fevered.earth

Tag: Ahsoka Tano

  • Ahsoka (episodes 3, 4, 5, 6)

    Last time we picked up the tale of Ahsoka Tano, former cartoon.

    Hayden Christensen, star of Obi-wan, makes his on-screen return.

    Look I’m sorry — I really am — but I’m struggling to care about Ahsoka. Despite my initial optimism, born of a desire to come to any work of art without preconception, in a state of pure innocence, my interest just hasn’t sustained. Part of this blame can rightly be portioned out to the show itself, which in a call-back to the dire days of Obi-wan spent a good three and a half episodes spinning its wheels (the plus points of those first two episodes quickly passing out of memory), followed by a passable but slight subsequent two and a half following. Part of it must sit with me.

    The good then, in brief: Thrawn is a passable villain. He has been introduced far too late in the game, and yet we were never allowed to be unaware of him, muting the possibility of the other villains (and this show is stacked with them) taking the fore. The Lord of the Rings planet is novel and spooky, though the proto-Hobbits were laying it on a bit thick and the action scene where Sabine fought the space-Orcs was dry. The threat of additional space-Orcs is dryer still. And the laser sword fight between Ahsoka and Ray Stevenson was delightful — bizarre that it was in the same episode as the placid duel between Sabine (motivation: have her opponent hang around a bit) and Shin (motivation: have her opponent hang around a bit).

    The bad, well: Let’s consider.

    I’ve failed to mention of course the triumphant return of Hayden Christensen, who is apparently allowed to be in these things so long as he doesn’t hang around too much. His episode-long ‘A’-story in Ahsoka’s mind palace hits all the nostalgia notes for Episode II, and were I structuring these essays in a sensible and planned manner this would be a prime time to tackle that film and Christensen’s performance therein.

    Hint I have however, with my use of the television-land language of ‘‘A’-story’, at what is ultimately bothering me about Ahsoka more than anything. It’s television. This is the most crushingly unfair of complaints, but at the root it’s what is turning me off. Obi-wan was never sure whether it was a diced-up movie or a cinematic miniseries, but Ahsoka is teevee, capital-T Television, with the ‘A’-story and the ‘B’-story and the self-contained episode plot always in an uneasy truce with the grand plot arc, in a way TV writers think was finally solved by Buffy the Vampire Slayer but it really wasn’t. Thrawn gets mentioned all the time because it’s foreshadowing, not because I should be expecting him to appear onscreen. There’s filler episodes because TV needs filler episodes. Ahsoka is what it aims to be and what it aims to be just isn’t for me. The same was true (but more recognisable) in Mandolorian. I’d be better off picking off standalone exceptional episodes than trying to take my medicine weekly like I have been.

    To me, Star Wars is cinema — the grand image, the swelling score, the single most important story that has ever been told playing out on screen in front of you. There’s no room in my Star Wars for day-to-day trials and tribulations. There’s no room for forty minutes of Ahsoka training Sabine. When Sabine is finally reunited with her lost paramour Ezra (no relation), she seems… pleased. Andor fooled me into thinking that I could watch a Star Wars TV show by being not Star Wars and not being really a TV show. More fool me.

    The show recognises that akin to Vader in Rogue One, Genevieve O’Reilly’s Mon Mothma can only appear in the same room as the cast of Ahsoka as an image, a representation, a spectre.

    I have fairer complaints. Green Mary Elizabeth Winstead has graduated from pebble-in-your-shoe to millstone-around-your-neck in terms of frustrating characterisation. You fought a war, Green Mary Elizabeth Winstead! You should be able to compellingly navigate a bureaucracy! You should be able to put your own contact lenses in!

    The decision to cast a different actor for young Ahsoka in the scenes opposite Christensen is really baffling. Dawson as Ahsoka hasn’t exactly been stretched by the demands of the role, among other tasks spending the entire Episode 6 reclined in a chair, so giving the scene with all the emotions to an (admittedly talented) newbie puts in a weird distance between the main actor and the scenes.

    There’s some real bite in the images of fallen Clone Troopers here, which flow into the next episode’s guerilla Stormtroopers.

    The space whales are a particularly baffling piece of errata brought over from the cartoon. Structurally in the episode, interacting with them is the reward of the wisdom Ahsoka gains from confronting her personal demons and facing Anakin/Vader. Why facing down Vader permits you to talk to a whale is left by the show as an exercise for the viewer. It’s a nice visual though.

    I’m typing this out shortly before a new episode (7 of a total 8) is released. Perhaps it will sew this all together into one suitably grandiose narrative. Or perhaps it will cement my concern that this is all just marketing pre-roll for an upcoming return to movie theaters, with nothing of consequence being concluded: a final shot of a freed Thrawn vowing revenge on the galaxy, eight episodes to build what Rise of Skywalker achieved with a single Fortnite tie-in. Or perhaps it will be more jigsaw pieces settling themselves into the big patchwork board of Dave Filoni Star Wars TV shows, of interest to some (and very validly so, I should add) but maybe not, in the end, to me.

    George would have fixed this in post, that’s all I’m saying here.

    Previously:

    1. Obi-wan: Episode 1
    2. Obi-wan: Episode 2
    3. Obi-wan: Episode 3
    4. Obi-wan: Episode 4
    5. Obi-wan: Episode 5
    6. Obi-wan: Episode 6
    7. The Phantom Menace (video essay)
    8. Andor: Episodes 1, 2, 3
    9. “Can Andor save Star Wars from itself?” Andor: Episodes 4, 5, 6 (plus supplemental)
    10. Andor: Episode 7
    11. Andor: Episodes 8, 9, 10
    12. Andor: Episodes 11, 12
    13. Ahsoka: Episodes 1, 2
    14. Ahsoka: Episodes 3, 4, 5, 6

    If you like my writing, watch my new video essay The Fanatic, available now with a short companion essay kindly published by Blood Knife. If you’re after more text, please follow me on Medium or subscribe to my Letterboxd reviews.

  • Ahsoka (episodes 1 & 2)

    Way back last November I was talking about Andor and loose ends.

    The goofy headdress gives her something of Vader’s profile at a glance.

    It’s pathological at this point. I keep going back. Like every true Star Wars fan, all I want to talk about is this Star Wars that I don’t like (Obi-wan, you may recall). The signs were not promising here, as the next in a series of underwhelming Disney+ live action TV shows across all of their fetid intellectual properties, the trailer for Ahsoka made a baffling show of underwhelming face paint and robots fighting in a grey scrapyard. Regardless though, with the mood of a wayward child spitefully trekking upstairs to bed, I sat myself down and watched the first two episodes.

    It’s a continuation — I understand — of the cartoons, which are an element of Star Wars I deemed far too ‘expanded universe’ for my tastes circa 2003, and I’ve still only seen half of the Tartakovsky series, as well as a handful of Clone Wars episodes when it was briefly available on UK Netflix. I am aware though basic cultural osmosis that there is a character named ‘Ahsoka’, a female Jedi with two laser swords who was Anakin Skywalker’s apprentice before he had to go back to be in the regular movies*. Ahsoka is an interesting protagonist, being introduced in a Raiders-of-the-Lost-Ark-esque sequence where she breaks into a tomb, solves a puzzle, then emerges with the prize to find her enemies waiting. You’d be forgiven at first for thinking her a bit of a generic badass, but once she has to interact with the show’s secondary characters the character gains some fun dimensions: she’s awkward, a touch cold, very direct, and easy irritating. She’s not making any quips, is what’s important — an invaluable trait that keeps the whole thing from feeling utterly trivial.

    I was horrified in the opening scroll that this whole thing was going to be about tracking down this secret map-sphere, in the fashion of Force Awakens. Thankfully it is not.

    Secondary protagonist Sabine, Ahsoka’s own disappointing protege, is exactly the quip-primed badass who plays by no-one’s rules you might expect of a modern Star War. The first episode smartly undercuts this by immediately making Ahsoka completely correct in her narrow estimations of the character — once Ahsoka’s Padawan as she was Anakin’s — as Sabine loses the priceless magic map-apple that Ahsoka grave-robbed in the opening. Green Mary Elizabeth Winstead, who seems oddly underserved by the smirk-heavy acting direction in these first two episodes, is the Zordon-like figure nudging these plucky kids around and David Tennant plays a camp robot in the finest Star Wars tradition.

    Green Mary Elizabeth Winstead is about as far from Stellen Skarsgård as you can get, but they’re in similar roles.

    It’s pleasant, it should be noted, to be enjoying a Star Wars property fronted by a series of women. Leia and Padme were great characters but often perhaps a tad outnumbered. The only other prominent male characters in these first two episodes are gravel voiced non-Jedi Ray Stevenson, and the guy who played Taub in House M.D., seen here playing a Taub-like character who apparently gets arrested at the end just for being a useless tit. Ahsoka, Sabine, Green Mary Elizabeth Winstead, tertiary antagonist Shin, looming primary antagonist ‘Morgan Elsbeth’ (might want to check if there’s an even more witch-like name in the back), it’s a bold move for a series that famously had executives twisting themselves into knots over whether The Last Jedi’s Rose Tico was permitted to appear in another movie.

    It’s not Andor, of course, but it’d be weird if it was. This is Star Wars in the form of Star Wars, and there’s a pleasing charm to seeing the aesthetic elements that Andor turned to new ends played straight. Showrunner Filoni was deemed something of a designated heir to the setting by Lucas and by contrast to Obi-wan (and Solo, Force Awakens, Last Jedi) which seemed to fear the association of the prequels Filoni appears to have a grasp of what it all means, what it’s all supposed to convey. The New Republic here appears in the negative space left by the Empire it deposed, nerdy types in cosplay helmets standing in the formations previously held by Imperial Stormtroopers, or going back further Trade Federation Battle Droids. Antagonist Ray Stevenson and his apprentice are introduced in a delightful mash-up of the start of A Phantom Menace and A New Hope, announcing themselves as two Jedi and performing a daring jailbreak (full marks to the Captain in this sequence, who does a note-perfect impression of Picard at his most cavalier).

    Nerd alert. Someone has put a plastic bin on that R2 unit.

    Where Ahsoka fails to live up to Lucas’s sextet is only in the melodrama of it all — hopefully this will ramp up as the series goes on. Anakin’s troubles are all-encompassing, with the score swelling in the beautiful setting as he curses that he cannot love Padme. Luke’s longing to leave Tatoonine is inflamed as he stares at the double sunset. And so on. Ahsoka is ‘just’ TV, for its sins. Hopefully it can transcend. There’s more than enough in these first two episodes for me to keep watching, I think — the only other possibility is that this sickness for watching Star Wars is a sickness unto death.

    Oh god I’m back on a Star War. Previously:

    1. Obi-wan: Episode 1
    2. Obi-wan: Episode 2
    3. Obi-wan: Episode 3
    4. Obi-wan: Episode 4
    5. Obi-wan: Episode 5
    6. Obi-wan: Episode 6
    7. The Phantom Menace (video essay)
    8. Andor: Episodes 1, 2, 3
    9. “Can Andor save Star Wars from itself?” Andor: Episodes 4, 5, 6 (plus supplemental)
    10. Andor: Episode 7
    11. Andor: Episodes 8, 9, 10
    12. Andor: Episodes 11, 12
    13. Ahsoka: Episodes 1, 2

    If you like my writing, watch my new video essay The Fanatic, available now with a short companion essay kindly published by Blood Knife. If you’re after more text, please follow me on Medium or subscribe to my Letterboxd reviews.

    (*) Is it congruent with Revenge of the Sith to suggest that Anakin trained an apprentice? It’s certainly a decision in the characterisation — solely watching the films, you might be tempted to imagine Anakin a sheltered youth, too long kept tucked under the wing of his teacher and master. The thought that he had his own run at being the teacher, while obviously doomed in any portrayal of the character (“Join me, and together we can rule the galaxy as father and son!”), makes him a decidedly more social animal.

    At some point in the script this was a classic Star Wars de-hand and we have been robbed.