All We Know For Sure Is That He'll Be Blue
A Thrawn superfan's cautious optimism for Ahsoka
When it comes to Star Wars, my wife knows BB-8 is the round guy. She has not seen Andor. She has never harassed Pablo Hidalgo on Twitter. She certainly would not recognize Dennis Muren on the street.
But she did have a coworker who last year binged Star Wars: Rebels on Disney+. This colleague explained to my wife that the show had the best villain ever, a guy named Thrawn. Pressed for what made him the best, she shrugged and offered only, “He’s blue.”
Disney’s challenge in marketing Ahsoka, which has teased Thrawn as its main villain, is that in workplaces all over the world there are people who know the character from Rebels, and people who know just that he is blue. Then there are a great many more people who have no idea who he is.
And finally, there are people like me, who know Thrawn’s full name (Mitth'raw'nuruodo), his species (Chiss), and a host of other trivia that fill Timothy Zahn’s nine main Thrawn novels. (Needless to say at this point: I would recognize Dennis Muren on the street.) The Ahsoka series will probably not interest my wife. But there’s a chance it’s not really for me either.
Series creator Dave Filoni has made no secret of the fact that Ahsoka will be an unofficial fifth season of Rebels, his 2014 cartoon. Even assuming some number of adults streamed Rebels after its Disney XD run (and told their co-workers the color of its villain), we’re talking about likely hundreds of millions of dollars invested into an all-ages sequel to a kid’s show. But for a certain very vocal kind of Star Wars fan, that gambit represents a promise unfulfilled since Revenge of the Sith.
The creatives charged with reviving the franchise when Disney bought Lucasfilm (Abrams et al.) loved Star Wars as a setting. They wanted to make films in the used future. Behind the scenes featurettes from the sequel trilogy extolled the return of puppets and sets. Yes, they were repudiating the prequel trilogy. But more than that, they were simply focused on what they thought makes Star Wars great.
But for a growing number of fans, what’s great about Star Wars isn’t tactile effects or swashbuckling action. It’s the Republic (discarded unceremoniously in the middle of The Force Awakens, presumably central to Ahsoka). It’s the prophesy of the Chosen One (muddled by The Rise of Skywalker, though never totally explained in the prequels). It’s the Jedi master-apprentice dynamic (rejected for thematic reasons in The Last Jedi, tellingly central to the Ahsoka marketing effort).
Diehard fans want Star Wars to explore the depths of its own lore—not make aesthetic tributes to the original trilogy. Lucky for them, the man most responsible for the lore of the current Disney-era canon is Filoni, who—with George Lucas—explicated many of the core concepts of the universe in the 2008 Clone Wars cartoon, of which Rebels, and thus Ahsoka, can said to be a sequel. (Ahsoka Tano, the titular character from the new show, was the breakout character from The Clone Wars. If you didn’t already know that, I’m shocked you’ve made it this far.)
The guy most responsible for the lore of the pre-Disney canon was Thrawn’s creator, Timothy Zahn. He kicked off the golden age of the “Expanded Universe” with the novel Heir to the Empire (a phrase spoken by Ahsoka in the Ahsoka trailer) in 1991.
Filoni began introducing aspects of that old Expanded Universe, most notably Thrawn, in Rebels. Zahn, in turn, wrote new canonical novels that jibed with Rebels and fleshed out Thrawn in a cinematic universe in which he would never again face off against a young Luke Skywalker. (That is, unless some really ill-advised deepfake stuff is coming down the pipe.)
Both men did an admirable job. Filoni was smart to pick-and-choose from a mixed bag of the old canon. Zahn took the opportunity to refine and expand Thrawn instead of cashing in on his name value. But they were painting in different shades of blue. As the villain of a kid’s cartoon, Filoni’s Thrawn was arrogant and taunted his opponents before being foiled. Zahn approaches Thrawn from a much more sympathetic place. Take for instance, his introductory dialogue on Rebels:
Grand Admiral Thrawn: The Emperor recently promoted me after my victory at Batonn.
Agent Kallus: Civilian casualties outnumbered the insurgents at the time.
Governor Pryce: Acceptable margins, Agent Kallus, for there are no longer rebels in that sector.
This dialogue is seemingly meant to establish Thrawn as brutal but effective. However, in Thrawn, the best-selling novel Zahn wrote with the Rebels scripts in hand, the author goes to great lengths to explain that Thrawn was not responsible for the civilian casualties at Batonn. In fact, he abhorred the casualties (caused by Pryce) and had established a relationship of mutual respect with the Batonn insurgency’s leader.
There are other moments in Rebels that stick out at odds with the character from the books. In one scene—a tribute to Patton (1970)—Thrawn shoots pointlessly at an airborne enemy with his sidearm:
I appreciate a Patton reference as much as the next guy. Beyond the general idea that they’re tactical geniuses, however, Thrawn—ever cool and patient—would seem to have little in common with the vainglorious U.S. cavalry commander.
That’s the paradox of Ahsoka. After feeling put off by the sequels, the superfans get a show steeped in lore, starring established characters—a story not afraid to leave casual fans behind. But will it be fundamentally at odds with six books of characterization of its villain?
I hope not, for the simple reason that I am a fan of those books, but had to force myself to finish Rebels. (I know people who reasonably take the opposite position.)
There are reasons for hope. Zahn has endorsed Filoni as a writer and Lars Mikkelsen (who is making the jump from animation to live-action) as an actor. (It’s unclear to what extent Zahn was consulted on the show.) Filoni undoubtedly knows that a live action series aimed at adults allows for more well-rounded versions of characters than a cartoon for kids. To that end, Mikkelsen has commented that his live-action performance will be an adaptation—not a repeat—of his voice-acting role.
Or maybe Thrawn is barely in the show. Maybe Ahsoka and her sidekick Sabine are on a quixotic quest to find their red-eyed, blue-skinned nemesis before he emerges as the villain (or unlikely hero?) of the forthcoming “Filoni-verse” movie.
We’ll have some inkling in exactly one week, at which point I will become the Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons, quibbling with every deviation from the Thrawn novels. (Or I will provide important context for the show, creating a newsletter that is both interesting and indispensable. It’s honestly 50/50.)