Ahsoka Episode 3 Review: Easy Money
How many witches does it take to screw in a hyperdrive?
“Hey, why haven’t we seen that before?” I muttered to myself on four separate occasions while watching the third episode of Ahsoka.
Historically, the third chapter is when a Disney+ Star Wars show kicks into high gear. Din Djarin turns into Batman and steals Grogu from Werner Herzog’s compound. Fugitive Cassian Andor leaves his family and home behind as the emotional music swells. Something happens in The Book of Boba Fett, probably, I can’t remember.
By that standard, “Time to Fly” fizzles. Ahsoka and Sabine (spoiler alert) arrive at Seatos, the planet where Morgan Elsbeth is building a giant golden hyperspace ring to retrieve Thrawn. Their rinky-dink Jedi ship get roughed up by said giant ring and they crash on the forest planet below.
But in that small amount of plot, we get the following overdue Star Wars live-action layups:
Wide shots of the Republic Fleet
Space combat with intentional use of the Z-axis
A Jedi hopping out of their ship in a spacesuit to fight with their lightsaber in zero gravity
Chancellor Mon Mothma
World War II–style propeller planes
Dropping out of hyperspace at a reasonable distance from the enemy
Turbolasers actually hitting a smaller craft
Whales
After so many attempts to show us something we’ve seen before in a new way, Dave Filoni knows what we haven’t seen. He sees a bunch of easy money the sequels left on the table and he’s grabbing it all in this episode.
For some people, that will include the Ahsoka/Sabine lightsaber training scene. Personally, I’m good on super-literal Jedi training, and I got nervous when Sabine paraphrased Luke’s “With the blast shield down, I can’t even see…” The team behind Ahsoka is evidently eager to get featured on the Instagram account @starwarsparallels.
Yet for all the cool, this episode is the third of eight in a miniseries, and the story still feels stuck in the first act. Genevieve O'Reilly saying, “Grand Admiral Thrawn?!” will only keep me happy for so long. Let’s see the blue guy.
The Rating
3 un-deployed New Republic A-Wings out of 5.
Meme of the Week
Random Thoughts
I appreciated Ahsoka explaining that anger gives one a short-term burst in a fight but wastes energy. It’s nice to have the Light/Dark Side approach explained in humanistic terms beyond, “Good guys push rocks; bad guys shoot lightning.”
David Tennant’s delivery of “Closer pleeeease” got a chuckle, and was a nice throwback to the diegetic humor of C-3PO in Empire.
The first episode drew criticism for too many portentous pauses. Hera’s botched pitch to the Galactic Senate Committee on Armed Services used awkward silence to much better effect.
Shin and Morgan dislike each other. Does it matter? Will Baylen flip on Morgan at some point?
#VantoWatch
In this episode, overconfident New Republic senators claim the Imperial fleet is scattered and Thrawn is dead. You know what that means: Thrawn is alive and he’s going to unite the Imperial fleet. That sounds like 1991 Thrawn trilogy talk to me. I’m not getting a strong 2016 Thrawn vibe here. With a heavy heart, I’m downgrading the likelihood of Eli Vanto appearing.
Programming Notice
To better use the newsletter format (and spare the inboxes of family and friends), I’m planning to post 2-3 times a week going forward. For the time being, I’ll probably push out an Ahsoka recap on Wednesday, plus a digest of #content and #thoughts on another day-to-be-determined.
I’m also polishing up a review of Thrawn Ascendancy: Chaos Rising. So even if Ahsoka isn’t about to get Thrawn-heavy, this newsletter is. Get on board. (Or bail.)