‘Ahsoka’ Episode 4 Recap: It Was the Best of Wars, It Was the Worst of Wars

“Sabine…can I count on you?” “………You know you can.”

“Is everything alright?” “…………Be careful out there.”

“Best get underway soon.” “…………Is that a note of fear in your voice?” “……Experience.”

“Relax.” “…Don’t worry about me.” “…I’m not.” “…Good.” “……Should I be?” “……What?” “……Worried.” “…………Nope.”

Imperial torture scientists toiling in the bowels of the detention level on the first Death Star for months couldn’t come up with a method of interrogation that would leave the human mind in the kind of state required to deliver the dialogue in Ahsoka. The endless pauses, the soporific delivery, the nature of the dialogue itself — my god, look at that last exchange; I honestly can’t believe Rosario Dawson and Natasha Liu Bordizzo were handed a piece of paper with those words in that order typed out on it — are all so bad that I kept waiting for Joel and the Bots from Mystery Science Theater to start dunking on it during every pause.

For a while, anyway, the “action” in this episode isn’t much better. When a group of raiders attacks Ahsoka, Sabine, and Hyuang’s ship, the two warrior just sort of trot on down the ramp and join the fray with all the urgency of someone trotting down the stairs to get the front door when the pizza guy comes. For no apparent reason, Sabine does a barrel roll upon jumping off the entrance ramp, enabling her to go nowhere and dodge nothing. The fight, if you can call the massacre that follows a fight, is over in moments, leaving the pair to smile and razz each other as if the killing of half a dozen people was something that happened on a bad Star Wars show they’re watching, not something they just participated in themselves. This is all preceded by a truly ridiculous-looking fight between Huyang and a battle droid that looks like a reenactment of a game of Rock’em Sock’em Robots. 

It goes on from there. Sets that look empty, constructed and peopled on the cheap. Green makeup on Mary Elizabeth Winstead you just want to reach out with a handkerchief and wipe off. A ten-year-old child with green Halloween Spirit hair, dragged into a war zone by his mother, a general. The worst X-wing fighter-pilot banter you’ve ever heard, which at this point in this franchise is really saying something. 

I’ve seen a lot of bad TV in my time, but it’s been a while since I saw anything this amateurish. Ahsoka feels like a mediocre fan film that somehow slipped past the Mouse’s legal team and made air.

At least for a while. I’m not sure who to credit for the massive upswing in quality (a relative thing, but still!) that takes place towards this episode’s second half, since everyone involved — writer/creator/showrunner Dave Filoni, director Peter Ramsey, the Rosario Dawson–led cast — was also involved with the crap that preceded it. I think we can rule out Filoni, who has to answer for his sins for that dreadful game of dialogue catch he made Dawson and Bordizzo play earlier. I’d like to rule out Ramsey, who at one point in the early going frames a closeup on Bordizzo’s Sabine that’s supposed to show the character thinking real hard but which leads one to wonder if either person involved knows what thinking even is. 

But someone was responsible for staging the duels between Ahsoka and Sabine on one side and the evil Force practitioners Marrok and Shin on the other in a red and white forest, like something out of the lovely (if goofy) samurai video game Ghosts of Tsushima. The staging of the combat, too, often reminded me of a stately fight scene from a Kurosawa film — the way Ahsoka waits, then calmly takes one swing and dispatches her far flashier opponent before he even knows what hit him; the loooooong pauses between exchanges when she faces off against Lord Baylan, a welcome return to the more staid yet emotionally charged kind of dueling we saw in the original Star Wars between Obi-Wan and Vader. It works, 

So do the spectacular sci-fi images that pepper the episode. The exterior shots of space ships have that old Star Wars magic, even if the interiors look like the half-empty soundstages they usually are. Setting the fight between Baylan and our heroes in a sort of holographically enhanced Stonehenge surrounded by a glowing map of the stars makes for a combat ground that’s interesting to look at, a good way to offset the deliberate pacing of the combat itself. There’s a shot of the enemy’s huge ring ship breaching the clouds that’s legit terrific; ditto the low-angled shot employed to show Baylan’s destruction of the map with his red lightsaber by impaling and superheating it until it shatters.

The analog light-up array that indicates the big ship’s hyperdrive has been fired up looks like a large-scale version of something you’d have seen in the good doctor’s lab in James Whale’s Frankenstein. The blast wave that hits General Syndulla’s ships when the huge vessel makes the jump to hyperspace, all blue-purple energy and orange fire, leads to a harrowing little sequence of total chaos. The bit where the black-masked bad guy Marrok just kind of disintegrates after getting slashed by Ahsoka — so much for my “he’s Ezra in disguise” theory — is both creepy and funny considering how much we’d invested in the idea that there was more to this guy than meets the eye. (In Jerry Seinfeld’s words, “No. There’s less.”)  Even the weird stardust-suffused nether-dimension in which Ahsoka finds herself in the end is good looking.

Then a horrifically digitally de-aged Hayden Christensen shows up as Anakin Skywalker’s force ghost, and it’s back to reality. Ahsoka is still content-mill slop churned out in Disney’s quixotic attempt to give us Star Wars non-stop while it figures out what the hell it’s doing with the theatrical end of things, when the obvious solution is to knock it off entirely and make us anticipate returning to that galaxy far, far away. Instead we’re being dragged through it by the scruff of our necks, made to watch some of the most embarrassing material ever associated with the setting, broken up here and there by an entertaining battleground or spaceship shot. 

Or by Ray Stevenson as Baylan, the MVP of the episode without question. He’s the only performer on this thing you could possibly conceive of seducing anyone to any side; when he tells Sabine she should stop fighting and come with him, you believe the guy. (Runner-up: Ivanna Sakhno, who channels bits of Darryl Hannah as Pris in Blade Runner and Ray Park and Peter Serafinowicz as Darth Maul in The Phantom Menace for her intense, sexy evil padawan character.) His performance, alternately purring and avuncular, coupled with all that strong imagery sprinkled in gif form throughout this review, are the series high points thus far. Stevenson plays his role like an uncanny visitor from an alternate dimension where Ahsoka is good. It is, alas, not the dimension we live in.

(This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the series 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.