Well, here we are. Fifteen years after first appearing as a supporting character in the Clone Wars cgi movie, Ahsoka Tano is now starring in her own live action series, Ahsoka. After watching the two premiere episodes, I saw that Andor, not Ahsoka, was trending on Twitter with people either observing how much better Andor was or people complaining about people saying Andor was better. So, yeah, Ahsoka seems to have hit the ground stumbling.
A lot of reviews say it's slow and that it's almost incomprehensible if you haven't watched Star Wars: Rebels. I'd say, yes, both are true. Though I will say that one of the main problems with Obi-Wan Kenobi was that it lacked the sense of awe and majesty you get in classic Star Wars movies. So in that sense, I appreciated Dave Filoni's slow and almost ceremonial pace at times. But the guy just can't write. I used to say he couldn't write female characters and his male characters are a little more nuanced but I think, at the end of the day, he's just all around a bad writer and the slow pace makes it all the more excruciating to experience.
I don't mean he's a bad writer in the George Lucas way, like Lucas imitating the stiff style of Flash Gordon dialogue. Filoni has no emotional connexion to the characters so it feels mostly like he's treading water, waiting for something to come to him and nothing does.
The first scene is kind of cool if intensely stupid. A New Republic ship comes across a strange vessel asking to board and issuing an outdated Jedi code. Instead of even opening a channel to get a visual or even aural impression of the strangers, the captain says he'll "call their bluff" and invites them aboard. Of course, they come aboard and use red lightsabres to slaughter everyone.
Cut to Ahsoka herself, now unlocking a puzzle in an ancient temple of some kind. This is another in a series of attempts to bring an Indiana Jones-ish vibe to the Star Wars universe and I'm going to quote from my review of a Bad Batch episode that attempted something similar with similarly unimpressive results:
The target of her tomb raiding in the episode, the "Heart of the Mountain", doesn't have a lot of lustre, literally and figuratively. We know it's something from before the time of the Republic, we know it's on a planet in an uncharted system. But why is it legendary? We find out it serves a function, but what do people believe it does? A legendary artefact ought to have legendary powers. The idol in Raiders of the Lost Ark was clearly a religious symbol, representative of a god. The sort of Incan trappings of the Idol and temple carry associations for the audience, mixing the known and the unknown.
Part of the reason artefacts have a mystique in tomb raiding stories is because there's a mysterious culture around them. Whether it's the cities in H Rider Haggard or the cults and books around Cthulhu in Lovecraft, there's a sense of unknown culture. In Star Wars, which Lucas created as a playground where you could "other" aliens who didn't even exist, you should be able to have screaming weirdos trying to thwart Ahsoka, some evidence of some deeply strange or hostile society around the artefact, several steps removed from, but still implicitly connected to, the object. Without it, the sense of mystery around the object is absent and it just feels, as some reviewers have said, like a video game.
For some reason, Ahsoka's compelled to work with Sabine Wren to decipher the map she obtains. Why, in the whole New Republic, Sabine Wren is uniquely qualified to decipher the thing is never made clear. Nor is it revealed why Ahsoka and Sabine split up. Sabine had had a go at being Ahsoka's padawan but we're told, but never shown, they had some terrible clash of personalities that compelled Sabine to give up padawaning and searching for Ezra. Seems like a pretty important character development point to just omit, doesn't it? I guess it's stashed somewhere with the reason Nick Fury and Captain Marvel stopped looking for a new homeworld for the Skrulls.
We catch up with Sabine on her speeder, now played by the gorgeous Natasha Liu Bordizzo. Even the chaste Dave Filoni can't resist tracking a shot up her thigh. She's speeding away from a ceremony where she's set to be honoured, her absence somehow only discovered at the very moment the master of ceremonies announces her name. So two starfighters are scrambled apparently to arrest her?
This is what you do when someone doesn't show up to a ceremony in her honour? During the ceremony?
We also catch up with Hera, my favourite character from Rebels entirely because of Vanessa Marshall's performance. Now she's played by the ridiculously miscast Mary Elizabeth Winstead. But this is only the latest in a series of badass roles (Kate, Birds of Prey) Winstead has insisted on playing despite being totally wrong for them. She's reunited with Rosario Dawson, her costar from Quentin Tarantino's Death Proof, a movie where Dawson and Winstead were both perfectly cast. Dawson as a plainspoken, charismatic chatterbox and Winstead as the pretty, naive airhead. She's run so far away from that, it reminds me of how Edward Norton tried to play only suave romantic leads after being perfectly cast as the dweeb in Fight Club. People have suggested Winstead got the job because Ewan McGregor is her husband.
And, yeah . . . Rosario Dawson is wasted here. She would've been great as the young Ahsoka Tano, energetic, clumsy, and charismatic. But Dave Filoni has taken one of the most creative performers of dialogue alive to-day and cast her as a statue. Incidentally, this extends to her fight choreography, which is lumbering and limp.
But at least none of her fights end like the duel Sabine has with dark Force user Shin Hati (Ivanna Sakhno). When I saw Sabine getting stabbed through the gut, I laughed out loud. It seemed impossible that they would do this again after a widespread critique that too many people were surviving lightsabre skewerings. It's gone from critique to meme, even. It's truly astounding that even Disney would be this stubbornly idiotic. But. Here it is. You could argue Shin stabbed her slightly to one side of Sabine's gut, potentially only destroying her intestines, but that only begs the question, "Why didn't she finish her off?" No-one even seems surprised Sabine survived. My revenge headcanon says she has trouble with bowel movements from now on.
Do I have any positive comments? Sabine looked great, at least before she cut her hair. Why did she have to cut her hair to wear a Mandalorian helmet? We saw this kid on The Mandalorian, right?
I get why Disney is hyping Dave Filoni. They want a credible successor and Filoni has a rabid gang of fans. Filoni certainly likes to hype himself, and he'll bend the truth to do it, like when he tried to take credit for Darth Vader's hallway fight in Rogue One, which people actually involved with the film quickly denied. An Ahsoka series could have been great if he'd gotten some of the writers actually responsible for Ahsoka's development on Clone Wars, like Paul Dini, Henry Gilroy or, hell, why not Katie Lucas? George Lucas created Ahsoka because he was thinking about his relationship with his daughters and it turned out Katie actually wrote some pretty good episodes of Clone Wars, including the memorable Dathomir arcs.
Well. Maybe it gets better next week. Ahsoka is available on Disney+.
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