This evening saw the debut of the Star Wars: Ahsoka finale (be it season or series– neither have yet been announced) on Disney+, and below are my recap and thoughts on this installment.
Star Wars: Ahsoka’s eighth and final episode of this season, entitled “The Jedi, the Witch, and the Warlord” (another tongue-in-cheek literary allusion, this time to the Chronicles of Narnia works of British author C.S. Lewis) is a pretty good distillation of the series as a whole– equal parts thrilling and frustrating. The chapter begins with Grand Admiral Thrawn (Lars Mikkelsen) and his troops having finished loading the mysterious casket-shaped cargo onto his Star Destroyer, just before Morgan Elsbeth (Diana Lee Inosanto) is given a well-deserved Force-magick promotion by the Great Mothers (Jeryl Prescott, Claudia Black, and Jane Edwina Seymour)… not to mention a sweet new sword. Then Thrawn orders two TIE fighters to go out hunting for Ahsoka’s (Rosario Dawson) Jedi shuttle, which is still ambling along with the race of nomadic turtle-crab aliens native to Peridea. At first I was confused why Ahsoka, her Padawan Sabine Wren (Natasha Liu Bordizzo) and their friend Ezra Bridger (Eman Esfandi) were still hanging out with the Noti instead of rushing into action to stop Thrawn from leaving the planet, but then it turned out that they were waiting for Ezra to enlist Huyang (David Tennant) in helping to build another lightsaber for himself– a weapon which just last episode Ezra claimed he didn’t need anymore.
Regardless, the TIE fighters attack from out of nowhere and knock the shuttle out of commission, so the three sort-of-Jedi set out to the Great Mothers’ castle on growler-back. And when Thrawn is alerted to their approaches, he of course orders the Star Destroyer (now retrofitted with the enormous hyperspace ring) to rain down hellfire on them, but being kinda-Jedi they all make it inside to square off against the Night Troopers, which as everyone predicted are pretty much zombie stormtroopers. This is a pretty cool fight scene, and it leads to another showdown between Ahsoka and Elsbeth, while Thrawn and the Great Mothers make their escape. Long story short, Sabine finally uses the Force to grab her own lightsaber during the battle, then to propel Ezra onto the Star Destroyer, while she stays behind to help Ahsoka finish off Morgan and the troopers. Elsbeth dies at Ahsoka’s blade and Tano and Wren are left behind on Peridea, having basically swapped places with the guy they came to rescue. Huyang swoops in at the last second in the very quickly repaired T-6, and the trio blast off into space, where they arrive at the Star Destroyer just in time to receive a dismissive farewell message from Thrawn (who compares Ahsoka to her master Anakin Skywalker) and watch the massive Imperial ship jump into hyperspace.
So Ahsoka and Sabine retreat back to Peridea’s surface, where they reunite with the Noti, and we get a very brief check-in with Baylan Skoll (Ray Stevenson) and Shin Hati (Ivanna Sakhno) as they continue their respective treks, with Baylan mounting a giant statue and following its gaze to a distant point on the horizon that’s blinking light, and Shin arriving at the raiders’ camp and flashing her red lightsaber blade. This is by far the most disappointing part of the episode for me, as now we know that Stevenson did not live to complete his role in the Star Wars saga. And a very intriguing role it was, which is another big part of the reason that hastily swept-under-the-rug element of the story feels so unsatisfying in this finale. I get that creator Dave Filoni must have been planning to follow through on Skoll’s quest in a future season of Ahsoka or other Star Wars media, but now the only two choices left are to reconfigure the narrative or (probably most sadly) recast the character.
Anyway, Thrawn and the Great Mothers make it to the Nightsisters’ planet of Dathomir in the main galaxy, and Ezra returns home to the New Republic fleet in a Night Trooper disguise, where he is reunited with General Hera Syndulla (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) and Chopper (voiced by Filoni). Then there’s a thoughtful final scene between Ahsoka and Sabine wherein the former expresses her fatalistic feelings that they’re right where they’re supposed to be, and the season ends on a shot of Anakin Skywalker’s Force ghost, happy with how his apprentice turned out– who didn’t predict that? I’d call this a fairly solid finale, directed by The Mandalorian’s Rick Famuyiwa, but as I’ve expressed elsewhere, the current volatile state of the entertainment industry makes me worry that Filoni and company are holding too much back for the sake of future stories that may or may not ever come to fruition. Maybe I’m wrong and Filoni (along with his collaborator Jon Favreau) will get to do everything they want in completing the “Mandoverse” over the next half-decade or so, but I’ve been burned too many times before to not stress about it. In the meantime, I enjoyed Ahsoka. On to Star Wars: Skeleton Crew and whatever wonders may come after that.
All eight episodes of Star Wars: Ahsoka are now available to stream, exclusively via Disney+.