‘Ahsoka’ Episode 7 Recap: Reunited and It Feels So Bad

Throughout the Ahsoka journey — and what a journey it’s been, am I right? — I’ve insisted that the people who say its problem is assuming everyone’s familiar with the Dave Filoni cartoons to which it’s a direct sequel have identified the wrong problem. This is Star Wars after all, and you don’t exactly need to consult Wookieepedia to figure out which characters are good, which characters are bad, and which one-sentence-long backstories and motivations have driven them in those directions. I didn’t need to be familiar with Ahsoka, Sabine, Hera, Ezra and the gang to figure out they were Rebel soldiers and friends, that Ezra was lost in some big victory, and that the loss has haunted the otherwise basically genial survivors. You don’t need to know anything beyond that.

But occasionally, you do need to feel something beyond that, and that’s where the two most recent episodes of Ahsoka have failed. That includes this episode, inexplicably subtitled “Dreams and Madness” despite the total lack of dreams or madness in the episode itself. Sure, you can understand that Sabine’s reunion with Ezra, Sabine’s reunion with Ahsoka, and Ahsoka’s reunion with Ezra are big deals. But unless you spent several years watching some genuinely hideous computer-animated children’s cartoons, I’m not sure how writer-creator Dave Filoni expects you to actually feel about this stuff. I’m not sure I feel anything at all, other than boredom.

I already pointed out how in the last episode, despite boasting the director of one of the most acclaimed television episodes of all time (Jennifer Getzinger of Mad Men’s “The Suitcase”), the big reunion hug between Sabine and Ezra is staged and filmed with all the focus, passion, and intensity of a couple smooching on their way out of an Arby’s in the background of a selfie you’re taking. 

If anything, the reunion between Ahsoka, Sabine, and Ezra is worse. For one thing Ahsoka and Sabine hug first, though it’s been a couple of days since they saw each other while Ezra has been gone for apparently years. Second, Sabine tells Ahsoka she thought she was dead. But!

a) At no point did Sabine relay this information to Ezra, instead allowing him to describe the situation between herself and Ahsoka as “complicated,” even though “I joined forces with agents of the Dark Side after watching Ashoka fall to her death at the hands of the same man I came here with willingly” is actually fairly straightforward; 

b) At no point does the indescribable intensity of finding your best friend and mentor alive after a disaster you were sure killed them manifest itself in the almost confrontationally bad performance of Natasha Liu Bordizzo as Sabine, or in the “hey, maybe someone should wake her up and let her know the camera is rolling” delivery of Rosario Dawson as Ahsoka. 

I know it’s a cheap shot to compare any of this stuff to the films that started it all, but anytime Luke, Leia, Han, and their gang are separated, their reunions are joyful and sweet, the site of people who really really like each other being thrilled to see each other safe and sound despite the odds one more time. This? I don’t know what this is, except bad.

I’m belaboring this point in part because there’s barely any plot to summarize this week. Back on Coruscant, I believe, General Hera survives a disciplinary committee driven by the most transparently “I’m secretly working for the Imperial Remnant” New Republic senator you could possibly imagine thanks to the timely intervention of that star of the silver screen C-3PO (Anthony Daniels). (Wow, C-3PO, back in Star Wars! Great get, Filoni!) Bearing doctored evidence from an unseen Princess Leia (thank god, given what they’ve done with her poor brother over on The Mandalorian), Threepio gets Hera off the hook for her insubordination. Mon Mothma is wise to the ruse but trusts Hera and Leia more than she trusts her own people, something actor Genevieve O’Reilly does her best to convey with what’s given to her, but with which she could make a feast if it had been written by Tony Gilroy and company over on Andor. 

Meanwhile, in (sigh) a galaxy far, far away, rogue Dark Jedi mercenaries Baylan Skoll and Shin Hati track down Sabine and Ezra, in a caravan of truly adorable pillbug-shaped vehicles driven by their little turtle-bug companions. (You’d be amazed how far creating really cute critters gets a Star Wars project; I’d have very few nice things to say about The Last Jedi if it weren’t for the porgs.) 

Surprisingly, Baylan presents the assassination mission to Shin as a sort of graduation present, leaving it up to her to dispatch the Jedi as he pursues his own path toward ending the cycle of Dark and Light rule of the galaxy forever.

Most of the action in this episode is of the mindless pew-pew variety: enemy fighters shooting at Ahsoka’s ship in a tensionless chase sequence, say, or Ezra and Sabine exchanging fire from their pillbug wagons against raiders on rat-horses racing alongside them — an excitingly conceived sequence to be sure, harkening back to Westerns of Hollywood’s Golden Age the same way the original Star Wars tapped into Flash Gordon serials, but one with almost no real choreography or structure to speak of. In both cases the blaster/laser sound effects are cheap-sounding and unimaginative; they sound like Space Invaders. It ain’t good enough.

Throughout it all, Thrawn watches from his command headquarters, dressing down Morgan Ellsbeth for her failure to kill Ahsoka and for Baylan’s departure from the field, relying on the Great Mothers to locate Ahsoka when his instruments and pilots cannot. In the end he calls off the reinforcements he sent to help kill the Jedi, leaving Shin on her own; she wisely cheeses it than try to fight three Jedi or Jedi-adjacent warriors at once. 

Ostensibly this is done because in a few minutes he’ll be leaving this galaxy, stranding the good guys here for good. To paraphrase Fargo, I’m not sure I agree with you a hundred percent on your police work there, Thrawn. If this was the case, why risk your men at all? Let the long-lost friends find each other out there; while they’re busy doing that, you can simply leave and solve the problem. If you insist on risking your men, which you’ve done, why let their lost lives go to waste? Bombard the living snot out of the area from the air and have done with it. Use your Star Destroyer, use every fighter and bomber at your disposal, use the Great Mothers’ magic, but just do something to finish the job you insisted people try to do for what amounts to no reason whatsoever! Hmm, methinks this admiral isn’t so grand after all.

Sure, there are highlights; on this show there always are, which is part of what makes it so frustrating to watch. Once again, Baylan and Ahsoka have an impressive lightsaber duel, staged very deliberately to resemble Kurosawa samurai battles. (There’s even a Japanese flute in Kevin Kiner’s music for this fight if you couldn’t make the connection already.) Among all the reasons it’s a shame Ray Stevenson died, it’s really terrible we won’t see more of him in this role, to which he brings so much weariness, gravitas, and quiet self-confidence, the “quiet” aspect of which is a very rare trait among Force-wielding bad guys in this universe. 

Seeing Stevenson’s imposing face lit up by the red and white glow of their lightsabers as they duel is the best special effect in the whole episode — not the lightabers, the face. Digital artists working in one of Disney’s (hopefully soon to be unionized!) CGI sweatshops could toil for hours and fail to come up with anything as convincingly intimidating as that guy looking dead serious while trying to kill another character. It’s a face that makes you want to reconsider your life choices before it’s too late.

Ahsoka’s most consistent strong point has been serving up visuals that look peeled from a prog-rock album cover from the 1970s (remember what I said about this being good stoner TV?), and that continues here, I’m happy to say. The ep opens with a nice shot of a sci-fi cityscape, the kind of basic building block of worldbuilding one appreciates in this sort of thing. And dig this shot of Thrawn and Morgan and a cool evil droid standing around as the Great Mothers recreate the cover of Dark Side of the Moon in their search through a star map for Ahsoka’s coordinates. I don’t have anything particularly intelligent to say here (when do you ever??? hyuk hyuk) — it just looks really cool, man. 

But for every well-staged lightsaber duel or well-placed shot of science-fantasy spectacle or adorable little alien critter, there’s just…well, slop. Sabine and Ezra’s fight with Shin and her red raiders is a sloppily choreographed mess, a mixture of guns and lightsaber and half-hearted judo throws and even more perfunctory Force-only telekinetic combat that properly highlights none of these individual techniques. Anakin Skywalker shows up as a hologram episodes after he appeared as an actual sentient ghost; it’s so obvious this order should have been reversed that I want to write an angry letter. The dogfights remain a series lowlight. The dialogue, from Thrawn’s nonsensical brilliant-strategist clichés to Ezra’s godawful concluding line — “Guys, I’m getting a feeling: I think I might be going home after all” — feels like an extended prank someone’s pulling on Kathleen Kennedy. And the shot of the space whales remerging from hyperspace, their tail-tentacles elongating ridiculously from the deceleration, looks truly ridiculous, like the cheapo CGI you’d see in a 15-second commercial for a stretchy rubber children’s toy called Tenta-cools or something that you’d see 20 times while trying to watch an Adventure Time marathon on Cartoon Network. 

So while it’s nice that at this point we can add Lars Mikkelsen to the Ray Stevenson/Ivanna Sakhno column of “actors who understand the assignment” thanks to his gleefully menacing performance as Thrawn, that’s pretty much the only thing of lasting value to be found here.

Which brings me back to my original point. No, I haven’t seen Clone Wars or Rebels, and so, thanks to Ahsoka’s incompetence, the reunions between those characters don’t hit very hard for me. But don’t the people who have seen Clone Wars and Rebels deserve better too? Stuffing your pre-used action figures in the equivalent of a wrinkly Ziploc bag and tossing it in their general direction, then expecting them to treat it like Christmas morning, is disrespectful to them as both viewers and fans. Sure, their attachment to the characters does at least half your work for you, but they’re not getting paid to make this stuff work. You are. They deserve better. The rest of us do too.

This piece was written during the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike, after the victory of the WGA in their own strike over similar issues. Without the labor of the actors currently on strike, the series 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.