Ahsoka would possibly repair one of many Star Wars sequel trilogy’s largest issues

If watching Ahsoka feels a bit like strolling in on the center of a narrative as an alternative of the start, that’s as a result of it form of is. Whereas it’s not billed as such, the newest live-action Star Wars present may be very a lot a sequel to the animated sequence Star Wars Rebels, reuniting its forged to inform the following chapter in a narrative that creator Dave Filoni and his collaborators have been telling, in a single kind or one other, since The Clone Wars premiered on Cartoon Community in 2008. That mentioned, it’s additionally a follow-up to plot threads launched within the second season of The Mandalorian, and, presumably, setup for considered one of three forthcoming Star Wars movies.

Ahsoka, nevertheless, is modern to the story The Mandalorian is telling, and subsequently set throughout a time for which there are only a few canonical Star Wars tales: the New Republic period, the nebulous 30-year hole between Return of the Jedi and The Drive Awakens. This implies it’s seemingly that Filoni is utilizing Ahsoka to do for the sequel trilogy what he’s already well-known for doing for the prequels: to elucidate what the films wouldn’t, and make the Star Wars film canon make some form of sense.

That is Filoni’s power. He’s maybe the foremost Star Wars continuity physician, a man recognized for utilizing seven seasons of The Clone Wars to rehabilitate the prequel trilogy’s popularity by foregrounding and exploring plenty of the concepts these films simply breeze by. He’s a fan’s fan, the form of one that has thought that we should always have some rationalization for why it was really easy for the Clone Troopers to activate the Jedi throughout Order 66, or how the Jedi realized to turn into Drive Ghosts. And when Disney’s 2012 acquisition of Lucasfilm led to the canonical slate being cleaned except for the films and The Clone Wars, Filoni, in his position as supervising director on The Clone Wars, was out of the blue accountable for a lot of Star Wars canon that he had led improvement on in live performance with George Lucas.

Picture: Lucasfilm

The primary two episodes of Ahsoka counsel Filoni is popping his eye towards the sequel trilogy as properly. In case you’re the form of fan who asks the sorts of questions Filoni requested concerning the prequels in The Clone Wars, then you definately would possibly be a bit bothered by the seemingly sudden and whole collapse of the triumphant New Republic after The Drive Awakens appeared to erase all the hard-earned wins of the unique trilogy.

Ahsoka suggests it’s heading towards a solution: the looming risk posed by Grand Admiral Thrawn, an Imperial legend thought defeated after the conclusion of Rebels. It’s a neat little answer, a option to additional reintegrate Thrawn — one of the crucial common villains from the outdated Star Wars Expanded Universe (aka the Legends timeline) — into the present canon and stage a disaster massive sufficient to suffocate the nascent New Republic and depart it weak to the First Order.

It’s a tantalizing thought, however there’s some hazard on this strategy. A power of The Clone Wars was its anthology construction, a roving focus that allowed it to inform tales about characters all around the galaxy, exploring all method of concepts. This gave it a unfastened really feel that, whereas it was canon, didn’t make it really feel prefer it was placing forth the ultimate phrase on something. It was only one imaginative and prescient for the Star Wars universe, given the liberty to outline a particular interval in time.

Picture: Lucasfilm

Ought to Filoni use Ahsoka to increase this logic to the New Republic period and the sequel trilogy, then it turns into an integral hyperlink within the chain, eradicating the largest power of exhibits like The Clone Wars and Rebels: They made Star Wars really feel larger. Right here had been characters who may — and did — work together with heavies like Anakin and Obi-Wan, however primarily spent their time in their very own nook of the galaxy, with one other forged of characters unrelated to the movies and their well-trod territory.

It’s an comprehensible impulse to wish to see plenty of disparate elements of Star Wars lore come collectively to kind a coherent complete, and it’s doable that Ahsoka might be a profitable step in that undertaking. It might reward over a decade of fan funding, a substantial quantity of which started with children watching The Clone Wars on TV — seeing the world of Star Wars come full circle in a satisfying means as an grownup can be undoubtedly cool. However plenty of the magic of Star Wars is in what we don’t know. And what we may, if we left the dual suns we’ve lived beneath all our lives in favor of the hazard and discomfort of one thing unfamiliar.