And Now for Something Completely Different

Ahsoka Part 6 "Far, Far Away"

SPOILERS! SPOILERS! SPOILERS! SPOILERS!

“Far, Far Away” is the episode I’ve been waiting for. It’s a journey into the unknown, full of fresh designs, titillating teases, and payoffs for every member of the audience. Part 6 provides goodies for the Celebration-attendee, the faithful, and everyone else too.

I know it can seem like I’m a little obsessed with how this is playing to a casual crowd. One might fairly say: Matt, why do you care? You’re a fan, it’s for you! Enjoy it! And I do!

But I can’t help but sense how the dichotomy between its audiences is baked into the cake of Ahsoka. It’s a series that presents characters and plot-lines that are years old as if they’re new. Or at least, it does sometimes. It straddles a shaky line between giving long-time fans what they’ve been waiting for and introducing the characters as if they’re Din Djarin.

Grand Admiral Thrawn is Exhibit A. He’s been around since Timothy Zahn’s Heir to the Empire, published in 1991. That’s 32 years ago. He’s older than most of the viewers. He was un-canonized in 2012 and then re-canonized with appearances in Season 4 of Rebels. He’s been through the Canon-blender, been a fan-favorite for decades. He has, though, never appeared in live-action Star Wars. So, to most audiences, he’s essentially introduced with this episode.

But it works! It’s such an iconic introduction! A whole cadre of wild stormtroopers (MORE ACTION FIGURES!), a captain of the guard that looks like he belongs in Clash of the Titans (played by Wes Chatham of The Expanse!), a chanting cult-like following on a decaying Star Destroyer, and a chilling performance by Lars Mikkelsen - polite, dismissive, incisive. He immediately feels like a threat. So, for those of us waiting years, it’s a triumphant moment. For those who just learned about Thrawn five episodes ago? It feels like a major scene, too.

It makes me wonder if there is, in a sense, an unspoken hierarchy to Star Wars storytelling. Is live-action the big leagues? A character can exist in publishing and animation for 15+ years, but until captured by a live actor, there’s something that unconsciously implies it’s a niche part of the story. Thrawn, Ahsoka, they’ve have essentially graduated to Real.

Is that right? As I write it, I’m not sure. It’s more a feeling than anything else: Star Wars was defined by live-action features films for most of its forty plus years. The more characters appear to be living in that feature-film universe, the more they seem like an equally expressed part of the Star Wars Saga.

This is certainly true of Ezra Bridger. Another graduate into live action, we finally see the charming, sweet fellow that all the fuss is about. Eman Esfandi is absolutely perfectly cast, instantly recognizable as the beloved character. He could not be a bigger contrast to Thrawn, which is aces for the story being told.

Ezra and Sabine being reunited at last, in a landmark story moment, also highlighted for me how allergic the Ahsoka series is to big feelings. Ezra and Sabine’s brother-sister banter, their ‘it’s no big deal’ shrug-ishness, feels totally right for their characters. I didn’t find it particularly cathartic, but that appears to be Filoni’s preferred style. (For a guy who famously sat at the feet of George Lucas, ‘faster and more intense’ isn’t a lesson he appears to have absorbed.) Sabine betrayed the galaxy to find Ezra, and her reaction to seeing him is more “oh, there you are” than “Thank the Maker I’ve found you.” (It’ll be interesting to see if Ezra responds with more passion when he realizes what she gave up to find him.)

There’s a school of thought that if the actors over-emote, then the audience doesn’t have to: you don’t cry if they’re doing all the crying for you. Perhaps that’s the theory here: the characters wouldn’t get all weepy, but that doesn’t mean you won’t. I’m more of a big feelings fan, I like Star Wars as Opera; but I imagine there weren’t many dry eyes when Ezra and Sabine were reunited among the biggest fans of Rebels.

Let me stop for a moment to mention where Ezra is found, which is among the Noti. These turtle-bugs are my very best friends and I would kill for them. Star Wars does cute better than any other mega-franchise, and these little turtles with their clothes! I want to die. I love them. I want to pack up their houses and take a long walk with them like they’re Harfoots in Rings of Power.

They are, besides cute, just plain new. This is an episode that finally shows us what it means to go to a different galaxy in the context of Star Wars. So far, the differences are subtle, costumes and vistas. It isn’t a visual departure I would call profound, and if you presented Peridea’s flora and fauna in the saga’s ‘home’ galaxy, nothing would seem out of place.

What is fresh is the sense of not-knowing. The characters speak as if they’re somewhere out of legend, which helps make what is an otherwise standard rocky planet feel like it’s mysterious and eerie. Baylan Skoll (still great!) wonders what darkness is rising on this planet that is driving the witches away, and it makes us wonder too. It could be anything, and that’s fun.

Part 6, in a way, wrestles with what the ‘unknown’ even really means in the context of Star Wars. Some characters that have been with us for decades are presented as new; some characters that are entirely new are reminiscent of what we’ve seen before. The Noti feel like the Ewoks, the marauders feel like, well, marauders. The Nightsisters of Dathomir, who call the planet Peridea home, are new to live-action but can be found in the galaxy our characters just left. The Howlers are just wolves that don’t look like wolves. It’s not as if we found a galaxy with an entirely different galactic government, ruled by socialist unicorns armored in hardened kelp. This looks and feels familiar, if older, maybe even abandoned. Have we found a haunted galaxy? What’s truly new here? What’s familiar? What’s askew?

Star Wars has always wrestled with how much to look ahead and how much to look back. When the prequels were released, many fans at the time felt betrayed by how distinct they felt from the original trilogy. Abrams and Co. self-consciously attempted to recapture the tone and feeling of the original trilogy, only to be critiqued for being derivative. Filoni’s Ahsoka is stuck squarely in the middle: it’s serving a core fan-base while hand-holding the uninitiated. That’s all been in service of “Far, Far Away”, as, at last, Ahsoka boldly goes where no one has gone before.

Wait.

Oh no.

That’s Star Trek.

A thousand pardons.

P.S.

I would be remiss if I didn’t also mention that, in this episode, the words “A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away” officially become a part of the internal language of the Star War galaxy. It’s a sweet meta-textual choice, much like making John Williams music a part of the lived-in galaxy. The first words we ever read as an audience that set the tone for the Saga are given a gentle new context almost fifty years later.

Truly, what’s old is new again.