In the production brief for the new live-action Star Wars series Ahsoka, its creator and writer, Dave Filoni, says you need not know anything about the goings on a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away to follow the story.
While that’s technically true, there’s a reason some are calling this show the fifth season of Star Wars Rebels.
Ahsoka brings back key characters from that animated gem, including heroines Hera Syndulla and Sabine Wren, now portrayed by Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Natasha Liu Bordizzo, respectively.
And the new series’ namesake, one-time Jedi apprentice Ahsoka Tano, was featured intermittently in Rebels. However, the co-creation of Filoni and the father of Star Wars, George Lucas, was introduced in the 2008 animated theatrical release Star Wars: The Clone Wars and became a fixture in the series of the same name that followed it.
The character, who long ago left the Jedi Order, made her live-action debut in the second season of The Mandalorian, where she was portrayed by Rosario Dawson.
Dawson’s incarnation is, of course, front and centre in this new Disney+ offering.
5 cute Star Wars creatures: Baby Yoda, Ewoks, BB-8 and more
Based on an advanced look at the two episodes debuting on the streaming service this week, Ahsoka is uneven – or unbalanced, to use a more Star Wars-y word.
Some of the good: The exciting action sequences that bookend the Filoni-directed first episode.
Some of the bad: All the standing around and talking that dominates the scenes between those exciting moments characterised largely by the clashing of lightsabres.
Much of that dialogue no doubt is designed to get viewers – especially anyone who didn’t watch Rebels – up to speed on who these characters are and how they relate to one another.
7 Disney quotes to add sparkle and imagination to your next essay
Plus, we learn that Ahsoka – the Padawan of Anakin Skywalker before he turned to the dark of the Force and became Darth Vader – had taken spirited Mandalorian artist Sabine on as her apprentice.
Refreshingly, that first episode, “Master and Apprentice,” begins in a VERY Star Wars fashion, with a crawl of text against a backdrop of stars – it’s helpful for viewers to know the show takes place after the fall of the Empire and the rise of the New Republic – followed by an overhead shot of a ship moving through space.
That ship soon is boarded by two cloaked figures, revealed to be Dark Side users Baylan Skoll (the late Ray Stevenson) and Shin Hati (Ivanna Sakhno), another master-and-apprentice pair. They have come to rescue the captive Morgan Elsbeth (Diana Lee Inosanto), a mysterious woman loyal to a highly effective Imperial military leader, the lost-in-space Grand Admiral Thrawn (a yet-to-be-seen Lars Mikkelsen, who voiced the character on Rebels).
As Rebels fans know, if Thrawn can be found, that means would-be Jedi Knight Ezra Bridger also could be saved. We briefly see Ezra (now played by Eman Esfandi) in a recording played by Sabine. He meant a lot to her and is the reason she is willing to set aside frustrations with Ahsoka to help her try to get to Thrawn before Morgan does.
There is, however, one more dark side user standing in their way: a masked, double-bladed lightsabre wielder referred to as Marrok (Paul Darnell). One online theory as to who exactly he may be is a lot of fun.
For the most part, fun is lacking in “Master and Apprentice” and in the Steph Green-directed second instalment, “Toil and Trouble,” which takes Ahsoka and Hera to a planet familiar to long-time Star Wars fans for a bit of detective work.
The casting of the Rebels characters is solid, with Bordizzo (The Voyeurs) and Winstead (Birds of Prey, 10 Cloverfield Lane) feeling like extensions of the characters voiced, respectively, by Vanessa Marshall and Tiya Sircar.
On the other hand, Dawson’s Ahsoka continues to feel almost distractingly different from the Ashley Eckstein-voiced version. Nevertheless, Dawson (Rent, Dopesick) is a terrific actor and was desired by many fans for the role, so you can’t complain too much. She simply brings something different to Ahsoka.
These first two episodes of Ahsoka, which account for a quarter of the season, are a little slow but hopefully will prove to be effective table setters for a thrilling adventure. After all, we found the first episodes of Andor to be downright dull, only to conclude after all 12 first-season episodes had debuted that it was the strongest Star Wars work of the Disney era.
Here’s hoping Ahsoka has a similarly rebellious streak.
