A Sucker to Know
Last night's Ahsoka was the best of the series so far. It was terrible but it had some nice design work and the writing was dumb in a slightly different way than in previous episodes. It reminded me of something stupid I noticed all the way back on an episode of Star Wars: Rebels.
I wrote in my 2017 review for an episode of Rebels called "Trials of the Darksaber";
Here Sabine casually caresses the Ghost's resident droid, Chopper, who shivers with apparent pleasure in response.
So . . . that was surprising. What was that? Oh, how I want Sabine and Chopper to be lovers. What a lovely can of worms that would be. Of course, I know that's not what's going on here but, egad, how happy I am to construe it that way. What's actually going on here, I'd say, is a further attempt to establish Sabine as a bona fide Disney princess.
In "Ghosts of Geonosis" she had her Tinker Bell moment, now she's having her Snow White/Cinderella/Aurora moment. The way those princesses seemed to have a perfectly innocent physical rapport with deer, mice, owls, and dwarfs, Sabine has it with Chopper. And now that we know she is a daughter in a major Mandalorian house with the potential to become leader of all Mandalorians thanks to inheritance, she's literally a princess.
Now think about Sabine's relationship with the horse/wolf mount that Thrawn's people just kindly handed over to her. It automatically seems to love her and seems to be making up for Sabine's persistent naivete. Just like the forest animals in Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Tangled, and so on. They really want Sabine to be a Disney princess.
They may have leaned in way to hard on the naivete angle. She just seems intensely stupid most of the time. After, by pure dumb luck, the Empire gives her a mount to explore a totally alien planet, she gets angry with it and argues with it after it gets spooked by her fight with the bandits. She doesn't thank her lucky stars that she doesn't have to go on foot across a wasteland with no food and water. She decides to argue with the animal instead. It has to beg for the pleasure of carrying her ass across the hellscape. I'm inclined to think there's some, perhaps unconscious, misogyny in this writing.
By more pure, dumb luck, she runs into some cute snail people who just so happen to be taking care of Ezra. They offer her food the moment she gets to their camp which she refuses and, okay, maybe their food would kill her but when was the last time she ate? Also, I couldn't help hearing Indiana Jones in my head; "You're insulting them and embarrassing me."
And there was Ezra, hale and hearty on snail people food. Their reunion was another moment that compelled me to marvel at how void Dave Filoni is of imagination. Their casual hellos had the vibe of Luke Cage running into Danny Rand. Scratch that, Luke Cage and Danny Rand were more excited to see each other. And they lived in the same city. Sabine just travelled to another galaxy, potentially sacrificing her own to do so. Ezra hasn't seen a friendly human in more than a decade but he's casual about it, too. Compare that to Han's reunion with Lando in Empire. Luke's reunion with Biggs in A New Hope. People used to have emotions in the Star Wars universe. Hell, a passionate kiss wouldn't have been out of order. Dave Filoni consistently tees himself up and whiffs.
We only see Ahsoka herself briefly at the beginning where she and Huyang seem to be treating the intergalactic ride in a space whale like a car wash. They're bored! They're killing time with stories.
Meanwhile, the bad guys arrive on the planet of moorland. Baylon and his apprentice, Shin, have a conversation that's so badly written, it's like it came from a first draft in a community college creative writing class. Baylon explains to Shin that this is a place of madness and dreams and the subject of folklore in the familiar Star Wars galaxy. Thanks for the infodump because we're certainly not going to see any of this. Despite this legendary background to the place, Baylon and Morgan had seemed bored and barely interested, of course, when they first arrived at the planet.
Lars Mikkelsen brings some welcome subtlety to his performance as Thrawn. In fact, since he's so nice to Sabine, and the New Republic council all seemed like slobbering assholes, I started to wonder if Thrawn taking over wouldn't be such a bad thing.
And yes, we got Ezra last night, too, and he's looking biblical, just like his namesake. I still wonder why Filoni chose names from the bible for Kanan and Ezra.
Star Wars: Ahsoka is available on Disney+.