‘Ahsoka’ Episode 1 Recap: Excessive Use of Force

By the lightsaber index, Ahsoka is a real Star Wars show alright.

Five of the elegant weapons make an appearance in the show’s premiere episode (“Part One: Master and Apprentice”), a fact all the more impressive in that only four characters wield them at all. Jedi this, Jedi that — this show is absolutely teeming with Jedi. This show is running right at the heart of the Star Wars mythos at full tilt.

At this point, I’d like you to imagine the Road Runner painting the heart of the Star Wars mythos on a cliff wall, because in running full tilt at it, Ahskoka has as much luck actually reaching it as Wile E. Coyote does getting through one of those fake tunnels.

Rosario Dawson stars as the title character, a regal, beautifully designed alien Jedi. Working in concert with New Republic General Syndulla (an unrecognizable Mary Elizabeth Winstead), Ahsoka’s on the hunt for a map that will lead her to both an old ally, Jedi Ezra Bridger (Eman Esfandi), and an old enemy, the unseen Imperial Grand Admiral Thrawn. She’s aided in this quest by her specially trained droid assistant Huyang (David Tennant) and — she hopes, at least — her former apprentice, a Mandalorian named Sabine Wren (Natasha Liu Bordizzo).

Matters are complicated by the arrival of other interested parties: the towering ex-Jedi Baylan Skoll (the late Ray Stevenson, to whom the episode is touchingly dedicated) and his as-yet unnamed apprentice (Ivanna Sakhno). Whether they’ve gone full Darth Vader–style Sith is unclear, but they murder a whole New Republic ship’s crew and free Morgan Elsbeth (Diana Lee Inosanto), a Force witch allied with Thrawn. They also employ a lot of very cool-looking, if ineffective, droid warriors, which I love for them. In the end, the apprentice stabs Sabine without killing her and makes off with the map. Cue episode two!

I’ll say this right up front: One thing I did not find Ahsoka to be was confusing. This was not a guaranteed thing, mind you. Though I’m enough of a Star Wars fan to have had the Rebel Alliance insignia tattooed on my right arm when I was 18, I never got into the animated stuff, for the simple reason that these are children’s cartoons and I am not a child. Whatever backstories were established for these characters in series like Rebels and Clone Wars are complete unknowns to me.

But so what? When I watched the first five or ten minutes of A New Hope for the first time, everything in them — the Rebel Alliance, the Imperial Senate, Princess Leia, Darth Vader, a pair of robots, the phrase “if this is a consular ship, where is the ambassador” — were complete unknowns to me too. The movie wound up filling in the blanks, and even as a pre-schooler, I was fine. 

The same is true here. Going in, I had no idea who any of these people were, but guess what? Now I do! Ahsoka’s a Jedi trained by Anakin Skywalker, who abandoned her master (presumably because he’s a psychopath) but never abandoned the cause itself. Sabine’s her truculent ex-apprentice. Huyang’s their droid sidekick. They had a Jedi buddy named Ezra, who sacrificed himself to stop an Imperial admiral named Thrawn, who’s so badass his reemergence could reignite a full-scale war. Now Thrawn, at least, I know about, having read the Timothy Zahn novels in which he debuted back at the dawn of the old Star Wars Expanded Universe, but I don’t need to have read them to get the gist of it. Ditto not watching those animated shows. There’s nothing here that requires you to have completed earlier courses, so to speak.

It’s not just about comprehension, of course; it’s also about emotional investment, and I don’t get it there either. If you’re having trouble getting invested in these guys as a matter of principle rather than of execution — the execution is very much up for debate — I have to wonder how you get invested in characters from any new show. We had no idea who Don Draper was either until well into Mad Men’s first season, and you managed just fine. We watched and enjoyed Season Two of The Wire, which spent several episodes as basically a brand new show. We can handle getting dropped into a Star Wars series on the Disney Channel.

So no, the problem with Ahsoka isn’t that it relies too heavily on familiarity with shows I haven’t watched. The problem with Ahsoka is, almost literally, everything else.

Almost, I said, because it has its moments. Ray Stevenson is thoroughly convincing as an evil behemoth, a figure so imposing he doesn’t even need Darth Vader’s black mask and armor to come across like the personification of death itself. Ivanna Sakhno is, let’s be frank here, really sexy as his apprentice; we need more space operas featuring evil women wearing a lot of smudgy black eye makeup. The opening music by composer Kevin Kiner is an ominous, percussion-driven piece quite unlike anything I’ve heard in the setting before, and it’s intriguing as hell.

And now we come to everything else. I say this with all due respect: My god, what a turkey.

Other than Stevenson, and a characteristically charming cameo by Clancy Brown as a planetary governor, the acting ranges from inert (Dawson) to perplexingly substandard given the actor’s track record (Winstead) to outright embarrassing (Esfandi briefly, Bordizzo extensively). Everyone acts like they’re on Xanax, eyes dull, faces barely reactive, voices a monotone. There’s a scene where Sabine wakes up from a nightmare that seems designed for commentary YouTubers to tear to shreds at length.

By my count, there was one good shot composition in the show, revealed in a cut timed to a brass sting in the score when we see the evil Force-wielder and her forces arrayed in a line, like so:

And this was a nice closeup on Dawson, to be fair.

Far more often, however, what we saw ranged from undistinguished to borderline unprofessional. There’s an overhead shot of Ahsoka squaring off against droid assailants that looks so obviously CGI’d that it could be in a mockbuster called Space Quest: Kinshasha or something. The show can’t even manage to line up actors symmetrically as they watch a ship land, for crying out loud. 

The costumes look like decent San Diego Comic-Con cosplay. The commemorative mural on display at a big ceremony in Sabine’s honor is laughably amateurish. The children’s drawings Sabine finds in a bunk on Ahsoka’s ship are so obviously an adult trying to draw like a child that it’s almost a provocation to include them. The opening crawl is a syntactical nightmare. The score is frequently dreadful — a ghastly guitar-driven rock song here, lugubrious and out-of-place string sections there. Two lengthy sequences involve puzzle-solving you normally think of as the domain of the parts of Tears of the Kingdom you don’t like playing.

The performances aren’t helped by the dialogue, naturally. There’s only so much anyone can do with clunkers like “May their courage and commitment never be forgotten” or “Mentoring someone is a challenge” or “Sometimes even the right reasons have the wrong consequences.” (Jesus.) The ne plus ultra of this combination of bad writing and bad acting comes in this exchange between Dawson and Bordizzo’s characters:

“I go where I’m needed.” “Not always.” “You never make things easy.” “Why should I? You never made things easy for me, master.” “There is nothing easy about being a Jedi.” “Well, then I should have made a good one.” “Yes, you should have.” It’s like listening to an AI voice chat program train. 

Now, as an out-and-proud prequel enjoyer, I feel obligated to say that you can get past flat dialogue and flat performances if you get enough stuff of compensatory value — the overall batshit personal vision of George Lucas, for example. But this show can’t even muster a single suspenseful battle or chase, which ought to be the bread and butter of any Star Wars story. There’s no urgency to Ahsoka’s face-off with those droids, even when she’s running away full-tilt to escape the blast radius of their self-destruct mechanisms. The climactic swordfight between Sabine and the evil apprentice is so weakly choreographed that it makes the duel between senior citizen Alec Guinness and bodybuilder David Prowse in A New Hope look like the entire House of Blue Leaves sequence from Kill Bill. 

None of this, needless to say, leaves me optimistic about the rest of the series. Sadly for him, there’s really only one person at whose feet this mess can be laid: Creator, writer, and director Dave Filoni, working with source material he himself oversaw for the animated shows. By the standards of the Mouse’s widget factory this is practically an auteur project, and as such the auteur must take the credit, and the blame.

(This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the show being covered here wouldn’t exist.)

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.