Peek behind the curtain with me. Usually, when new television series are released for preview, I watch them like the rest of the viewing public: sprawled out on my couch in front of a 32-inch screen. It is the perfect simulation of how a show’s core audience will consume the product. But there are some projects that defy that convention, throwing glitzy screenings and acting as if their product were always intended for the big screen. So it was with Disney+’s Star Wars: Ahsoka, which I watched at the cinema amid a sea of twirling lightsabers and papier-mâché montrals. This is small screen TV at, quite literally, its biggest.
Ahsoka picks up a thread left hanging in The Mandalorian. If you were watching carefully during “Chapter 13: The Jedi”, then you’ll have seen Rosario Dawson’s Ahsoka Tano placing rogue administrator Morgan Elsbeth (Diana Lee Inosanto) under arrest and urging her to reveal the whereabouts of shadowy Empire bigwig, Thrawn. That’s where the story picks up. But not long after the opening titles, Elsbeth is busted from space jail by Baylan Skoll (the late, great Ray Stevenson) and the chase is on for the show’s central MacGuffin: a mechanical map that leads, for some reason, to Thrawn’s hideout. “It’s never a straight line with you Jedi,” observes General Syndulla (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), which is also true of Ahsoka’s plot.
