Below you will find my recap and review for the second episode of Lucasfilm’s live-action series Star Wars: Ahsoka, which premiered alongside the first this evening on Disney+. The title of this installment is “Toil and Trouble,” a quote from William Shakespeare’s iconic play Macbeth, and likely a reference to the Witches of Dathomir, ancestors of the character Morgan Elsbeth on Ahsoka.
What does it take to get killed by a lightsaber through the torso? We saw Darth Maul use that particular maneuver to eliminate Jedi Master Qui-Gon Jinn in Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace, but Sith Inquisitor Reva walked it off in last year’s Disney+ series Star Wars: Obi-Wan Kenobi, and now the young Mandalorian Sabine Wren (played by Natasha Liu Bordizzo) has survived her encounter with Sith-in-training (is that what she is?) Shin Hati (Ivanna Sakhno)– though Sabine needed a medical droid and a hospital bed to recover from her injury. Regardless, episode two of Ahsoka opens with the title character not too happy that her former apprentice took the map leading to Grand Admiral Thrawn and subsequently got jumped by Hati and some deadly HK-series assassin droids. But lucky for her, Wren reveals that one of those droids might still be hanging around her apartment in Lothal’s old communications tower. Sure enough, when Ahsoka goes to investigate, she’s attacked by the HK unit as well, but manages to decapitate it pretty much right away, preventing it from setting off the nuke embedded in its chest. She brings the head back to the always-handy Sabine, who is able to very narrowly avoid it exploding in her hands in order to retrieve the information from its circuits that it originated on the planet Corellia– once home to Han Solo, and the location of the New Republic’s shipyards.
So Ahsoka meets Hera Syndulla (Mary Elizabeth Winstead)– who was listening in on the droid decoding via hologram– on Corellia, where they interrogate the factory’s foreman Myn Weaver (guest star Peter Jacobson from House) about just what kind of operation they’re running. This investigation eventually leads to the discovery that enormous hyperdrive engines from decommissioned Imperial Super Star Destroyers are being shipped off to some unknown location at the behest of investors who are in fact not the New Republic. So Weaver gets arrested while Hera and that impudent droid Chopper (voiced, as always, by series creator Dave Filoni) take the Phantom II shuttle to plant a tracking device on the escaping ship carrying the hyperdrive, and Ahsoka battles Hati and another HK droid in the shipyard. The villains escape, but at least our heroes have another potential lead to follow. Meanwhile, the fallen Jedi Baylan Skoll (Ray Stevenson) meets with Magistrate Morgan Elsbeth (Diana Lee Inosanto) to plug their newly acquired map orb into a starting point at a temple on the mysterious planet Seatos. This also happens to be where that engine is headed in order to complete construction on an enormous hyperdrive ring that will presumably carry Elsbeth to Thrawn’s location somewhere out there in another galaxy, where he was carried by those pesky Purrgil at the end of Star Wars Rebels.
So this episode ends with Sabine giving herself a haircut and agreeing to step into the position of Ahsoka’s Padawan learner again, though Huyang (David Tennant) says that Wren has less aptitude for the Force than any other apprentice in the Jedi Order’s history. There’s also an intriguing moment where Elsbeth communicates with her Dark-Jedi underlings (I’m really not sure what to call them yet) via a form of communication that looks quite different from the holograms we’re used to seeing in live-action Star Wars media. I have to wonder if this was Morgan using her Nightsister magic or something else entirely; hopefully we’ll find out in future installments. All of these characters are heading for the same location and are destined to collide with each other again, likely very soon– but interestingly, Baylan seems hesitant to kill Ahsoka, making note of how few Force-users remain in the galaxy. Overall I thought this was another very strong episode of Star Wars: Ahsoka, though perhaps not as thrilling as the premiere. The diversion to Corellia was an interesting one, in that it explored the politics of the average citizen after the fall of the Empire, but it did also feel a little bit like delaying the inevitability of our protagonists traveling to wherever Thrawn is hiding out. The action scenes here are quite well-choreographed, and I’m still really digging the performances of the main cast. And now that general viewers have caught up to the point that attendees of last week’s fan event had already seen, it’s great that all Star Wars fans are finally on the same page. Let’s count down the days until next Tuesday together.
The first two episodes of Star Wars: Ahsoka are now available to stream, exclusively on Disney+.