This evening saw the debut of the third installment of Lucasfilm’s live-action Disney+ series Star Wars: Ahsoka, and below are my recap and thoughts on the episode.
I’ve always been of the mind that one major advent of the streaming age (and pay-cable TV era before that) is that television episodes can be as long as they need to be, instead of having to conform to a certain predetermined length in order to make room for a certain number of commercials. That being said, having an episode of a dramatic show be around the 35-minutes-or-less length means there isn’t a lot of time for much to happen, as is the case with tonight’s new installment of Star Wars: Ahsoka, entitled “Time to Fly.” The episode opens with the title character, former Jedi Padawan Ahsoka Tano (played by Rosario Dawson) on her way to a mysterious planet with her apprentice Sabine Wren (Natasha Liu Bordizzo) and their ancient droid friend Huyang (David Tennant), who used to be a lightsaber professor at the Jedi Temple. During their journey through hyperspace, Huyang and Ahsoka both attempt to continue Sabine’s training in sword combat, though she’s self-admittedly a little rusty thanks to it having been a few years since she picked up a saber. Ahsoka makes Sabine try the old Luke-Skywalker-in-a-blast-shield trick, but Sabine not being Force-sensitive makes that challenge just a bit more difficult.
We get some discussion here about whether or not Sabine is even suited to become a Jedi, building off of Huyang’s comment last week, but Ahsoka seems to think one can actually be trained to use the Force, and at any rate she suggests a Jedi may not be specifically what she’s looking for Sabine to become. Then we cut back to Home One, where General Hera Syndulla (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) has a holo-conference call with some New Republic senators and Chancellor Mon Mothma (guest star Genevieve O’Reilly, reprising her role from Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, and most recently Star Wars: Andor), requesting backup from the fleet for the mission to track down Grand Admiral Thrawn. Unfortunately a Senator named Hamato Xiono (Nelson Lee from 2020’s live-action Mulan, embodying a character first introduced in the Star Wars Resistance animated series) poo-poos the idea and Hera reports back to Ahsoka and Sabine that they’ll have to go it alone. When it comes time for Ahsoka’s T-6 shuttle to drop out of hyperspace near the planet Seatos, they’re immediately attacked by Morgan Elsbeth’s (Diana Lee Inosanto) underlings piloting starfighters. Some fancy flying, one lightsaber-wielding spacewalk, and a jaw-dropping Purrgil close encounter later, and our heroes are able to land safely on the planet’s surface, though Baylan Skoll (Ray Stevenson), Shin Hati (Ivanna Sakhno), and Marrok (Paul Darnell) are still on the hunt.
I should also mention that this episode saw the debut of Evan Whitten (from Destroyer and Chupa) as Hera and the late Jedi Knight Kanan Jarrus’s son Jacen Syndulla, though the green-haired half-human-half-Twi’lek doesn’t have a whole lot to do. That’s about it, and while I thought it was all really solid stuff, it was just over way too quickly and the ending didn’t feel satisfying to me on an individual episode basis. I recognize that Ahsoka is obviously going to be more serialized than The Mandalorian before it, but c’mon, Dave Filoni– you gotta give me more to go on for the next week. Okay, we did learn a little more about how the Purrgil are connected to long-forgotten hyperspace lanes, one of which took Ezra and Thrawn to a Galaxy Even Further Away, and we saw some competition brewing between the baddies, but I just need a little more forward momentum than that. Consequently, “Time to Fly” feels just a tiny bit slight, though I’m sure it will play better once we can appreciate it as part of the whole.
The first three episodes of Star Wars: Ahsoka are available to stream right now, exclusively via Disney+.