A short but sweet new episode of Ahsoka aired on Tuesday night, which was largely just one long sequence on a ship that culminated in a space battle with Ahsoka doing anti-grav cartwheels to cut enemy fighters into pieces with her lightsaber. Sure, whatever, I’ll allow it.
But what I appreciate the most about Ahsoka has nothing to do with her sick moves, nor even the main storyline of finding Ezra and Thrawn in another galaxy. Rather, I’m really interested in what the show is doing with Sabine Wren.
I know that Rebels ended with Ahsoka attempting to mentor Sabine in the ways of the force, only for that to end and just resume now, many years later. Sabine already has a lightsaber, one given to her by Ezra, but now we are running into a situation that I find really compelling. What happens when you try to train someone to be a Jedi who just sucks at using the force? As in, they cannot use it at all.
As ancient Jedi robot Huyang says, she is the worst candidate he’s ever tried to train, and she would not have been accepted as viable under the old ways. Here, Ahsoka makes the point that the old ways eventually ended up wiping out the Jedi, and that Sabine doesn’t even need to be a Jedi, just herself.
It’s an interesting concept to start with just someone using a lightsaber as a normal weapon with no force abilities. This reminds me of what happened with Finn in the sequel trilogy, where he picked up a lightsaber in desperation and fought with it. This led to a storyline being aborted where, despite not being a prodigy like Rey, Finn was supposed to be at least force sensitive and be trained down the road. That never happened, obviously. That feels like one mistake Ahsoka is correcting here (and Sabine is even less force sensitive than Finn.)
The second fumble being fixed is whatever happened with Rey. Love or hate The Last Jedi, a main point it was trying to make is that a Jedi could be anyone. The big reveal there was that the mystery of Rey’s parents was that they weren’t anyone special. That she was a soon-to-be-powerful Jedi even though she did not come with a dynasty of Jedi or Sith behind her.
Then, of course, that was all thrown out the window. The third film contorted itself to abandon that idea and came up with an absurd storyline that had Rey being Palpatine’s granddaughter, explaining her vast powers. In the end, she sheds that name and becomes an adopted Skywalker, continuing that legacy instead.
It is far, far more interesting to have Sabine be trained from scratch, with no force history, without even any force ability. It feels much more in tune with the nature of the force to say that it can be extracted from anyone with enough training, given that the force resides in all living things, as Ahsoka says. You should not need to be a Skywalker or Palpatine to have abilities, and while we know plenty of Jedi that were not that, it’s rare to see what is essentially a muggle trained to become a wizard (sorry, sorry, but it fits.)
To me, this is the best thing the show is doing right now. I don’t know if Sabine will ever move that cup, and I doubt even after training she’s going to be 5% of what Rey was by the end of the trilogy. But it’s a better path and a better story, that’s for sure.
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