Disney
Editor’s Note: This article will contain spoilers for the eighth and final episode of season one of Ahsoka
The season one finale of Ahsoka is here, and with it came far more than just the return of a widely-feared villain to the galaxy far, far away.
Despite the fact that episode 8, “The Jedi, the Witch, and the Warlord”, was meant to serve as the culmination of the story Ahsoka is telling, it ultimately left fans feeling like they watched anything *but* a conclusion, thus highlighting the major problem with the current era of Star Wars (and Marvel) storytelling.
Having not been able to ever immerse myself in Star Wars: The Clone Wars or Star Wars: Rebels, many of the storylines and characters in Ahsoka were largely new to me.
And still — despite some issues with its seeming refusal to fill in the gaps for fans like myself and my bemusement at the generally lighthearted manner in which creator Dave Filoni views the Star Wars universe — I actually and surprisingly found myself quite enjoying Ahsoka, particularly in the middle to latter episodes.
So, as someone who never dove into the lore of Clone Wars and Rebels, you could imagine my surprise when I learned that two of the key figures from those series, Ahsoka and Grand Admiral Thrawn, had actually never crossed paths before.
“Well,” I, and likely many other Star Wars fans thought to themselves heading into this latest episode, “That certainly sets up for an epic showdown in the finale.”
But strangely — that showdown never came. Thrawn escaped with nothing more than a radio transmission to his cosmically pig-tailed foe.
The villain winning in the Star Wars universe is certainly nothing new — Empire Strikes Back is so iconic because of it — but the villain escaping without any real resolution is an issue that’s become unique to the Disney era of Star Wars and Marvel content, which seems solely focused on stringing audiences along from one project to the next. Except for the finite likes of Andor, of course, which has been widely praised as the high watermark of the Star Wars shows on Disney+.
The ending of 'The Empire Strikes Back' famously left our heroes at a low point (via Lucasfilm)
This certainly isn’t new, however. Fans saw it before in The Book of Boba Fett, which not only zoomed through the narrative thread of Grogu training with Luke Skywalker (which originated from another show entirely, The Mandalorian) but also featured the reuniting of Baby Yoda and Mando, which is particularly bizarre when considering their split served as the emotional climax of The Mandalorian season two.
The Mandalorian, of course, is also the show that introduced live-action audiences to the character of Ahsoka in the first place.
The clash between hero and villain, light and dark, isn’t the only narrative cliffhanger that the season one finale left fans hanging on, as there’s also the return of Ezra Bridger to the main Star Wars galaxy and the stranding of Ahsoka and Sabine Wren in the new one that Thrawn just escaped from. Ezra, in my opinion — an MCU joke-quipping, plot-armor-wearing, aggressively blue-eyed staring caricature of a Jedi — is ultimately what undid Ahsoka, but that’s another article entirely.
While reports indicate that season two of Ahsoka is certainly being considered, it feels undeniable now that the Star Wars universe is angling towards its own take on Heir to the Empire, in which the likes of Ahsoka, Mando, Boba Fett, Sabine Wren, Bo-Katan, Cobb Vanth, uncanny valley Luke Skywalker, and more aligned to take down a resurgent empire led by Thrawn.
But despite how awesome — particularly for longtime Star Wars fans — that may sound, it certainly shouldn’t come at the expense of the dramatic closure of its other, current projects. A lightsaber in the hand is worth two in the temple, after all — a fact even further compounded by Lucasfilm’s recent history of struggling to get movies off the ground.
Ahsoka was fine, maybe even good. It could have been great had it only worried about Ahsoka and not Filoni’s Schrodinger’s Star Wars film.