‘Ahsoka’ Episode 6 Recap: Thrawn Again

Fine, I’ll say it if no one else will: If you’re so stoned that you start feeling the Force flow through you, Ahsoka ain’t half bad. I’m not even going to explain any further just yet. I’m simply going to let you look at this shot from the very first scene of this week’s episode:

Did you ever see passable CGI space whales undulating through a hyperspace rainbow vortex, man? Did you ever see passable CGI space whales undulating through a hyperspace rainbow vortex…on weed? It’s fuckin’ crazy, man! It’s like you are a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away!

Oh, wait, that reminds me. This episode of Ahsoka also ends with an honest-to-god character in an honest-to-god Star Wars show actually saying the words “A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…” And the moment I realized what was about to happen, I groaned, “Oh, no.”

This, surely, is the nadir of creator/writer Dave Filoni’s Funko Pop fanservice. I refuse to believe it can get any worse. Why not have a cantina band strike up the Star Wars theme while you’re at it? Why not reveal that everyone in the galaxy gets their news from large text crawls beamed across the middle of space? Why not reveal that the God of this universe is actual, physical George Lucas?

Why not? Because it sucks, that’s why! Because it’s the worst kind of fan service, what’s known in the wrestling biz as a “cheap pop” — the equivalent of sending John Cena out to the ring to say how great it is to be back in Pittsburgh!!! You’ve shattered the fourth wall, and for what? So David Tennant can force the single worst line in the history of the franchise out of a mouth that has otherwise been doing solid work in a thankless role, so that the people watching this crap on the Disney Channel 2.0 can ooh and ahh and point at the screen and yell “He said the line!”? 

I could spend the rest of this review dunking on this one decision and it still wouldn’t be what it deserved. Terrible. A firing offense for everyone involved except Tennant. Execute a metaphorical Order 66 on Lucasfilm execs before it’s too late.

Anyway, returning to my weed thesis, I think it may be the only way to get used to the soporific rhythms of this show’s dialogue, which is still being delivered by every actor involved at .5x speed even with TV veteran Jennifer Getzinger taking Dave Filoni’s place the director’s chair. 

That’s right: Jennifer Getzinger, aka person who directed the Mad Men episode “The Suitcase.” From “That’s what the money is for!” to <sigh> “A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far way…” as an actual line of dialogue…jesus, what a brutal transition. 

Seriously though, compare and contrast Don Draper’s interaction with Peggy Olsen in that episode to what ought to be an equally emotional moment, albeit one with a different tenor: Sabine Wren’s reunion with Ezra Bridger, the Jedi friend/presumable love interest she thought was dead for an unspecified number of years. They just kind of stare at each other and smile from a distance for a while before having the least dramatically or passionately staged hug you’ve ever seen on TV. (At least Getzinger had the good sense to turn this into a gag by cutting to a shot of Ezra’s admittedly adorable little green turtle-bug friends through the humans’ legs.) There’s just nothing here, nothing in the performances of Natasha Liu Bordizzo (the show’s weak spot, though Diana Lee Inosanto is sleepwalking into second place in the Morgan Elsbeth dark witch role) or Eman Esfandi that conveys the turmoil and relief they must be feeling at this moment.

It’s not just emotionally unrealistic, it’s narratively unrealistic too. “How did you get here?” Ezra asks, understandably, given that he’s in the middle of the outer-space Scottish Highlands in an different galaxy on a planet run by evil wtiches. “Let’s not talk about that,” Sabine says in her usual monotone, and that’s pretty much as far as it goes. I get that she’d like to just focus on being happy she found him, as she puts it, but I feel like “I traveled here with a Dark Jedi and a Nightsister in a massive vehicle capable of retrieving Grand Admiral Thrawn to restart the war, and in fact it’s Thrawn who told me where I could find you” is relevant fucking information, Sabine! Capture the moment for the Gram in ten minutes, after you’ve explained that you’ve sacrificed the galaxy so you could find your crush!

Normally I wouldn’t belabor plot holes, a practice I generally find unfair where science fiction is concerned. Science fiction without plot holes would just be science fact; the holes are often where the fiction is found! Provided you’re getting enough compensatory value out of the project — ideas, performances, images, good storytelling, etc. — such holes can and often should be overlooked. Like, if you’re complaining that you can’t hear explosions in space while you’re watching the attack run on the first Death Star, you shouldn’t be allowed to watch movies anymore. That’s why I’m not going to dwell on the star whale graveyard orbiting the planet, which is full of bones despite the fact that bodies don’t decompose in a vacuum. It’s a cool visual! You can already hear explosions out there! Chill out.

But the plot holes that concern me here aren’t tied to the “science” part of “science fiction.” They’re holes in the “fiction” itself, character-based actions that simply make no sense.

The clearest example is what leads to the whole Sabine/Ezra reunion to begin with. Sabine is brought before Grand Admiral Thrawn (Lars Mikkelsen, playing the blue-skinned, red-eyed being like a cross between Peter Cushing’s regal Grand Moff Tarkin and Ian McDiarmid’s unnervingly weird Emperor Paplatine). Thrawn is informed of the bargain she made with Baylan Skoll in exchange for her cooperation with the map to his hideout. He agrees to honor the bargain and provides Sabine with equipment, a mount, and his intel on Ezra’s whereabouts, and allows her to go free and find him. He then dispatches Baylan and his apprentice Shin Hati to follow Sabine until she finds Ezra, then kill them both.

Okay, here’s the thing. Several things, in fact.

• If they have intel on Ezra’s whereabouts and want him dead, why not go find him and kill him themselves? If Thrawn was concerned about sending his men against a Jedi, well, that’s what aerial bombardment is for.

• At any rate, now that Baylan and Shin are in town — a pair of quasi-Jedi mercenaries, basically tailor-made for this mission — why not cut out the middle man, execute Sabine, and have them find and kill Ezra on their own?

• Or, as Thrawn himself points out, why not just bug the fuck out of there and leave Ezra and Sabine stranded on this faraway planet forever, where they are doomed to live alone and die the moment Thrawn and company take off for the galaxy we know and love?

I don’t care that this is all away to make Thrawn look dishonest; if you couldn’t figure that out already you should see a doctor. I don’t care if it’s a way to show Sabine’s competence in dealing with some cool grunting red-clad raiders; it’s a nice little fight scene, with a streak of dark humor — one raider is shown reeling from the slice down his mask she gave him, while another gives up and runs away after she chops his weapon into pieces like that kid in the House of Blue Leaves in Kill Bill, its obvious inspiration — but fight scenes are thick on the ground in any Star Wars project where lightsabers show up. I don’t even care how cute Ezra’s turtle-bug buddies — okay, I do, they’re really really cute. 

You see what I’m saying, though. The whole storyline exists because it’s a storyline that needs to exist for the show to function. It’s as if Filoni came up with this plot point, but instead of actually working backwards from it to do what was required to make it make sense, he just got so excited by putting his old action figures back together that he winged it. The result speaks for itself, and has nothing to say.

(A brief aside: Obviously, Sabine and Ezra’s reunion means more if you’ve seen the Filoni cartoons they came from, and I haven’t. But I insist that the show’s problem is not that it’s continuing a story from the animated series and thus if you haven’t watched them you won’t get it. I haven’t watched them and I’ve understood every word and every storyline so far. It’s the execution that’s the problem, not some fundamental underlying issue with using these characters at all. Just want to make it clear I’m not holding that against the show, because I haven’t found that to be the source of my frustrations at all.)

But let’s get back to my original point: Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em. Or pop an edible, wait a couple of hours, and tell me Getzinger doesn’t absolutely nail how creepy this ancient planet is, with its towering, sinewy statues of hooded, screaming figures, or its massive brutalist temple, or the terrifically designed and costumed Great Mothers helping to free Thrawn from his prison.

Or this freaking guy, a stormtrooper with a golden mask in the shape of an actual human face, like something out of John Boorman’s Excalibur.

That stuff looks cool as hell! In fact, for at least three episodes in a row, Ahsoka has been full of stuff that looks cool as hell, even if (as with the dang whales) it drags every cool visual it has out past the point of diminishing returns, like Bilbo Baggins’s proverbial butter scraped across too much bread. By all means, get yourself in a state of mind where you can appreciate the weird drugginess of it all. Just don’t expect much more out of it than that.

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

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.