I decided to give Ahsoka a shot. I put it off at first, because I had started watching Rebels a few months ago, and was in the second season, and the promotional material suggested this was a sequel to Rebels, thus might have spoilers, so I decided to wait until I finished rebels. Then I decided the show ought to be able to stand on its own, and it’s not like Rebels was going to be hugely consequential given how the Star Wars universe works. I mean, I’m not watching each episode wondering if the characters are going to die, and we’ve already seen the big cat guy make a cameo in Mandalorian. So I’m going into this with a loose knowledge of who the Rebels characters are, though IDK why they are in this show, since I don’t remember getting to any connection to Rebels. I also saw the Kenobi dumpster fire, and knowing about the Grand Inquisitor did not ruin his appearance in Rebels for me. So here we go.
Beyond Season 1 of Rebels, I saw the Clone Wars movie, with Ahsoka as a child (she was Anakin’s padawan) and her cameo appearances in The Mandalorian.

1:00 They’re bringing back Thrawn, it looks like. IDK how I feel about that. He kind of felt like a Mary Sue villain, who became an author’s pet, that Timothy Zahn desperately wanted to remake into a hero. I have zero confidence in the ability of Filoni et al to handle someone as OP as Thrawn well, or to competently depict someone as competent as Thrawn is supposed to be.

1:11 It’s Force Awakens all over again. Ahsoka has to find a map to thwart the plan. And there is someone called Morgan Elsbeth, whom I don’t know if they were in another story.

2:58 How will the old white male fare going forward, since he is the only person standing between a square-jawed woman of color and command of the ship? I wonder…

The question here I guess is, does the captain die in the attack to take the prisoner off the ship, or is he going to be a bureaucratic obstacle to Ahsoka who needs to talk to the prisoner for map-hunting clues?

And for the record, we’re already getting into typical Disney incompetence at security. These Jedi with no names or faces as yet want to see the prisoner, they can damn well go through channels, and in the meantime, they should be told clear out of the system if they want to be in the good graces of the New Republic. You don’t want irregularities if your whole mission is about handing off a prisoner.

3:14 That’s a lot of short security people. How many women?

4:40 This is why captains don’t do this crap! When there is a potential security issue, this hanger should be closed, and at the first sign of trouble, venting the whole thing into space.

5:33 This scene is a blatant rip-off of Vader going through the rebels in Rogue One. And not as well done. Are there no doors that close on this vessel? Part of the tension in Rogue One was that the door was stuck and they were trapped in the corridor with him, and they had to pass something on past the stuck door. Here, they are trying to prevent the Sith’s progress, but nothing else, so all they need to do is start locking things down. Even the elevators should have been locked down the minute the fighting started.

And if they are using the Force to override all of that stuff, it should be shown.

6:33 So Morgan Elsbeth is a woman, and apparently the main antagonist of the season, with this Baylan as her muscle and his apprentice as the foil for Ahsoka. Did we need six and a half minutes to establish that Morgan was liberated from custody by Sith or mercenary users of the Dark Side? It’s not they established the threat in any real way. Baylan and the girl didn’t perform to any higher standard than you would expect for two people competent with the Force, and we have no investment in the crew.

7:58 I don’t like the Disney (or EU for that matter) emphasis on Jedi archaeology. As established in the (good) movies, all a Jedi needs is the Force. This is not magic, that you need rituals and artifacts to increase your capabilities. Yoda and Obi-Wan went into exile to prepare to overthrow the Sith and the Empire with nothing but their lightsabers. They did not go to ancient temples or carry off relics to protect them from defilement or keep them out of the hands of the Sith.

10:27 Setting aside the tedium of the weak ass Indiana Jones crap, by a company that has already proven they suck at doing actual Indiana Jones, you can’t have a scene all about mastering the properties, and understanding the workings of this place, that starts with her hacking her way in through the ceiling. All this fussing over precise alignment of the stuff in the room only highlights how lucky it is that Ahsoka didn’t cut something critical and that the sunbeam she has let in is not disrupting the lights inside.

Also, how does this help find Thrawn? Is he constraining his movements to conform to these ancient mechanisms?

11:30 If she could chop her way into the room, and use the Force to sense how things work, why could she not just cut into the floor and pull the thing out? The location was not exactly counter-intuitive, being in the center of the pattern on the floor and of the carvings.

12:49 Oh, boy. More hand to hand combat. This is not nearly as cool as they want us to think it is. There is no threat here, and it proves nothing about Ahsoka, merely that her enemy is foolish enough to accommodate themselves to the limitations of her weaponry. They should be pointing heavy blasters at her. Remember how in Phantom Menace, Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan ran from TWO droids with heavy weapons and shields? Those destroyer droids didn’t have them surrounded, either. These droids are just brandishing their spears, from atop rubble they will have to climb down from to use.

13:24 It had a gun! I had a gun and led with a spear! I note an additional instance of Ahsoka being able to sense things through stone, with the ability to cut very precise circles, very fast around the droids, reinforcing my earlier complaint about working the stupid combination to the vault.

Also, the captions say “Multiple blasters firing”. More than one of them had a gun.

13:33 But they aren’t shooting any more, and the one droid advanced on her with the spear instead of shooting, bringing it within reach of her lightsabers, one of which seems unusually short.

13:44 Now what was happening in the vault, after she cut the circles under the droids? She was down there for a couple of seconds with three droids and they didn’t do anything, and she didn’t take them out as soon as they fell? Why did it take them so long to climb out if she didn’t?

14:29 This is unbelievably stupid. Why not send one of those droids in and just do the suicide thing and a second one to pick through the ashes to find Ahsoka’s corpse with the ball? Don’t tell me the ball is in danger of destruction, that indicates the Imperials or whoever is behind this is willing to give up on the whole thing the minute the droids encounter a setback (only 2 of 5 being destroyed). For that matter, why climb out of the hole and give her warning to run? An explosion of this scale and scope might be lessened by the blast being in an underground chamber (with four man-sized holes in the ceiling) but not so much that Ahsoka can escape if she doesn’t have all that advance warning.

15:45 Fulcrum was the code name Ahsoka used when dealing with the main characters in Rebels. She was their unseen contact, who only talked to the pilot, Hera, until she was revealed in the first season finale.

17:22 She barely looks like Hera. They are apparently the same species and she dresses just like Hera, but nope.

17:27 Her demeanor is not a lot like Hera’s either. She’s awfully flippant and seems almost amused at Morgan getting away.

17:40 Why was the Mon Calamari seeming to be providing medical treatment to the person lying with a leg cocked, in the hanger? On a ship this size, as long as it has been since the attack, shouldn’t all the casualties be in the sickbay?

17:49 Ahsoka is looking at the backs of the heads of people wearing hoods and says she doesn’t know who they are.

17:55 “They seemed to have abilities like you” says a woman who was flying around for several seasons with a Jedi and an apprentice. Hera should be sufficiently familiar with this sort of thing to say “they seemed to have been using the Force.”

18:00 No, there are not few who can wield the Force these days, we were originally told there were five, depending on your count, except Disney Star Wars can resist making OC Jedi every time you turn around. How many did Hera run into in Rebels? How many popped up in Ahsoka’s cartoons? The only show that paid more than lip service to the Jedi being purged and gone was Andor. Which, uniquely among Star Wars shows, did not have any affiliation with Filoni and Favreau, to the best of my knowledge, or suck.

19:20 Hera’s headgear did not adapt well to live action. It really looks silly and she looks frumpy. She was not exactly a sexy type, but this looks like who she’d be after settling down and having a couple kids.

20:36 Is Ezra dead? Unless they are talking about a character introduced later in Rebels, the only “she” I can think of would be Sabine. IDK why a rebellious teenage Mandalorian would be able to open this map ball if no one else can. And that means Mandalorians are become as ubiquitous as lightsabers in this setting.

20:49 “On this day, several years ago, the Empire was defeated” Who talks like that? They don’t remember how many years ago? Historians might argue in hindsight when the Empire was really defeated, when the remnants are considered to have been beaten for good, but if they have a celebration and can pin the Empire’s defeat to a date, the year should not be in question in their minds.

21:13 Clancy Brown. Is he going to be the latest “too good for this crap” actor?

21:28 Yeah, I’m not at all surprised she’s not there. Sabine doesn’t exactly cooperate.

22:27 That really doesn’t look much like them either. Hera looks a little better than she does live.

23:09 Only dramatic awareness told me that was Sabine. Not her appearance.

23:48 She sounds like Wren at least. That being said, why are ships being deployed to get her to make a speech? If she’s not in the service anymore, the governor shouldn’t have the authority to do it, and if she is, she should be in a lot of trouble for not being where she is ordered.

24:55 That might have been more impressive, if the IP had not established the operational capabilities of every single vehicle in the setting as “whatever is convenient for the plot.”

Why did that speeder have to slew sideways and half roll over to fit under the plane? Bikes have to do that, because they are much taller than they are wide, especially with a person straddling it. But these speeders, no so much, as long as the rider ducks.

27:55 Is that Liandrin in the background?

28:19 As I remember from the book in which they were introduced, the Nightsisters of Dathomir were primitive tribal shamans. IDK what they were doing building ruined temples on desert planets, unless the ones who appeared in a book set around this time (so precisely defined as “several years” after the defeat of the Empire), were refugees whose civilization was trashed, like Robert Howard’s Atlanteans devolving to Cimmerians.

28:46 Baylan sounds like Ray Stevenson! And he said “Either the Jedi has the map, or it’s vaporized.” Maybe someone should have thought of that before sending in droids with overkill self-destruct mechanisms. Between IG-11’s failure to destroy more than his legs and part of his memory and these guys nuking a whole temple complex, droid self-destruct mechanisms seem to be yet another thing that works exactly as the plot requires.

28:53 That is totally Ray Stevenson. That facial expression on top of the voice. Does this mean, this is going to be his last work before his death. He deserved so much better.

29:48 Honestly, they said (I thought) that Thrawn disappeared after the Battle of Lothal, so it seems to me that would be a great place to start looking for him, whether or not Sabine is moping around in Ezra’s old squatter hole.

32:40 I’m kind of curious what happened to Ezra, since they were acting like he was dead, but Sabine’s reaction to Ahsoka’s words indicates they take it for granted like he is alive and this is not news. It’s like he went off with Thrawn, having made an agreement to stay in a place that matches a map hidden in an ancient Nightsister temple.

Also, I am very much getting a vibe that Sabine is going to be more of a protagonist, or at least character of interest, than Ahsoka, who will merely stand around being iconic and starring in plot-driven action scenes.

33:24 Did Sabine & Ezra live on Ahsoka’s ship at some point? This doesn’t look like the Ghost.

34:01 Their preferred term is “Nightsisters.”

34:18 Ahsoka brought the map ball to Sabine because she’s a graffiti artist, and this is as close Dave Filoni’s extant stable of characters comes to a cryptographer?

Wow. I could not have come up with the rationales Disney Star Wars routinely uses, if I was trying to imagine the dumbest ones possible.

34:31 That’s not what codex means.

38:16 So the lightsaber is exactly like Huyang taught students to make them, and also unique to Baylan. Make up your mind.

39:41 It’s like clockwork that our spunky heroine doesn’t follow the rules even though she indicates she understands the importance of them, and leaves herself and/or the cause open to disaster, and of course there will not be any comeuppance for her, or she will divert the rebuke with a fallacious argument.

And for the record, those look like the same droids Ahsoka encountered, so we can’t even claim that Morgan and Baylan were not responsible for that botched retrieval mission and just picking through the mess a third party made.

42:10 Usually the animal comparison with stubborn is mulish, not bullish. Bullish is almost exclusively a stock market term, and a positive one, at that. Bulls are not known for being obstinate, but for aggression, often stupidly so. Someone who is bull headed is usually one who goes ahead with whatever they want, not heeding other input. Refusing to cooperate is more often attribute to mules.

I don’t see how either trait is particularly pertinent to Mandalorians.

42:19 Hera’s head tentacles need to be smaller and thinner. That’s the problem. They make her face look diminished as it is.

43:41 How much footage do we need of Sabine in this dump. We get it, she’s frustrated. Because there is nothing to establish that she is a cryptographer or cartographer. It looks like the end of this episode will be the revelation to move ahead to the next step in the quest.

45:00 From the music, she’s onto something, which means just as she gets it, or is about to, Darth Bangs is going to attack.

45:55 Okay, why was Ahsoka able to work out the combination in the vault through the force or matching the surrounding patterns, but it never occurred to her to use the exact same method to open this map ball? And, in turn, why is any of this set up this way? What is the point of having this elaborate temple configured to conceal this map ball? Why does the map ball open or reveal its data if its surface is rearranged in the combination matching the décor of the temple interior? How and why does this ancient artifact explain where Thrawn is? Why is all this information so complex to access if it was recorded for the purposes of access, and if it was intended to be concealed, why was it done in such a piss poor manner than can be solved so easily and quickly?

46:42 So it CAN use blasters without failing to get its spear into play. But why did it wait until it was standing on the platform instead of shooting as soon as she was in sight? Shouldn’t robot limbs be able to lock onto a position without worrying about breath and pulse and other biological annoyances disrupting the aim?

46:56 What is also the point of a robot if a small human can successfully grapple it hand to hand? And why, if the first droid opened fire as soon as it encountered its target, why did the other one run up and grab Sabine, instead of shooting her from behind, while she was preoccupied with the first one?

48:14 Also, are we supposed to believe that in the time Sabine called for help, gave enough of an explanation to motivate a supercilious, procedurally-obsessed droid to pass along her request, and dramatically retrieved her lightsaber, the droid only got a few feet outside to where Darth Bangs was waiting?

And Sabine is kind of shit in that she took an object that a Jedi was concerned with protecting and did not bother to arm herself in order to protect it, while she had it in an isolated and remote location.

48:37 Also, while Sabine poses and stares down Darth Bangs like a badass, that droid could, or should, be sprinting for her ship as fast its pistons can crank, ensuring the bad guys retain possession of the map.

50:14 Of course, the droid was just standing there watching the fight, because we have to protect the plot-blessed characters from the consequences of their own mistakes. Any success the good guys have in recovering or retaining that map ball is purely an own goal by the bad guys.

50:23 All these Disney shows have to have lightsaber duels, and I can’t help but notice how crappy Disney lightsaber duels are compared to the original trilogy. After the first one, between Vader and Obi-Wan, they move over different ground, they have multiple dimensions to them. There are obstacles and they interact with their environment. These shows, and even the sequel films are just straightforward duels, with a lot of emphasis on clever footwork and blade handling that often is not very clever, such as by turning their backs on armed opponents and so forth.

50:30 Sorry, Disney. You’ve had too many people run through the torso with a lightsaber and come back from it. Ain’t buying this means anything.

50:36 All Darth Bangs does is glare with her head hunched forward. Sabine is clearly flailing, but Bangs can’t be bothered to take another shot at her before running off. She was completely unaware of the ship’s approach, until she had to turn around and ascertain that it’s not on her side. And rather than stop her or go after the droid with the map, and leave taking care of the wounded Sabine whose fault this all is to Huyang, I will bet Ahsoka will let them get away.

50:57 That’s very nice of them to dedicate this to the memory of the late, great, Ray Stevenson. A nicer gesture be would not humiliating his memory by making his last work into total dogshit.

51:53 Mary Elizabeth Winstead is in this. Wow, green makeup makes everyone look bad. I am assuming she is playing Hera, because that’s the only sufficiently prominent female character, and she does not look like Winstead. She looks older and much less attractive.

Episode Two
1:23 They release more than one episode at once, and yet have a recap for the prior episode, that almost no one is going to watch at a sufficiently distant time to have forgotten. Why didn’t they have a recap in the first episode, catching us up on the end of the Rebels show, and introducing Hera and Sabine to people who have never watched it?

4:20 Another magical Stonehenge thingy. Have I mentioned I hate this conflation of the Force with bog-standard fantasy magic?

5:17 In a galaxy far, far away, you have to walk to the ship to contact someone. Even if you can’t carry an interstellar communication device on your person, you’d think they’d have a way of linking a personal device to the ship. Because real conversations don’t happen in scripts, so there will never be an issue where the person making the call runs back out to relay a question to the boss, and then back in to relay the answer to the person on the other end and so on.

7:50 Wow, great job taking out that droid, Sabine. Taking out being her description of the fight. Not sure what the point of this scene is, other than to show how incompetent Sabine is, as if we didn’t get that from the last episode (and going by how Filoni and Favreau write them, just identifying her as a Mandalorian should have been sufficient to let us know she sucks). Ahsoka already knows how she feels about Ezra, since her feelings for him were a factor Ahsoka was counting on to get her to help with the map ball.

8:28 “Like me, this droid is incredibly resilient.” Get bent. You know what it also is? Grossly incompetent and prone to showing off and posturing instead of doing the job in the most effective manner possible. So, yeah. The droid is a lot like Sabine. Also, it’s not necessarily super-resilient, since we didn’t see much of that before. Actually, they gave up and self-destructed at the first setback. All we really know about their resilience is that Sabine failed to kill one. That could mean they are very resilient or that she just sucks. There is no other evidence for their resilience, but a very good case for Sabine sucking. Since you see all these parallels, Sabine, have you considered a self-destruct mechanism?

Also, Hera’s hologram can go anywhere it seems, so why do Baylen and Bangs have to go back to the ship to talk to Morgan?

8:55 The logic of this made-up tech is wrong. According to Sabine, it keeps on going even if you cut off a limb or two, which indicates back-up systems and redundancies. No, it doesn’t. It just indicates this is a machine, that does not feel pain or lose blood. There is no reason why it should need backup memory or redundancies in its brain or CPU or whatever. A computer brain can keep giving orders for the limbs to move and the other functions to continue, even if partially destroyed. The writers have conflated its mind and body. Redundancies that would help it keep functioning despite extreme physical damage would be mechanical, like backup hoses and wires and pistons and things that could take up the load if some were damaged. These sorts of auxiliary systems would have nothing to do with the droid’s propensity for backing up its memory.

I also notice, that for all the talk of resilience by the droid, shooting it in the foot made it let go of Sabine’s torso. Why, if it’s got so many backups and can keep coming if you cut off limbs, didn’t it tighten its grip to crush her chest?

Then, she seems to be saying that she can get what she needs by giving the right parts more power. Has anyone ever heard of a computer that could work better by giving it additional electricity? Yes, they don’t work as well when underpowered, but you can’t just eternally improve the performance with additional power. Either that, or the people of every sci-fi franchise simply operate their devices with suboptimal levels of power.

Also, why would you have droids with so much backup and redundancy, if you’re going to simply impose on them a laughably abrupt self-destruct protocol?

Of course, it’s not enough for her to be praising herself for surviving the sort of lightsaber wound from which we have seen Inquisitor Reva, the Grand Inquisitor and Darth Maul survive, and in at least one case, walk away from being awesomely resilient, but Huyang has to blow smoke up her ass for being clever, too.

09:02 On the subject of this droid exploding, what about the self-destruct stuff? How was that not triggered amongst all this? For that matter, given the alacrity with which they self-destructed when Ahsoka cut down two of them, and was carrying the object they were sent to retrieve, why didn’t the one Sabine failed to take down just blow itself up when she entered the tower?

And if these things are so backed up and redundant, why didn’t they chase Ahsoka while their self-destruct was counting down, to increase their odds of getting her? Shouldn’t they be able to do that, even if a significant portion of their processing capacity of motive power is being re-routed to the self-destruct feature? As it was, their supposed resilience and backup functionality failed and made the self-destruct as ineffective as possible. Remember in Empire Strikes Back, when the probe with the self-destruction function triggered it instantly upon taking damage?

9:58 How does that hologram of Hera work? Because she is moving her face and eyes as if her visual intake of the room is oriented in the exact spot where the hologram of her head is being projected. Is the hologram concealing a camera which is focusing according to her eye movements?

10:36
“This droid came here from Corellia”
“The New Republic shipyard?”
It’s a planet. More than one thing can be on Corellia! Look at Hawaii. That’s a mere island chain, and yet it has a major US naval base, significant agriculture and is a very popular tourism location. That’s just of the top of the head of someone who doesn’t care about Hawaii. That Corellia, home planet and initial setting of Solo, character and movie, respectively, would instantly be identified by that single function, and relevantly to this plot, is beyond belief.

And because the writers were in a hurry, the only possible ramification of this droid being from Corellia is that it was made by Morgan. Now the people in this room know that a couple of non-Jedi extricated Morgan from captivity, and if they were halfway competent, should have showed Sabine the security footage, allowing her to identify Darth Bangs as her assailant, even if Ahsoka’s ship and Huyang didn’t get a good enough look at her. Why did we need to risk an explosion from the droid that accompanied Darth Bangs, and is similar to those who attempted to take the map ball from Ahsoka, to discover that Morgan might be involved in this?

10:46 They are at this moment, utilizing interplanetary communication, but for some reason, will need to check on Morgan’s businesses on Corellia in person. Why? Can a New Republic general not make a call to the authorities on Corellia to ascertain for certain? Again, if anyone involved has a brain, Morgan’s still-functioning operations will simply have a different name on the deed, and walking into the plant or office will get you nothing but denials, and claims that their droid-making operation is part of ZZZ corp, and everyone will know and believe this, because the technicians who assemble the machines and people ordering supplies, and filling out shipping orders and keeping up with the government paperwork, do not need to know who is ultimately behind the whole thing. Meanwhile, ZZZ corp will not have any offices on Corellia, and tracking them down will reveal they are party of a conglomerate named YYY, which is owned by shell corporation XXX, which in turn is part of an innocuous business that half the New Republic senators own stock in.

So what this means, is that Imperial Remnant Warlords are less clever about covering their tracks than high school dropout drug dealers in the projects in Baltimore in “The Wire.” Our heroes are not exactly covering themselves with glory in taking these clowns out of action.

11:03 Why is Ahsoka’s Jedi droid waiting for permission from Hera to leave?

11:30 “… the first thing I do goes sideways.” Not “I done fucked up,” which would be a more accurate way to phrase it, as opposed to that passive-voice statement, insinuating that Sabine experienced bad luck and Ahsoka is down on her for it.

15:08 Why are people who use the Force, especially the Dark Side, all about Thrawn, a mundane military commander? The whole vibe I get from Morgan is that she looks up to Thrawn, she is not looking for a very useful henchman, but a savior or liege lord to serve.

18:55 Hera looks legitimately surprised that there are ex-Imperials in the government. How has a general never encountered any?

19:12 Is this Weaver guy a businessman or a local official? I thought it was the latter. How does a general, and apparently a politically unconnected one at that, have the authority to compel him to cooperate with her random curiosity? Is this a Republic or a military dictatorship? If the latter, how is it an improvement on the Empire? Remember in Andor, when an overzealous security officer got fired for exceeding his authority, even though he was right? Remember in The Mandalorian, where they are brainwashing former Imperial scientists who break the rules while undergoing a dehumanizing and tedious rehabilitation program, but there are also politicians and nobles who claim they barely see any difference in the government? Is anyone coordinating this sort of thing? Because it rather feels like Werner Herzog was right about the Empire way back in the first season of The Mandalorian, that it is actually a better government when it comes to administration, and so far we see little to no improvement in the morality of the New Republic.

19:51 What ARE you getting at, Hera? Is this the Sabine show, or the Ahsoka show? What character development has Ahsoka had? What is she doing that could be called an arc, instead of lurching from plot point to plot point on yet another Disney+ televised scavenger hunt? The closest thing we get to exploring her as a character seems to be all about how she relates to Sabine.

25:42 WOW. Talk about plot-contrivances. They just happened to ask about just the right thing to get into a conversation with a droid that just happened to have encountered an assassin droid, which just happens to be leaving on a transport that is taking off right now.

30:09 Let me guess, the faceless non-Jedi with the Inquisitor lightsaber is an enslaved or brainwashed Ezra.

30:17 Why can a general who claims she has the right to access anything and everything, not call for some security, such as the fleet that must surely be present to protect such a vital facility as this major shipyard?

30:33 And seconds later, they were blown up by the non-Jedi transport that just took off and is surely following hot on the heels of the one Hera and Chopper were chasing.

In fairness, but Winstead seems to be doing a good job with Hera’s mannerisms in the pilot’s seat. My memory might be off, but I feel like this is the character from Rebels, like I didn’t really before.

31:39 I guess the return of Sabine’s Mandalorian armor was inevitable. Getting kind of sick of Mandalorians, frankly.

33:34 One implication of the Empire retaining loyalty out of greed, suggests that even reduced to a remnant, they provide more prosperity than does the Republic. In other words, even with the risks of running this massive illegal operation, simple profit calculation tells them they are better off under the Empire than doing it straight. Where does the Remnant get the resources to pay them? How are they outbidding the Republic? Or, why is the Republic so bad for business?

34:52 Something has been bothering me about this mural, and I just realized, it’s Sabine’s art style from the cartoon! This is graffiti caricatures of cartoon people. It should not look like this in the live action. It makes this “artist” look like a grade school finger painter.

35:40 The primary focus of the first two episodes of the Ahsoka show is about her apprentice’s journey to signing up.

36:15 This has been a long shot of the ship taking off and flying away. Why are these all so long? Why do we need these 5, 10, 15 second long clips of space ships taking off and landing?

There are lots and lots of shots of just nothing, meaningless movement. These are pretty lame sets and visuals. I mean, they look nice and all, but there isn’t any deeper meaning there. There is nothing being conveyed in these silent stretches of women staring at each other between lines of dialogue or staring at the set or wandering around. Like the lightsaber fights, we’re not seeing something new or unique. Like Count Dooku’s ship taking off after the battle at Geonosis. That was a unique ship design. It was something new to look at, even if it did not advance the plot. These are all just generic space ship designs, we don’t get anything from seeing the take-off. We don’t get anything from Ahsoka seeming to sneer an order to go to hyperspace at Sabine and calling her padawan. Maybe there is some meaning in there from further back in their relationship, but it’s meaningless if you haven’t watched that, so we don’t get what the point is of calling her “Padawan.” The perception I am getting with Ahsoka is that she does not believe in the Jedi rules and practices, so why is she sticking with the nomenclature?

36:55 So I guess all of these classified hyperdrive cores on the ring doohickey are going to somehow take Morgan and her crew to the other galaxy where Thrawn has been all this time?

And Ezra, of course, assuming he isn’t the faceless not-Jedi who fought Ahsoka. Or maybe that’s Kainen. I notice no one has mentioned him at all. They haven’t mentioned Zeb either, but at least he had a cameo in The Mandalorian.

3825 So what is Baylan’s deal? I am not getting much of a Dark Side vibe with him. Is he just a Force user, who doesn’t use the Dark Side, but puts it to mercenary uses? That does not seem to be how the Force works. You can’t be an asshole, murdering people for pay and not succumb to the Dark Side. There has to be something positive to hold onto even when you kill people. And if he is of the Dark Side, it should be corrupting him and keeping him from having that nice guy vibe he generally has. There is nothing visibly marking him out as a Dark Side user that many of them have, like the shadowy eyes that Darth Bangs does, or Vader’s yellow eyes on Mustafar. Even Dooku and Palpatine looked… off… when the got intense about their power.

All the yellow on this set is making me think of Elizabeth Debicki’s golden aliens and their stuff in the Guardians of the Galaxy sequels.

Okay, this is not the worst thing Disney has done for Star Wars yet, but also, there tends to be a drop in quality after the first couple episodes. And we have the hallmarks of a Disney Star Wars show, with the incompetent depictions of military organizations, tactics, strategies, covert operations, security methods, and weapon or equipment design. There's also the tough women. No skinny or short English brunettes, but the female characters (and only Baylan has been male, organic and in more than one episode so far) seem to have a limited range of emotions they are allowed to convey. Smugness, determination, snark. That's about it. The impression I got from Rebels was that Sabine and Ezra kind of had a thing, but the hologram of Ezra is careful to state that their friendship is purely fraternal, not romantic. Sabine is way too awesome to be yearning for a guy. Hera was like the mom figure of the crew in Rebels but we have none of that with this portrayal. Ahsoka had a light, perky voice and was Anakin's buddy as much as his student. This version is just grim and miserable, like Sabine. It's like there is some kind of ideal they have for their women to be cool and superior, in ways that would be called toxic masculinity if applied to a different gender. Also, considering all the history Hera, Sabine and Ahsoka have together, you'd think they would, at some point, ever, give a sign that they liked or cared about each other. Hera sometimes flirts with that, showing a sort of dispassionate concern for Sabine, but the kind that could just as easily come from a teacher or superior who doesn't want to see her fail, not a close friend.

The bones of a cool story are there, but you need characters for it, and this show doesn't seem to do characters.

I might add episode three tomorrow, if I don't it'll be a few days because I think WoT is dropping tomorrow night.