Ahsoka recap: Why teach someone who doesn’t want to learn?

Last week, I said that I don’t really think it’s a flaw in Ahsoka that so much of the show hinges on the audience being familiar with characters and plot points from across the entirety of the Star Wars universe—or at least the Disney+ version of it, since I don’t think there’s really been anything from the actual movies so far. Why? Because it’s nice to reward fans who have stuck with this stuff for so long with a show that is so explicitly catered to them. That being said, this episode featured a scene where the New Republic leadership told Hera that they have no interest in helping her with her quest, which basically means that the larger Star Wars universe couldn’t care less about any of this, and that…is kind of deflating.

Because yeah, all of the big things happened in the movies without Ahsoka or Sabine or Thrawn (because as terrifying as he is to everyone, he did miss out on the whole war), and I feel like Ahsoka is falling into a common “expanded universe” trap where the events have to matter enough for the story to have stakes but they can’t matter so much that they impact the main-canon events.

The question of why any of this matters (beyond the fact that we all now know these Disney+ shows are building to an Avengers movie) hangs over Ahsoka, especially in this episode, where we spend a good chunk on Sabine’s Jedi training even as David Tennant’s Huyang (who remains perfect in every way) points out that she would make a terrible Jedi and that the old Jedi Order would’ve never accepted her. Plus, Sabine says she can’t feel the Force and can’t do Force things like Ahsoka can, which is obviously just to set up her eventually using the Force in some way, but why is she being trained as a Jedi in the first place if she hasn’t shown any aptitude for it and—evidently from the off-screen backstory stuff last week—doesn’t seem particularly interested in learning?

At least in this episode, Sabine’s crummy training session (where Ahsoka literally does the “make the person wear a helmet so they can’t see and are forced to tap into the Force” thing from A New Hope) is a setup for Ahsoka to come to a realization about listening to her student more and giving her what she needs rather than pushing things on to her (like, say, being a Jedi). After a very long trip through hyperspace, Ahsoka and Sabine end up at the big ring that the bad guys started building in the previous episode.

As Huyang does some scans to figure out what it is, enemy fighters start swarming Ahsoka’s ship. One is piloted by Shin, who seems to be wearing one of those Jedi headsets that people would wear in the prequel movies (a nice little aesthetic touch), and another is piloted by the mysterious Marrok (the masked henchman who carries an Inquisitor lightsaber). At first, Sabine has trouble hitting the enemy ships, because Ahsoka refuses to communicate with her, but after some prodding from Huyang, she decides to let her “I’m a Jedi master” ego slide and treat Sabine more like a partner than a dumb student who can’t even use ancient magic to move a cup.

They take out most of the ships, but by then they’re close enough to the ring (I believe they called it the Eye Of Sion last week) for Morgan Elsbeth to use its big cannons. She disables the ship but fails to fully destroy it, so while the fighters swoop in for the kill and Sabine tries to get it running again, Ahsoka puts on a spacesuit and climbs out onto the ship’s wing so she can battle the fighters with her lightsabers. I like how this sequence is sort of presented as a badass show of just how awesome Ahsoka is only for it to not really work at all, with her managing to destroy only one ship and getting knocked off into space in the process, but Sabine manages to save her and the sneak down to a nearby planet.

On the way down, the pass by a big herd of tentacled space whales, which are later identified—in cause you don’t know how Rebels ended—as Purrgil. As Huyang alludes to, Purrgil are creatures that can travel through hyperspace, and they were a key part of how the heroes defeated Thrawn (and lost Ezra Bridger) in Rebels. In other words, Ahsoka and Sabine are on the right track.

The episodes ends, oddly, with Baylan Skoll just kind of looking cranky—and that’s it. Did Ray Stevenson have something in his contract requiring the show to put him in every episode? If so, good for him.

Stray observations

• So, after initially dismissing him/them as a random goon in the first episodes, it’s pretty clear that Marrok is important in some way. They clearly have some plot armor after that fighter battle, and they speak with a heavily distorted voice. Plus, Baylan and Shin were created for this show, so it’s not like anyone’s hands were tied by canon with the other villains, so there’s no reason for this person to be in a mask unless it’s important that they’re in a mask. In other words, this is probably somebody. I’m not entirely sure it would make sense for it to be a brainwashed Ezra, which seems to be the common theory, but it might be worth noting that Eman Esfandi’s live-action Ezra wasn’t really in any of the trailers beyond the little hologram cameo we already saw.
• I loved the lightsaber training game that Huyang was putting Sabine through at the beginning of the episode. Felt very video game-y in a fun way. I’d spend a ton of money on that at a Dave & Buster’s.
• After a lot of scanning, Huyang eventually determines that the big ring is a hyperspace ring, which is a thing that smaller ships (like Jedi starfighters) used in the Clone Wars so they could go into hyperspace.
• Hera and Kanan’s son Jacen popped up briefly in this episode. I liked the little meta gag of Hera initially saying that he’s just hanging around somewhere on the ship and she doesn’t know where, which seemed like a nod to people who would’ve questioned why he wasn’t there in the first few episodes. But then he showed up for real!