‘Ahsoka’ Episode 5 Recap: Fail Whale

As a director, if not a writer, Ahsoka creator Dave Filoni has some good instincts. Not in terms of his work with his actors, mind you — as many have pointed out, getting a bad performance out of either Rosario Dawson or Mary Elizabeth Winstead might just be the luck of the draw, but getting bad performances out of both of them suggests the problem sits in the director’s chair. But visually, as perhaps befits a man with roots in the (ugly, in my opinion, but yours may vary) CGI Star Wars animated series, he has an instinct for moments of color and spectacle of the sort that might make a lasting impression on viewers otherwise just there for a good time in a galaxy far, far away. 

Please note, however, that I said moments, not minutes. 

Ahsoka “Part Five: Shadow Warrior” begins with the camera silently panning across the treetops of the red forest where last week’s battles were fought. Lovely.

Our heroes, or what’s left of them, reunite at the cliff where the technological stonehenge was built, as the droid Huyang does an “alas, poor Yorick” routine with the missing Sabine’s Mandalorian helmet. Strikingly composed.

In the dream world — or is it a Force-generated pocket dimension? — in which Ahsoka finds herself sparring with her old master Anakin Skywalker, she’s sent crashing through their illusory floor into a hazy world of pink smoke and the yellow flash of explosions, through which clone troopers and Anakin himself emerge, along with hulking saurian AT-ST attack vehicles, to fight an unseen enemy. (Ahsoka has by now reverted to her younger self, played by Ariana Greenblatt.) I found this to be a genuinely gorgeous and legitimately haunting sequence, visually depicting the countless dead soldiers she once knew as ghosts in a spectral mist even before their deaths reach them. Honestly, Apocalypse Now came to mind. 

When the dream world changes and becomes an ocean rising up to swallow Ahsoka, her descent beneath the surface has the serenity of a baptism of someone being born again.

And when our heroes devise a plan to find their missing friends and enemies in a galaxy even farther, father away by hitching a ride with the space whales, there’s genuine awe and wonder in their eyes as the massive creatures sail gracefully by in the bright white sky, complemented by Ahsoka’s white gear…

Or in the very, very Dune Shai Hulud-esque way the largest of the whales rises up into the frame and opens its massive maw for Ahsoka to fly right in.

Good looking show, right? Sheer image-making used to convey a range of emotions, from joy to PTSD. An overall sense that maybe there’s more to the Star Wars Universe’s magic than cameos of preexisting Star Wars characters. (I know the whales have been around before, apparently, but they’re new to me, and they’re not really “characters” anyway, even if the enormous blue eye of the mother of them all seems very wise.) And everything given ample room to breathe in dialogue-free silence. 

And, finally, there’s the rub. By “ample room” I mean “more than ample room.” I mean “Wembley Stadium” room. I mean “the lone and level sands stretch far away in ‘Ozymandias’” room. I mean “the distance between one point in space and another as described by an unfortunate passenger in Stephen King’s ‘The Jaunt’” room. I mean a writer and director and showrunner who keeps trying to stuff a 22-minute animated-series runtime of shit into a 50-minute live-action series runtime bag and, as you’d expect, coming up empty, over and over.

Take the two most impressive visual sequences in the episode: Ahsoka’s spectral and sad fog-of-war memories, and the flight of the space whales. Both phenomena are repeated, virtually identically from one iteration to the next. Ahsoka doesn’t just return to the Clone Wars, which she helpfully names in case anyone watching Ahsoka is unfamiliar with the Clone Wars (lol) — a needless idiot-proofing decision, echoed by the egregious of having Anakin occasionally flash into his Darth Vader outfit, as if we need the reminder and would be like “oh, right, that’s who he is!” 

No, she also returns to a second battle, one that took place after she and Anakin had parted ways, so they can rehash the same conversations they already had about violence and warfare and the need for soldiers and so on. Whatever magic was in the first sequence has the air let out by the unnecessary second. Moreover, constantly cross cutting from the dream world to the real one — a major plot point, given that we’re required to see General Hera’s Take Your Child to Work Day visitor Jacen use his Force sensitivity to hear the sound of Ahsoka and Anakin’s lightsaber duel so she can…be retrieved while floating unconscious under several feet of water. It’s a dopey idea that’s not worth the sacrifice of the mood and look otherwise maintained by the flashback/dream/vision.

Same with the flight of the space whales. It’s not enough to have a long appreciation of their size and gracefulness as Ahsoka and Hera encounter them in the skies above the planet; the whole thing has to then be repeated in outer space as the whales slip past a New Republic fleet there to recover the rogues. One long, drawn-out sequence of experienced space dogfighters having their jaws dropped by the beauty and size of these animals is plenty. 

Add a second and, frankly, you start seeing the CGI strings being pulled a bit too much. What felt like Avatar: The Way of Water (which itself wasn’t exactly trying to hide its creatures’ unrealistic digital nature) winds up looking like something you might see done on the cheap in a mockbuster, or a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode from the late 1980s.

And Filoni lacks even the taste to reserve the overdelivery of specific visuals to the ones that are good. There’s a scene where the camera slowly spins around Ahsoka as she uses the Force to piece together what became of Sabine that is so boring — she’s literally just standing there with her eyes closed as the sound department hits play on some dialogue from the previous episode — that the fact that it goes on for a full minute of screentime feels like some kind of prank being pulled on us by Filoni, or being pulled on Flioni by the editor. Absolutely wild stuff.

To say the performances don’t even come close to matching the good visual elements of the episode is such an understatement I should probably lose my job, honestly. Again, I don’t think it’s the actors’ fault; I’m not about to start transcribing the clunky, “trying to play table tennis with balls that weigh 40 pounds” dialogue that the characters are forced to recite one or two words at a time, but it’s omnipresent, even worse than before. 

Other than David Tennant, who milks real pathos out of Huyang’s regret that his friends and wards simply never listen to him, and (for real) Hayden Christensen, who’s hamstrung by the words he’s given to say but still carries the gravitas of his downfall in Revenge of the Sith, the strongest of the prequels, with him, no one can get anything worthwhile out of anyone here. Dawson and Winstead are faced with the extra degree of difficulty of needing to emote from behind their shockingly amateurish makeup and head tails. 

(The liveliest thing about any of it is Mary Elizabeth Winstead’s bright yellow, surprisingly snug flightsuit pants, which at the risk of sounding crass is another spectacular visual Filoni has the good sense to linger on — if, as with everything else, for a bit too long. In the immortal words of Hannibal Buress, “Why are you booing me? I’m right.”)

After these last two episodes, I’m no longer just wondering “How the hell did this get on the air?” I enjoyed looking at enough things in both episodes to answer my own question there. Now I’m asking “How the hell did this get on the air like this?” Simply put, there seems to be no quality control at work at all: no effort made to ensure the arresting SFF images are given the right amount of time to do their magic and then allowed to exit stage left; no sense that having your character from Clone Wars say “This is the Clone Wars!” when she shows back up in the Clone Wars is silly and insulting of the audience’s intelligence; no desire to make the people sound and act like people, instead of NPCs whose dialogue triggers need a patch in the next update. If it weren’t Ahsoka, Ahsoka might not be half bad.

(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.