Episode 3 of Ahsoka has dropped on Disney+ and I’m sad to report that this was yet another pretty big miss for Disney’s latest Star Wars series. Dave Filoni is popular across the fandom, but he seems to be struggling to make the transition from animation to live-action.
This should not be a huge surprise given the sorry state of The Mandalorian Season 3. I loved the first two seasons of that show, but Season 3 took everything that made them great and tossed it out the hatch.
In any case, I have some thoughts. Let’s dive right in, shall we?
The Good
- We finally got an up-close-and-personal look at the space whales—aka, purgill—as Ahsoka (Rosario Dawson), Sabine (Natasha Liu Bordizzo) and Huyang (David Tenant) make their escape from Shin (Ivanna Sakhno) and the Dathomir Nightsister, Morgan (Diana Lee Inosanto). The space whales are really cool! The special effects during this scene were great and this segment was the most fun I’ve had so far in this show.
- The hyperspace ring was neat. I like the idea of something so powerful you can hop between galaxies. That opens some cool possibilities, though I’m sad they didn’t accidentally get fired through the ring and end up in another galaxy altogether, propelling the plot forward much more quickly than I suspect we’ll get in the show.
- The dark Jedi Baylan (Ray Stevenson) only gets one scene this episode but he manages to convey more emotion and depth in that one moment—and in basically one phrase—than any of the protagonists the entire episode.
- Shin is also good still, though giving her Anakin’s “This Is Where The Fun Begins” headset is laying it on a little thick.
- Huyang is great. I would watch the Huyang and Chopper Show any day. Hard truths droid + maniac droid, yes please.
- I’m still making my mind up about Hera (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) and maybe I liked her here more because of how much I loathed the New Republic politicians she was forced to deal with.
- The planet that our heroes are forced to take refuge on looks like it could be a cool setting for the next episode, which hopefully brings us some good hunter-vs-hunted action in the mysterious forest.
- I liked Sabine more this episode than in the past couple, and I really like that they’ve made her bad at the Force and difficult to train. “Training and determination are what matters” Ahsoka says (I’m paraphrasing) and I can’t help but think this is a bit of ribbing at Rey’s expense.
The Bad
- Ahsoka. By far my least favorite thing about this show is Ahsoka. She has the personality of a wooden plank mixed with a dash of smug for good measure. She comes across as stoic and arrogant and is just a deeply unlikable protagonist. This is not how I remember her from the cartoons at all, and I’m really not sure why they’ve decided to make her this way.
- The training scene was lifted from A New Hope and even includes some of the same lines from the Luke / Obi-Wan scene, which is just a cheap trick designed to get superfans to post about it on social media and reddit. It’s lazy and irritating.
- Even the dogfighting felt like it was cribbed from the original films, but with Ahsoka in the cockpit instead of Han Solo and Sabine in the turret gunner seat instead of Luke. So basically A New Hope But With Girls. This fits the whole “The Force Is Female” trend but ultimately feels insulting to everyone involved. I don’t want A New Hope But With Girls, I want these characters to get their own thing, and I want Star Wars to have a good mix of male and female protagonists. Han Solo and Luke were way more interesting than these two (at least in live-action) and the actors were allowed to have personalities. The comparison is not flattering.
- Mon Mothma (Genevive O’Reilly) was so damn good in Andor it’s hard to watch her in this, with far worse lines and a character that lacks any of the grit and steel she exuded in that show. Again, we’re forced to compare the two here and the comparison is not flattering.
- The biology of Hera’s son (who she had with the still-not-ever-mentioned Jedi Kanan Jarrus is confusing to me. Why does this kid look so human? Is green hair the only trait he got from his mom? Maybe if you’re going to do interspecies breeding come up with better character design. I know this is a problem that began in Rebels but it’s worse in live-action.
- Where is Luke Skywalker? How does any of this show make any sense at all without Luke? Not casting Sebastian Stan as an older, wiser Luke and having him be part of all this (Luke was one of the main characters in the Thrawn trilogy) is a huge mistake.
Finally, the entire space fight sequence was just awful, perhaps the worst since the “we’re out of gas” space chase in The Last Jedi. Two squadrons of (admittedly very cool) enemy ships are blasting away at Ahsoka and co. and then Morgan orders the hyperspace ring to open up fire with its ominous-sounding turbo laser guns, but after lord knows how many direct hits they take they’re only down to 10% shields. One ship against six and a space station and they’re barely hurt. Even when they do take a direct hit it only stops them.
Yes, it stops them in outer space where there is no friction. They come to a stop defying all laws of physics. Then, Ahsoka goes outside in a space suit to fight off enemy space ships in zero gravity. She blocks blasts from spaceships with her lightsabers while doing the cringiest zero-G flips ever.
Here’s a thought: If your ship is literally sitting there in space not moving, the enemy ships could also just stop and aim at you and fire from all directions. They could fire at the ship, not the Jedi standing on the ship. This whole scene was so bad it defies words. Sabine manages to fix the ship (handy that the bad guys miss every shot and Ahsoka can deflect massive blaster shots that should knock her into the void) and then Huyang says some funny stuff to distract us from how bad it all was, and then space whales show up to distract us even more. If you turn off your brains I guess this could be good.
And no, I will not accept “It’s just Star Wars” or “it’s just a TV show” or “they have laser swords and the Force but you can’t suspend your disbelief for this” as excuses for all the bad writing and direction. The reason Star Wars became so popular in the first place is that there was a time when it was good. It was so good that even all the mishaps and nonsense we’ve gotten over the years, we still keep coming back for more, rolling the dice every time.
All told, this was a genuinely bad episode of Star Wars. So many of these problems are easily avoidable, too. Make the dogfight scene much shorter, have them take the hit and then escape through the whales with the last of their ship’s power. Cut out the goofy spacesuit fight stuff completely. Save Ahsoka being badass for some land battles next week.
You could also cut way back on the training segments with Ahsoka and Sabine, which were slow and boring but might have been really engaging with more economical storytelling. Do more with less. This was a short episode but it felt long, and the cool stuff was too little, too late.
Here’s to hoping that Episode 4 picks things up a bit, because we’re already almost at the halfway point and you could have pretty easily told all the actual story that’s happened so far in one episode if you cut out all the filler and tightened up the pacing.
Maybe next week they’ll give Ahsoka an actual personality. We shall see. What did you think of Episode 3? Let me know on Twitter or Facebook.
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