It must be very complicated being George Lucas. On the one hand, you get to wake up inside a vast Scrooge McDuck money vault every morning. On the other, you have to live with the absolute mess Disney has made of your life’s work. To be George Lucas must be to know that you are indirectly responsible for allowing something as soggy and aimless as Ahsoka to seep into the world.
Ahsoka has now reached its halfway point, with four of its eight episodes aired, and it’s fair to say that literally nothing has happened. We know what’s going to happen, because the characters won’t stop talking about it – they’re going to meet a new baddie who has been banished to a different galaxy and represents an enormous existential threat – but the show is plodding towards it so glacially that it feels as if we may never actually get there. It’s almost (almost!) as if Star Wars realises it has spread itself too thin and is doling out plot one measly quarter-portion at a time.
The worst thing is that, as tortuously slow as Ahsoka is, it still isn’t bad by Star Wars standards. It isn’t bad on the scale of the pointless Obi-Wan Kenobi series, or that last JJ Abrams film that felt like the doomed result of a stoned 3am ChatGPT prompt. At its worst, Star Wars is unfathomably bad. Ahsoka doesn’t operate at that level, at least yet. Much of it is fine. If nothing else, it’s refreshing to see Rosario Dawson play something other than a middle-aged director’s idea of a love interest, even if that something is essentially a giant Oompa Loompa in a novelty Glastonbury hat.
The bigger problem, and it’s a pretty big one, is this: who cares? Although the character was created for the 2008 animated Clone Wars film, this version of Ahsoka is the one who sporadically appeared in The Mandalorian. Which makes this show a spin-off of a spin-off, stuffed into a crumb of Star Wars chronology that nobody thought was important until now. In the past, shows have managed to distract us from their own uselessness by lobbing us a cameo, or at least a de-aged digital frightmask, of a character from when Star Wars was good. But Ahsoka can’t even manage that. The big reveal from its newest episode (and here’s a spoiler warning) is that Anakin Skywalker is floating about as a ghost. Not Darth Vader; Anakin Skywalker, from the bad prequels. It isn’t exactly enough to sustain an entire season of television.
Also, the clutch of modern Star Wars shows have a habit of jumping around in time, which does neuter the drama. Ahsoka is set at some point in the 30-year gap between Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens. Now, you’ll remember that the point of this series is that Ahsoka must face an extremely bad baddie (who, incidentally, is called Thrawn, and wouldn’t you be evil too if your name was an abbreviation of “thawed prawn”?), who poses a deadly threat to the entire galaxy. However, if you’ve seen The Force Awakens, you’ll know that the galaxy is basically fine. We know Ahsoka wins, so what’s the point?
More pressingly, it’s just exhausting to sit through yet another thin slice of Star Wars. Disney+ has stuffed its gullet with so many Star Wars spin-offs that it’s hard not to feel bored by the whole operation. The iconography is the same. The sets are the same. All the characters sigh all their stilted expositionary dialogue in the same bored-sounding way, while a nonstop John Williams soundalike score farts away in the background. Nobody laughs. Nobody gets excited. It’s like listening to a class of shortsighted 11-year-olds read Shakespeare from a set of distant cue cards. There’s so much baggage to deal with that the story in these shows is an afterthought. Which is fortunate for Ahsoka, given that it doesn’t have one.
But let’s think positive. Ahsoka may pick up. The character of Sabine Wren is a decent new addition, not least because she talks and behaves like someone who hasn’t watched Star Wars and therefore isn’t particularly reverent about it. Don’t worry if you also like her, though, because at this rate she’ll have her own spin-off show in a couple of months, because God knows how much Disney likes grinding good ideas into the dirt.
In a fair and logical world, Star Wars would recover from the disappointment of Ahsoka by going fallow for a significant amount of time. Take a decade off, make people start to miss it again, then come back with a bang. But that isn’t the way the world works any more. Instead, we’re doomed to be force-fed this stuff in thinner and thinner dilutions, without a break, for years and years until we’re all utterly sick of it. Lucky us.
