‘Ahsoka’ Season Finale Recap: The Force Is Wrong With This One

“Yeah, so, where is Ahsoka?” asks Ezra Bridger in the “Previously On” intro to Ahsoka’s Season 1 finale. It’s a good question, and one the episode doesn’t get around to answering until ten minutes in. That’s when we discover Ahsoka just kind of sitting there on top of her ship as Sabine steps outside. No big entrance, no cool image, and certainly no focus on her as the driving force of the scene she appears in.

The same can be said of the finale as a whole. Titled “The Jedi, the Witch, and the Warlord” — a pun on The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe that immediately takes you out of the setting — it’s an episode of Ahsoka in which Ahsoka is perhaps the sixth most emotionally important character. Of course it’s fine for your main character, even your title character, to take a back seat to the rest of their ensemble now and then, but this isn’t Better Call Saul we’re talking about here. Giving Sabine, Ezra, Morgan, Thrawn, and arguably Hera and Huyang and even Shin more to do and feel in this episode than Ahsoka does speaks to a lack of focus that borders on storytelling malpractice.

Since the plot of this episode is so simple — our heroes try to stop Thrawn from escaping, while Thrawn tries to stop them from stopping him — it actually may be best to run down the characters one by one, simply to illustrate how lopsided the narrative has gotten. For example, as the heavy of the piece and the undisputed leader of the bad guy contingent, Thrawn is more the star of this episode than any other single character. This isn’t to his benefit, I’m afraid. His failure to kill three people riding on rat horses despite knowing their exact location on multiple occasions leads one to question his reputation as a master tactician. So does leaving the killing of these Jedi to the last minute, when he’s had a rough read on Ezra’s location for untold months. 

Be that as it may, Thrawn returns to Dathomir in the familiar Star Wars galaxy to become the leader of what remains of the Empire. He unwittingly brings Ezra along with him; the Jedi snuck aboard the ship with the help of Sabine’s Force telekinesis just before it took off. He did this by leaping into the open docking bay directly facing the platform where he and his fellow Jedi were fighting for their lives with Thrawn’s full knowledge; this docking bay was guarded by a total of two stormtroopers. Even after he dispatches them, he’s apparently still able to steal a shuttle and fly it directly to General Hera, with whom he has a standard Ahsoka reunion: The two characters stare at each other and speak to each other only briefly, and between yawning gaps of silence. But that’s just how these things are done on this show.

For her part, Sabine tests the extent of her Jedi powers on her feet. She, Ezra, Huyang, and Ahsoka dodge a volume of incoming enemy fire for seemingly the entire duration of the episode that is frankly preposterous, even by the standards of a franchise in which it has long been established that stormtroopers couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn. At times this involves battling zombie stormtroopers dubbed “nighttroopers,” who’ve been revived from the dead by the Great Mothers and who have the same headshot weakness George A. Romero established for the genre in 1968. What works in one galaxy works in them all, I suppose. The point is that by running this gauntlet and being forced to demonstrate a greater mastery of the Force, as well as by choosing to save her master — a lesson she’d learned in a heart-to-heart with Huyang, which is one more heart-to-heart than Ahsoka has in this episode — Sabine’s one of three characters who actually experiences growth in this episode. 

Next up is Morgan Elsbeth, who is given a magical makeover by the Great Mothers and rewarded with a flaming green sword that can duel with lightsabers, in the sequence that cold-opens this episode — very valuable real estate in a season finale. Not that it matters in the slightest, as she’s dead within the hour by Ahsoka’s blade. To my surprise, she didn’t rise again as an undead Force witch, as the nighttroopers had been revived, but perhaps that’s what Season 2 is for.

The third and final character to exhibit growth of a sort is Shin Hati, the false Jedi apprentice. In her brief, wordless scene, she appears to become the chieftain of the red raiders who have plagued our heroes and their turtle-bug pals (who remain adorable). I’d forgotten she and Baylan Skoll, who pops up even more briefly atop a large Lord of the Rings statue, were even still out there, although to be fair, so did all of the other characters.

Throughout this summary I’ve tried as hard as possible to avoid easy dunks on this episode, even though I think it deserves it and would have no problem coming up with a thousand words’ worth of them, because I don’t want a sarcastic tone to obscure my point for viewers more favorably disposed to the show than I am. I do, however, want that point to be clear: This is bad. 

It’s bad work. The acting is, at best, uninteresting, as is the case with Lars Mikkelsen’s Thrawn, whose clipped enunciation and grandiose air is rendered slightly comical by his manifest incompetence. At worst — Natasha Liu Bordizzo, Diana Lee Inosanto, and I’m sorry to say Rosario Dawson — it’s almost provocative in its soporific flatness, as if something experimental were being attempted. As it stands, we spend most of the episode watching performances created with what appears to be only a passing familiarity with actual human emotion. 

It’s bad work. The imagery, which honestly has been the show’s strong suit however much it has tended to overexpose us to its best visual ideas, completely fails the series here in the clutch. The zombie troopers are uninspired video game level bosses. The dark magic of the Great Mothers is green mist from a Hi-C commercial. There’s no color on the planet where all these fights and bombardments take place — a planet, moreover, where half the cast is now stranded for however long it takes the show to retrieve them. 

It’s bad work. The fights, which are both constant in occurrence and varied in form, all have in common a complete lack of tension, pacing, drama, or a genuine sense of physical stakes. Watching Ahsoka, Sabine, and Ezra just stand there swinging their lightsabers as phalanxes of troops stand opposite them and miss them from twenty feet away, multiple times, casts a glaring spotlight on the unbelievability of how combat works in the Star Wars universe. That’s as basic a “hey, things don’t work that way” as hearing explosions in space, but much as the editing and three-dimensionality of the best Star Wars dogfights makes you forget about that, strong fight choreography have long made complaints that you can’t block lasers with swords seem like churlish nitpicking. They sure don’t seem like it here.

It’s bad work. Creator, showrunner, and writer Dave Filoni’s script fails its characters again and again, from relegating Ahsoka to a bit player in her own story (those who think killing Morgan is a sufficient achievement should set their standards higher) to making military genius Grand Admiral Thrawn look like a moron. Its introduction of zombie stormtroopers feels like a dispatch from nerd culture a decade in the past at the least. It wastes its opening on a character who does nothing and then dies, and its ending on a silent stare between Ahsoka and the ghost of Anakin Skywalker, as though they hadn’t already had nearly an entire episode dedicated to them. 

It’s bad work. You deserve better as a Star Wars fan. This is true even if you don’t think so yourself.

This piece was written during the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike, after the victory of the WGA in their own strike over similar issues. Without the labor of the 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.