Ahsoka finale: The season ends without accomplishing much of anything

Two of the very first scenes in this week’s Ahsoka—the last of the season, if not also the series—showcase exactly what I think was one of the crucial missteps of this show: With the mysterious cargo fully loaded into his Star Destroyer, Thrawn is ready to leave the new galaxy and go back to the old one. But first, he and the Great Mothers decide to bestow upon Morgan Elsbeth a gift as a reward for making all of this happen.

The Mothers do some magic, with a lot of green light and what the subtitles called “whooshing” (a word that doesn’t really lend itself to ominousness), and when they’re done, Elsbeth’s face is scary looking and she’s been given a flaming magical sword referred to as the “Blade Of Talzin”—with the music dramatically ramping up to indicate that, even if you don’t know what this thing is, it’s obviously supposed to be a big deal. Crucially, though, it is not explained.

In the very next scene, Ezra is onboard Ahsoka’s ship building a new lightsaber as they all lazily march toward Thrawn’s fortress with the herd of nomadic Noti. Huyang, an expert in lightsaber construction, is initially very critical of Ezra’s approach until he explains that he was taught how to build a lightsaber by his Jedi Master, Kanan Jarrus. That helps Huyang understand, because he taught all of the Jedi Padawan how to build lightsabers back at the Jedi Temple before the days of the Empire, and he briefly reminisces about Kanan being a shy and clever student before presenting Ezra with a lightsaber piece that matches part of Kanan’s lightsaber.

But Rebels fans who know Kanan Jarrus (the father of Hera’s son from earlier in this show) will recall that Kanan isn’t his real name. Until Order 66 came through and the surviving Jedi went into hiding, he was Caleb Dume—which is the name Huyang would’ve known him by when he was a kid. It’s not a big deal— in fact it doesn’t matter at all to the plot, but in the span of a few minutes, Ahsoka is expecting you to recognize what the Blade Of Talzin is and ignore the fact that Huyang knows Kanan by the wrong name. It’s not all that different from Sabine and Ahsoka having a big falling out that happens entirely offscreen and is only off-handedly explained in this episode.

Up until now, this has explicitly been a show just for the people who will catch those things, who know the relationships between these characters as they were established in Rebels and Clone Wars, and I think that’s fine. The Clone Wars fans are some of the most dedicated fans that Star Wars has, since they stuck with the franchise post-prequels and all the way up through Disney’s takeover. But shouldn’t those people deserve something better than this? If you were really excited to see Captain Rex in live-action for five seconds a few weeks ago, then hey, that’s cool. But I think that’s ultimately all Ahsoka ever really had to offer.

I’m not even sure it’s worth breaking down the plot from this episode, because there was so little of it, but that’s why I’m here: Thrawn sends some TIE fighters to delay Ahsoka and the good guys, and with her ship temporarily downed, she joins Sabine and Ezra on a full-frontal assault of Thrawn’s fortress. He sends a bunch of Night Troopers to stall them further, and after Ahsoka gently reminds Sabine that she’s better with her blasters than a lightsaber, the trio kills a couple dozen bad guys with minimal effort.

Until the Great Mothers start doing some magic and the Night Troopers are resurrected as zombies! Everybody saw this coming as soon as Thrawn’s army was introduced, but I will say it was at least pretty cool in practice. I liked that the revived Night Troopers seemed mindless at first and then progressively became more Stormtrooper-like, and the shots of the heroes getting swarmed by a ton of Troopers in that narrow staircase were pretty neat.

Ahsoka eventually runs into Elsbeth and sends Sabine and Ezra ahead to catch the Star Destroyer before it can leave, and Elsbeth just lets them go. (The whole plan was to delay them, but whatever.) Ahsoka and Elsbeth fight while Ezra and Sabine battle some zombie Death Troopers, during which Sabine manages to use the Force to call her lightsaber to her hand. After all that, the Star Destroyer is basically gone, and Sabine convinces Ezra to use the Force to launch himself as far as he can and then she’ll use the Force (since she’s an expert now) to push him the rest of the way. He makes it, but before Sabine can join him with the same trick, Ahsoka arrives and is getting swarmed by zombies. Sabine stays behind to help her and they kill Elsbeth, then Huyang arrives with Ahsoka’s ship but they’re not fast enough to catch Thrawn, who taunts Ahsoka by talking about how similar she is to Anakin and then hyperspace jumps back to the regular galaxy.

So, Good Guys lose. Ezra made it out, but Sabine and Ahsoka are now trapped in the other galaxy forever—though neither of them seem too upset about it. Ahsoka says they’re where they need to be and that it’s “time to move on,” and…okay? Not exactly a compelling “end” to their story, but that’s it. Sabine senses something, and we later see Anakin’s Force Ghost watching over them, so that’s nice.

The episode ends with a montage of what everybody is up to: Thrawn is looking over his mysterious cargo (probably a zombie army, but we still have no idea), Ezra is reunited with Hera, Shin has joined the raiders on Peridea (even though she was supposed to rejoin Thrawn), and Baylan (wearing more capes than he was before) stands atop a big stone carving of an old man and then…doesn’t do anything.

Absolutely nothing about Shin and Baylan, two compellingly mysterious characters introduced in this series (the only two new characters introduced in this series?) was resolved, and it might not ever be resolved since Ray Stevenson died. The statue was of “The Father,” an ancient Force thing from Clone Wars that isn’t worth explaining here because the show didn’t bother explaining it, which just takes me back to my earlier point. They showed a thing from deep in the Star Wars canon without any sense of what it means in the context of this story, and if that’s good enough for you, then I’m happy for you. But I think it’s silly, and after eight hours or so of this show, it’s hard to feel like it’s much more than a big waste of time.

Or maybe it just feels exactly like what it actually is: a setup for Dave Filoni’s big movie that will tie together all of the storylines from these Disney+ shows (except for Andor, the good one). Ahsoka was the first one of these shows to have some version of an opening crawl, so maybe it should’ve had an ending one as well? It’s like the series was telling us, “Very little was accomplished here, but don’t worry: It will all eventually be addressed someday in a movie.” If you’re not setting out to tell a satisfying and complete story, you might as well acknowledge it.

Stray observations

• Maybe I’m wrong about the Kanan/Caleb thing, or maybe Lucasfilm figured it would be less confusing if Huyang just called the guy by the name more people know, but I don’t think he was ever even mentioned on this show before this point. So that conversation was just for Rebels fans, and Rebels fans are the ones who would know he changed his name!
• Thrawn’s whole plan to deal with the Good Guys was to basically give them busywork and stall them until he was ready to leave and could just abandon them on this planet, but as soon as he’s done loading his still-unexplained cargo into the Star Destroyer, he says “nah, let’s send soldiers after them.” If he wanted to kill them, he could’ve tried earlier.
• There’s even a moment where he justifies his refusal to underestimate Ahsoka by saying that his plans were foiled by a single Jedi once before, but he’s literally talking about Ezra there, and he spent 10 years or so letting Ezra live on this planet. Why didn’t he do anything until the last possible moment? This is the Empire’s strategic mastermind?
• Remember when Ahsoka and Sabine killed a guy who had a lightsaber and then just turned to dust? And they all reacted like it was a new thing but nobody ever talked about it again? Was everything that happened on this show just a dream?
• Would I have been more or less forgiving of all of this if Disney hadn’t announced Dave Filoni’s crossover movie already? I’m thinking more, if only because then it would’ve been more of a surprise just how little is resolved here.
• Either way, what a total, across-the-board bummer of a series.

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