lead into something else. Ahsoka doesn’t just not tell a complete story, but the fraction of the one it does tell just hangs in the air like the big bad thing they were trying to stop all season — Thrawn returning to the main galaxy — doesn’t matter at all.
Urgency Is Apparently a Young Rebel’s Game
By the end of the season, not a single one of our main characters addresses the fact that the very thing that everyone was trying to stop happened. Ahsoka (Rosario Dawson) is completely at peace, seemingly indifferent to the threat the galaxy faces – despite the entire motivation of her character has been to stop Thrawn since her introduction into the live-action stories. Then Hera (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) and Ezra (Eman Esfandi) meet up and neither exchanges a word about what his return means. The excitement these characters show to be reunited is important, of course, but not at the cost of engaging with your series’ own stakes. It would have been as easy as following up their tear-brimmed smiles with the dawning realization of what seeing each other again truly meant, or Ezra pointing it out to Hera who may not have realized that his return included the return of Thrawn.
Sabine (Natasha Liu Bordizzo) has made it abundantly clear that she’s willing to sacrifice a whole galaxy if it means getting Ezra back home, so at least one person’s reaction makes sense.
That’s it. We just… end there. Why? Well because we’re either setting up Dave Filoni’s movie or Ahsoka Season 2, two things that should be wildly exciting but now could end up in Star Wars purgatory with rest of the franchise’s many abandoned plans for all I care. Seasons of television are not commercials; they are foundations for what’s to come. But Ahsoka Season 1 can’t stand on its own because there is no foundation built, just a string of happenings until Ahsoka and Sabine are stranded and Thrawn’s back in the Galaxy Prime.
And if none of our primary characters give a shit about that, then why should we as viewers?
Let the Past Die. Kill It if You Have To
Nostalgia is great. I love nostalgia! But it’s meant to be a single tool in your arsenal rather than your only instrument. Skywalkers have been so aggressively shoehorned into so many stories they don’t need to be in that it’s getting to the point that I don’t even want to hear the name anymore. The galaxy is vast. There are now many of them, even. There are so many rich stories worth exploring and all Star Wars seems capable of doing is returning to the same well over and over again. I enjoy Luke! I adore Leia. Their stories are over. But not as over as their father’s is meant to be.
Ahsoka Tano is much more than her master. Why, then, are most of the only parts of the series worth engaging with when Anakin is around? It’s not that he shouldn’t have been in the series at all; there’s justification there, just as there was for young Luke and Leia to be involved in Obi-Wan Kenobi. But Ahsoka is meant to be Dave Filoni’s pride and joy! How is she out here playing second fiddle to a corpse? I don’t know what happened here, or how Ahsoka never ended up being a show about Ahsoka, but it’s a tremendous bummer and a rare miss from the creator.
A miss that could have been avoided if the title character was allowed to stand on her own two feet with a single shred of her personality. And before anyone goes blaming Rosario Dawson, we’ve seen her show emotion and be engaging on The Mandalorian. This isn’t a performance issue.
Fan Service Isn’t Art’s Job
Just to clear something up right out the gate: I love fan service! I love a little nerdy moment! They are great! They are fun! And, once again, they are tools. They are never, under any circumstance, meant to be the whole shebang. Star Wars lately? Nearly nothing but fan service. (Not you, Andor and a good hunk of The Mandalorian.) Even shows I enjoy like Obi-Wan Kenobi — bless it, it’s pointless, but I had a good time — are wrapped up in this never-ending cycle of “well, it’s what the fans want!”
The job of a creative isn’t to give viewers exactly what they want. The job of a creative is to give them what they never thought they could have wanted. Art is meant to inspire new worlds! To push boundaries! To explore corners of the galaxy we never could have dreamed of. But, ever since The Last Jedi dared to go outside of traditional expectations and an outcry arose from the worst corners of the fandom, Star Wars seems to have been utterly terrified to be new, different, or interesting.
The sheer mention of Tatooine should be exciting! Instead, it’s so overused that it just makes me roll my eyes at this point. It should be downright thrilling to hear mentions of Luke, but each time he gets shoehorned in, another hunk of that excitement gets sacrificed to the sarlacc pit.
The Book of Boba Fett, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Ahsoka… each one of these series had so much opportunity to push the boundaries of the universe in which they exist. That’s the whole point of introducing television to an existing film franchise! By adding longform storytelling into your sagas, you have the opportunity to explore parts of your galaxy that have never been touched or to give more meaning to an already beloved character journey. Instead, Lucasfilm has squandered most of their opportunities in favor of hanging out on Tatooine some more.
A couple of weeks ago, IGN’s Clint Gage said that Star Wars just feels like unboxing videos now, and I absolutely hate that he was right.
When Ahsoka was announced, I was ecstatic. A whole show just about our girl! She was going to find Thrawn and do whatever she could to stop him! Sure, she’d probably fail, but she’d fight, rally the troops, and fight again. She’d carve her own path outside of the shadow of her master and do everything she could to keep the galaxy safe.
Instead, we got a whole finale centered on stormtrooper zombies because oooh, ahhh, more toys.
Meanwhile, the last we saw of Shin Hati and Baylan Skoll — two wildly interesting new characters — was them just standing off in the distance kicking their feet, their arcs sacrificed in favor of undead soldiers. Not a moment of stakes acknowledged or reckoned with, not a single narrative arc fulfilled, no real climax to be had. Just a six-episode stepping stone to something else.
What a bummer.
Amelia is the entertainment Streaming Editor here at IGN. She's also a film and television critic who spends too much time talking about dinosaurs, superheroes, and folk horror. You can usually find her with her dog, Rogers. There may be cheeseburgers involved. Follow her across social @ThatWitchMia
