‘Ahsoka’ Is Just as Confusing as ‘Star Wars: A New Hope’

There are a few particular elements that make Star Wars feel like Star Wars. Sand, for one. Bureaucracy. Snappy patter and cryptic lessons. Oh — underdogs and outer space dogfights. Can’t forget robots, royalty, retired wizards. It’d be hard to have Star Wars without some or all of these things, and Disney+’s Ahsoka does indeed have 90% of the above. But there’s one more thing that Star Wars has had from the very beginning of the very first screening back in 1977 that Ahsoka has today: confusion.

That’s putting it bluntly, but it’s also putting it how plenty of reviewers and hot-take-havers have phrased it since Ahsoka’s two-episode premiere. A common complaint about Ahsoka is that viewers absolutely have to have watched all four seasons of the animated series Star Wars Rebels, and probably as many episodes of its predecessor Star Wars: The Clone Wars, in order to even have the slightest clue as to what’s going on. These characters… they are saying nouns that are not immediately recognizable to newcomers! And this story… it’s continuing a story that started elsewhere! It’s confusing! But I don’t think it’s confusing so much as it’s just Star Wars — because Star Wars has been intentionally “confusing” from the start.

I know it’s hard to imagine due to Star Wars’ ubiquity over the last 25 years, but try to imagine what it was like watching the first Star Wars film in the theater in 1977. Or try to imagine what it was like watching Star Wars for the first time during the Dark Ages when the franchise was dormant and pop culture had moved on (1985-1991-ish). Imagine watching those first ten minutes of Star Wars free of context.

The movie starts with a literal wall of text that mentions a hidden base we won’t see until act three, a Galactic Empire, Rebel spies we won’t meet until 2016, a Death Star, and a Princess Leia (later pronounced two different ways) who is a “custodian” of stolen plans (don’t picture her holding a mop, please). Then we see a starscape and a spaceship that looks like a hammer attached to a bunch of hair curlers being pursued by the most intimidating triangle ever captured on film. The first characters we meet are robots, so this is a movie with princesses and robots. And then all the soldiers, presumably the Rebels, are wearing vests and… giant, plastic, halved eggs on their heads?

Then a bunch of people or robots in white armor blast aboard followed by a huge dude in black wearing a cape who will later be called both “lord” and “darth.” What is a darth? Then Gold Robot is worried about being “sent to the spice mines of Kessel” and Lord Darth keeps asking questions about “consular ships.” Yes, this is a movie that asks the question, “If this is a consular ship, where is the ambassador?” Then we find out that the princess is also maybe a senator in the Imperial Senate, which sounds a lot like the Galactic Empire — and she’s being accused of having plans that were stolen by spies we have not met during a mission we did not see. What is this movie?

Later we’ll hear the line “traveling through hyperspace ain’t like dusting crops, boy” and movie legend Alec Guinness — who is playing a character named Ben and Obi-Wan — will casually mention something called the “clone wars” and namedrop Anakin Skywalker.

Over and over again, Star Wars keeps acting like we know things — like we know that sand people travel single file to hide their numbers and they carry “gaffi sticks,” although that line is mumbled by Mark Hamill because what is a gaffi stick?

All of this was intentional. Lucas wanted Star Wars to feel like a throwback movie serial, and he succeeded. As soon as he could, George Lucas amended that dense opening crawl to start with “Episode IV: A New Hope,” making it clear that three movies take place before this one.

Sidenote: wild that when Lucas made those three movies, the story of the spies and the plans was still untold.

I’m sure that I could go diving through newspaper archives and find a few — maybe more than a few! — reviews and gripes from critics about Star Wars being hard to follow, but there’s a reason why audiences were so enamored of the movie. That “confusion,” jumping in media res and forcing the audience to pick up context clues or just hold on for the ride, made Star Wars feel truly immersive.

Lucas also trusted that while his specifics were cuckoo bananas — “What I really need is a droid who understands the binary language of moisture vaporators.” — the broad strokes were pulled from thousands of years of storytelling. Bad guys have a weapon, good guys have plans for the weapon, and the bad guys want those plans. The soldiers that look like Cadillac Skeletons and the 8-foot-tall dude in all black are evil. The teenage girl is a princess. The robots are funny. A farm boy joins an old wizard to rescue a princess from a castle. He befriends a cocky pirate and his first mate. It’s all there.

The same can be said for Ahsoka’s first episode. Everything you need to know about these characters is right there. Ahsoka is a stoic Jedi who prefers to work alone. Hera is a Rebel general. Sabine was Ahsoka’s apprentice until something happened (BTW, not even Star Wars Rebels superfans know what that is).

In fact, all of their introductory scenes tell you everything you need to know: Ahsoka is relic-hunting solo; General Syndulla is a general stationed on a flagship; Sabine is running away from responsibility while rocking out and evading the cops. Loner, authority, rebel.

As for the plot? Grand Admiral Thrawn was a terrifying Imperial leader who disappeared a long time ago and Ahsoka has reason to believe he’s coming back. Bonus: their friend, the Jedi who defeated and disappeared with Thrawn, might be with him. That’s it. In fact, it looks like showrunner Dave Filoni probably even structured the start of the premiere episode after 1977’s Star Wars, maybe to assure new viewers that they’re in familiar territory.

The plot of Ahsoka is, ultimately, no more complicated than a princess sending a message and schematics to her dad’s army buddy, a hermit wizard, so he can deliver them to a rebellion, but instead ends up recruiting the whiny teenage son of his old pupil to go on a rescue mission.

The concern nowadays seems to be that, in a culture of Easter eggs and fan theories and wikis, viewers now go into everything already feeling low-key lost and presuming that any noun they don’t recognize is probably integral to the plot. That is a problem in 2023, when it feels like every story is a continuation of another story. Even a Star Wars show with a comparatively clean start, like The Mandalorian, could be seen as confusing just because it uses concepts that were established in previous shows and movies.

If you believe that everything you don’t understand is something major, then no Star Wars is accessible. It’s all confusing. But Star Wars worked in 1977 because, well, audiences didn’t have any reason to think they should know what a “clone war” was, but also because audiences just went along with it and trusted the storytelling. The same is true for Ahsoka. Dave Filoni, the architect behind Ahsoka and much of its continuity, isn’t lying to new viewers about any of these characters. He’s not alluding to anything essential that isn’t bluntly stated in the show. You’re actually not missing anything. The weird specifics and references to things you don’t know about are a feature of Star Wars and always have been. They are not a bug (unless we’re talking about Dr. Mandible).

There is one perk that watching Ahsoka in 2023 has over watching Star Wars in 1977: if you do want to learn more about any of these characters, you can. But just remember: that’s extra credit.