Ahsoka goes on a journey through her past and emerges with a new outlook (and new color scheme) in Ahsoka episode five, “Shadow Warrior”, written and directed by Dave Filoni. 

Austin Gorton: Adam! I see you’ve followed the map I left in an orb buried in a temple activated by a stone plinth, and found your way to this galaxy far, far, FAR away. 

Adam Reck: Hi Austin! Yes, I played Indiana Jones and solved the rubik’s cube to meet you here. And well, it had to happen at some point: Ahsoka finally got interesting enough to get me to talk about it! I don’t think I’ve talked Star Wars with you since… Andor?

Austin: The World Between Worlds connects all Star Wars series, Adam! Let’s run our mugs through the digital de-ager and dive in!

A Couple Decades Ago, In a Battlefield Far, Far Away

Austin: Let’s begin with the biggest, buzziest stuff: It’s Ahsoka and Anakin! Doing stuff together again! In live action. All else aside, this was just really cool to see, another one of those “my younger self wouldn’t believe me if I told them this happened” moments. Is it fan service-y? Sure. But hey, I’m a fan! I can only complain so much about being served. 

Adam: For Clone Wars fans, and I hesitate to call myself one since I really skipped around on that series, this is what they’ve been waiting for. We’ve seen Ahsoka fight Darth in Rebels, but this is an excuse to pair these two back up again in a way that hopefully builds character and allows us to revisit the past of a beloved show. 

Austin: Anakin — whether he’s a Force Ghost, a manifestation of the World Between Worlds, or simply a representation of Ahsoka’s internal struggle — says he’s there to finish her training. As is so often the case in Star Wars, this involves teaching via lightsaber, as the pair begin to duel. It ends when Anakin slices the pathway out from under them, sending Ahsoka tumbling down into…the Clone Wars, and the body of her younger self. 

Adam: Great casting of Barbie’s Ariana Greenblatt as the young Ahsoka. Her voice matches just enough with Ashley Eckstein, she has the right height against Anakin, she really embodied the character in a way that made it feel like the Clone Wars version of the character. Similarly, how good was Hayden Christensen in this episode? He had to portray so many versions of his character and he did so pretty seamlessly. 

Austin: Once again, with all due respect to George Lucas, one has to wonder if the problem with some of the performances in the Prequels was with the direction (and/or the script) and not the actors. In addition to Hayden doing a great job seamlessly shifting between different “modes” of Anakin, I thought the de-aging effects looked really good. But you have a much more discerning eye for that stuff than I do; how’d they work for you? 

Adam: I recently watched the new Indy and could not deal with the CGI de-aged Harrison Ford. I thought whatever they were doing here was subtle and worked really well (his changing hair for starters). Anyone who’s seen Shattered Glass knows Hayden Christensen can act. I’m glad he’s getting another shot at the character here. 

Austin: Manifestation Anakin takes Ahsoka on a greatest hits tour of her Clone Wars past, going from the Battle of Teth (or Ryloth) to the aftermath of the Battle of Ryloth to the Siege of Mandalore (from the final season of Clone Wars, events for which Anakin wasn’t present because he was busy turning into Darth Vader). Along the way, he tries to teach her that while the Jedi role in the war was necessary, she is more than a killer, as he is more than a killer, and much of him lives on in her. 

Adam: Y’know, you say manifestation, but I really would like to believe this is Force Ghost Anakin trying to help out his Padawan. The flickering on and off of him being Darth, his final, more evil Revenge of the Sith look point to this being something more abstract, but I love the idea that even in death Anakin could still be a conflicted character wrestling with his past. 

Austin: I do like the idea of this being some active vestige of Anakin trying to help his former Padawan, and not just a complete manifestation inside Ahsoka’s head. He does seemingly reference a line from Return of the Jedi, which Ahsoka wouldn’t directly know about. But it’s definitely ambiguous – as is whether or not they’re actually IN the World Between Worlds, or if that setting as well as all the others is just inside Ahsoka’s head. But I don’t mind that ambiguity; it ultimately doesn’t matter that much where exactly they are and what exactly Anakin is. 

Adam: After a final saber fight where Ahsoka bests her master, we watch as the path rises up until Ahsoka is returned to the real world. How she didn’t drown is beyond me. I’m not a Togruta biologist. 

Austin: Maybe a (space) wizard did it. 

The Sea is a Desert of Waves

Adam: Planetside, Hera’s really testing the patience of Captain Carson Teva who would really like to keep his job being on all the Star Wars shows and thinks it’s pretty obvious the bad guys killed Ahsoka and Sabine and got away. Huyang backs up that account when Hera finds the sad-droid mourning on a cliff (It really is amazing how they fit David Tennant into that droid suit!). But not so fast! Hera’s son Jacen is the son of a Jedi after all, and the little force sensitive guy hears something in the waves – Lightsabers! Oddly, non-force sensitive Hera also seems to be able to concentrate real hard and hear them? 

Austin: Remember what we learned in episode three: anyone can tune into the Force, if they try hard enough! 

I loved the bit where Huyang explained Jacen’s whole deal to a confused Carson, who responded with the equivalent of “okay, ‘tevs” before stomping back to his X-wing. It was an effective bit of exposition for anyone not familiar with the end of Rebels that still stood on its own thanks to the joke at the end. 

Adam: This bodes well for Sabine who really wants to use the Force but can’t quite move her mug (I identify with this! I too want to move my mug with my mind!). I think it’s safe to say we’ll see her using the Force before the end of the season, even if it’s just a little bit. And look, if we aren’t ever going to see “broom boy” from the end of Last Jedi again, Jacen might as well be able to vibe with the mystical/magical. 

Austin: How did the cutting back and forth between Ahsoka/Anakin and the “real world” work for you? I can’t help but wonder if the Ahsoka/Anakin stuff would have hit even harder if we stuck with them for the entire episode and just bookended it with Hera stuff on Seatos. At the same time, I kind of liked how the cutting back and forth felt like “traditional TV” (which is something too many of these streaming series try to avoid feeling like). And I wouldn’t for anything want to lose the actual sequence of Jacen & Hera listening to the waves and hearing the clashing lightsabers, an astounding feat of aural engineering as the two sounds mix and merge and rise and fall along with a riff on the Force theme. Just an absolutely beautiful moment. 

Adam: I think if anything the cutting back and forth reminded me of the pacing and structure Filoni might have used in an episode of Clone Wars or Rebels. I still think the show in general has pacing issues. I’m not sure if Filoni is using a more sluggish pace to mimic the austerity of Andor, but the show is far better when he pushes down on the gas pedal. I’m with you on the waves/lightsabers. Can I get an ASMR mix of that to fall asleep to? 

Back to the Beginning

Adam: One thing that’s separated Rosario Dawson’s Ahsoka from the character we’ve known from Clone Wars and Rebels is that she seems particularly stone faced and dour. She’s all business. But back from sparring with Anakin she’s positively glowing! She has a great new outfit with a beautifully knit cape, and is all smiles and zen chill as she convinces her colleagues of her plan. And what a weird plan it is! 

Austin: She’s gone from Ahsoka the Gray to Ahsoka the White! Her demeanor (and Dawson’s performance) is absolutely changed as a result of her encounter with Anakin, but I’m not 100% sure what, exactly, she learned. I think the idea is supposed to be that she’s let go of her guilt over not being there for Anakin and fear of training an apprentice because all she knows how to do is be a warrior, but while Ahsoka the Gray was much more dour (and did stuff like refer to their foes consistently as simply “the enemy” in a very dehumanized way), I also didn’t get the impression that she was all that messed up. A little guilt over Anakin, sure, some discontent with the Jedi protocol, of course, but she HAD agreed to train Sabine again before this encounter, and while Sabine wasn’t, like, a Super Jedi yet, it hadn’t been going THAT bad. 

I guess, tl;dr, I can see the journey Ahsoka went on as a result of this episode, but it doesn’t seem quite as long of one as the encounter with Anakin would suggest. Did you see anything in there that I’m missing? 

Adam: Over here in the actual real world, we don’t get magical visits from long-dead mentors all that often. The fact that Ahsoka spends this time in the presence of arguably the most important person in her life and comes out renewed, refreshed, and ready to bluetooth sync with some psychic space whales makes perfect sense to me. Does the “lesson” of “choose life” make that much sense in the scheme of the story? I don’t know. Maybe Anakin is just kicking back in Force Ghost land watching a lot of Trainspotting. Or maybe it was as simple as Ahsoka’s body reminding her “Hey doofus, you’re underwater, you’re gonna drown.” I honestly don’t want to overthink it, because this episode left me warm and fuzzy too. 

Austin: You do make a good point about not trying to overthink this too much (he says, in the fifth review dedicated to thinking too much about this stuff). And ultimately, whether the series set up Ahsoka’s immediate need for the lessons she learned well enough or not, what she learned – choose life, not death, throw the saber away rather than striking down your enemy, etc. – are all key lessons of Star Wars that echo through the various films, and always deserve to be re-emphasized. 

Adam: So to get to the bad guys/Thrawn/Sabine/Ezra. Ahsoka is going to hitch a ride with the Purgills, Jonah-and-the-Whale style. I flippin’ love the Purgills. And the fact that you can just drive your spaceship in their mouth and be transported across the galaxy is pretty sweet. I guess the physics of this are the same as objects inside your car traveling at the same speed as the vehicle? I was a little worried the big Purg’ was gonna choke once hitting the hyperspace drive, but I don’t think this is a problem. 

Austin: The Purgills are great, and shout out to the sound team once again (all else aside, this episode sounds great), as the Purgill calls and whatnot were well-realized. I’ve seen some snark that the way to get to Ezra turned out to be…doing the same thing Ezra did to get to the other galaxy, but I think that overlooks the fact that Purgills weren’t exactly common in the galaxy (this is, presumably, the first Hera/Sabine/Ahsoka have seen any since Ezra disappeared) and that the entire point of this episode was about getting Ahsoka in the right headspace to go on this journey (one can easily assume that if she tried this, say, in episode 3, the Purgills wouldn’t have let her fly into their mouths to be carried to another galaxy).  

To that end, it’s notable how the episode ends, with Ahsoka promising (General) Hera that she’ll bring them home. Not “I’ll stop Thrawn” or “defeat our enemies” or “save our friends AND defeat our enemies”. She is going to get her friends back, to win by, as The Last Jedi stressed, saving what she loves rather than destroying what she hates. Wherever Anakin came from, that’s ultimately the lesson he helped Ahsoka learn 

Force Facts 

• Ahsoka tells Anakin at the beginning that she won’t fight him; Anakin says he’s heard that before, which seems like an allusion to Luke’s similar assertion at the end of Return of the Jedi. (Cue George Lucas: “it’s like poetry!”) 
• Note that they never show any of the Clone Troopers’ faces. I guess they couldn’t get Temuera Morrison for a cameo (they did at least get his voice). Props for not digitally inserting his face, Disney. 
• We get another Mon Mothma cameo in this episode. Every time she pops up I think Disney is trying to tell us this show is as good as Andor. (It’s not, but that’s ok.) I applaud the continued use of actors as connective tissue. Maybe we’ll see Zeb before the season’s over! 
• Senator Organa also gets named dropped as helping cover for Hera back home, the first direct reference to adult Leia in any of the streaming series. 
• The Purgill first appeared in S2E15 of Rebels “The Call.” Hera originally wanted to shoot at the Purgill, calling them a “menace.” The fact that she’s trusting them to transport Ahsoka shows a lot of growth. 
• The last time Ahsoka saw The World Between Worlds was in S4E13 of Rebels when Ezra saved her from being killed by Darth Vader. Together they evaded the Emperor and Ahsoka convinced Ezra not to save his late mentor Kanan before returning to her own time. 
• Dave Filoni has said that the World Between Worlds is inspired by the Wood Between the Worlds in the Chronicles of Narnia. 

Elsewhere in a Galaxy Far, Far Away 

Intentional or not, Darth Vader #38 features two moments of nearly-absurdist dark humor. The first comes when a fleet of Star Destroyers arrives to ensure the Executor is destroyed. The ranking officer, Admiral Corleque, once had his life when Admiral Piett waited an additional second for him to reach the evacuation point, so Corleque decides to return the favor and attempt a rescue of the Executor’s crew before obliterating the ship. The survivors, realizing what they’re doing, get a message to their would-be rescuers, warning them to watch out for the droids. To which the rescuers respond by…sending in their droids, simply adding more fodder to the Scourge consciousness. Later, after Piett has retaken the Executor with Vader’s help and Scourge has reached Corleque’s ship, Piett simply gives him the four seconds he previously gave Corleque, then orders his gunners to destroy Corleque and his ship to contain Scourge. This series has previously dabbled in this kind macabre, tongue-in-cheek humor on occasion, but it would do well to lean into it even more. 

(It’s also worth noting that while Dark Droids #2 seemed to end with a direct setup for a crossover with Darth Vader, this issue doesn’t directly address any of that setup. It’s part of the event, in that the actions of Scourge serve as a backdrop, but there isn’t the direct correlation Dark Droids seemed to prime).

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Elsewhere, Obi-Wan Kenobi #1 starts the comic book adaptation of the Disney Plus series, a curious exercise Marvel has extended from the semi-traditional comic book adaptations of the Star Wars films (which reaches all the way back to when Marvel first held the license for Star Wars comics) to its various modern streaming series. As with previous such efforts, I remain confused as to who, exactly, this sort of thing is for (except for anal-retentive completists like myself). There are, of course, different storytelling techniques inherent to each medium, and leaning into the form of the comic book to tell a familiar story can be intriguing, but rather than assign an artist to this series capable of doing that, we’ve got Salvador Larroca’s stiff, nearly-photorealistic work. Larroca had a long run as the series artist on Jason Aaron’s Star Wars series, but while his style may have been better suited for that series — in which photorealism can help ground familiar looking characters in new adventures — it is detrimental in a series like this, where if we wanted to know what this story looked like if Ewan MacGregor was in it, we could just watch the series.  

This Week in Star Wars History 

Star Wars was inducted into the Nation Film Registry by the Library of Congress on September 19th 1989.

Austin Gorton

Austin Gorton also reviews older issues of X-Men at the Real Gentlemen of Leisure website, co-hosts the A Very Special episode podcast, and likes Star Wars. He lives outside Minneapolis, where sometimes, it is not cold. Follow him on Twitter @AustinGorton

Adam Reck

Adam Reck is the cartoonist behind Bish & Jubez as well as the co-host of Battle Of The Atom.