‘Ahsoka’ Episode 3 Recap: In Space, No One Can Hear Your Awkward Pause

I love a good set piece. A Star Wars set piece? Hoo baby, get the hose. The attack run on the first Death Star, the asteroid chase, the Sarlacc pit, the Duel of the Fates, Obi-Wan vs. Jango Fett in the rain, the duel on Mustafar, every third episode of Andor: When Star Wars gives up the goods, man, it’s good!

Then there’s Ahsoka. Specifically, there’s episode three of Ahsoka, “Time to Fly.” Three things happen in this half hour of television: Ahsoka (Rosario Dawson) tries and fails to train Sabine (Natasha Liu Bordizzo) in the ways of the Force; Hera (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) tries and fails to secure fleet support for Ahsoka and Sabine’s mission; and Ahsoka and Sabine try and succeed to evade their Imperial loyalist pursuers. Two of those things are the kind of action-based scenes or sequences upon which Star Wars thrives. All of them are boring as shit.

I’m not quite sure where to place the blame for all that. The script, by showrunner Dave Filoni, reads like AI trained solely on other Star Wars shows and movies rather than on recognizable human interactions. Some of it is more or less plagiarized from past Star Wars productions: “I can’t see — how am I supposed to fight?” Sabine asks when a visor is placed over her eyes, in the exact words used by Luke Skywalker when he was similarly handicapped for training in A New Hope. It’s supposed to be a callback, but it serves as a reminder of better Star Wars stuff we could be watching.

The acting remains dire. Rosario Dawson’s preferred technique of simply not emoting at all reminds me of what Dr. Chilton says of Hannibal Lecter attacking that nurse in The Silence of the Lambs: “His pulse never got above 85, even when he ate her tongue.” I get that she’s supposed to be projecting serenity and conference, but it’s giving “I have a cross-country flight and I popped an ambien and half a xan 45 minutes ago.” Natasha Liu Bordizzo can’t seem to decide if Sabine is spunky and determined or just kind of tired. Mary Elizabeth Winstead gives that negotiation with Mon Mothma (Genevieve O’Reilly, completely wasted here) and her council of generic, comically out-of-touch senators her all, but there’s only so much you can do acting against holograms who stop speaking for five full seconds anytime you disagree with any of them. No matter who’s talking, the pausing between each line of dialogue is ridiculous, like something Mystery Science Theater 3000 would develop a running gag about.

The direction, by Steph Green, is flat and devoid of tension. The training scene is unnecessarily drawn out, like watching the Luke/Obi-Wan scene on the Millennium Falcon at half speed. The endless dogfight with the evildoers’ blandly designed spaceships — complete with zooming and laser-shooting sound effects so dull that you start to realize what a John Williams–level contribution sound designer Ben Burtt made to the original series — has no sense of danger or risk, no pacing, no escalation, and de-escalation set up in such a way as to maintain viewer interest. 

You get the feeling that the filmmakers have mistaken the length of time it takes to say or do things with gravitas. Take the final shot, a zoom on evil Jedi or Sith Baylan Skoll that lasts for seconds on end and communicates absolutely nothing. It’s just there to make him look scary, I guess? And it’s like, you already cast Ray Stevenson and put him in a cool black outfit. Your work is pretty much done. What is the point of this?

There’s one semi-nice moment of semi-wonder, when enormous space whales appear from the clouds during the dogfight. But they don’t actually do anything! They don’t swallow a ship, they don’t swat at a ship with their tentacles, and no one shoots at or collides with any of them. They’re just…there. And they’re gray, and they’re hidden in clouds, and they’re not a particularly interesting rendition of the awesome concept of freaking space whales. You practically have to try to mess that up.

Now to be fair, subsequent dialogue between Sabine and Ahsoka reveals that these critters played a role in the Rebels cartoon, back when their Jedi friend Ezra Bridger disappeared. Which is nice and all, if you’ve seen the cartoon. And to the show’s credit, I maintain that it really isn’t leaning on past knowledge of Filoni’s work as hard as you might think. There’s nothing I’ve seen so far that I found myself unable to understand more or less right away despite my unfamiliarity with the animated series. Even with the space whales, their size and grandeur speaks for itself. (Or would, if they were better executed. But you get my drift.)

Regardless, Ahsoka comes across as the bare minimum of Star Wars required to make Star Wars fans go “Sure, I’ll watch it.” It feels less like a television show, let alone a movie, and more like a Happy Meal tie-in toy. If you’re absolutely desperate to hold something from a galaxy far, far away in your hands, it’ll do in a pinch. But the better toys, and the imagination required to make them worth playing with, are found elsewhere.

(This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the series being covered here wouldn’t exist.)