3:33 Why does Hera need to land, and walk ten feet out of her ship to ascertain that the site is deserted and that there is nothing going on, especially when the Only X-Wing Pilot is confirming that there is nothing on the scope? Why was the scope not good enough? Or looking out the window to see an absence of any people in this open air spot?

3:46 And she brought the ship down with her CHILD aboard, before the warships have checked “the scope” or done “a full sweep”! And rather than call her to ask if he can come out, he goes and stands in the wide-open doorway. He’s too tall and supposedly has spent his life traveling around on starships with his mother, to be a naïve idiot who doesn’t get basic safety precautions. I don’t know what their life has been life, but there have either been a lot of dangerous situations, such as criminal or combat type stuff his mother was doing on a somewhat better show, or a lot of official ones, where she is visiting important people or high-ranking officers, and he should know better than to intrude before his mother gives him the okay.

4:00 “Don’t wander off too far” she tells her son, about an environment that had previously been an enemy base, could still have wounded or hiding enemies, and has not yet had a full sweep done. She should be telling him “Don’t leave this wide open area where I can see you and any potential threats.”

They’re just running an AI parental dialogue generator.

4:08 “We don’t know this planet”. Could he be exploring the whole thing during this visit? I want to grab Dave Filoni and Jon Favreau by the lapels and scream into their faces “A planet is not an island, a country or a town!”

4:30 Hiding behind Chopper like that, is only marginally better than hiding Leia under Obi-Wan’s coat. And what if he had not been looking at her when she made the hand signal?

5:03 Oh FFS, this did not happen because they separated. Sabine was THERE when Ahsoka went over the cliff. By separating, Sabine kept Ahsoka from having to face Baylen with the numbers against her. Ahsoka and Sabine against Baylen, Morrock and Darth Bangs is a far worse matchup than simply Ahsoka vs Baylen.

5:25 Also, how did they not see 10-NT standing behind that pillar at all before this? Didn’t have a different angle while coming in for the landing? Didn’t pick up anything on their sensors or other equipment? Hera did not move at all into position to have a slightly different angle than what she could see from the doorway of her ship, before deciding there was nothing there and letting her kid come out? Considering what a big deal Mandalorian and Kenobi made about adopted parents being just as good as bio parents, Hera is really setting the message back, with her gross carelessness with this kid she is raising.

8:01 So we’re going to have Anakin lose this fight to show Ahsoka the lesson that she is great and awesome. He’s going to look like he’s winning but it’s going to be just because she is reluctant to fight. Once she gets going, she’s the best and unstoppable, because female character in modern screen production. The only lesson any female protagonists ever need to learn is how great they already are.

8:41 You have no hope of following, because they had to make a technological breakthrough requiring massive resources to go in the first place, whereas your support system can’t spare extant ships to check out an apparently abandoned system for Imperial activity. I really don’t think they are going to authorize the resources for an extra-galactic expedition.

And WTF is that giant radio-looking thing? It looks like what the rebels were using on Hoth, but also ridiculously oversized. You could make excuses for Empire, like it was necessary to contain insulation against the cold or required extra power given the apparent limitations of sensors on the planet. She’s looking for a body that would show up on her exact location if she had a smart phone in her pocket that they were tracking via Google or Apple.

9:20 This is another thing they do all the time on TV now – misuse or misunderstand word meanings. Only X-Wing Pilot says that if they don’t report in soon, people are going to be asking questions, to which Hera replies that someone should be asking questions. Except he is talking about questioning their activities and compliances with orders and procedure, and she is talking about investigating enemy activity. What she says is not a valid response to his legitimate concern, and undermines herself, because if she is in trouble, she will have even less luck sparking interest in the questions she wants people to ask.

10:10 Is Jacen’s hair green? It looks like it in certain lights. Is he supposed to be Hera’s bio offspring?

11:17 They are leaving the child on the ground, while all the ships fly around looking at the water. Okay. Nothing like foreknowledge of the screenplay to be certain that no other threats will manifest.

11:29 Ah, so Jacen is the son of Kainan. Doesn’t tell me where Kainan went, and there is still the question of who was his biological mother. Did a hairless green-skinned mother and a normal-skinned, brown-haired father really produce a green-haired, normal-skinned child? What? No! That’s … they should not even be able to reproduce! They are of different species, from different biological origins. To also have her quality of “green” pass on, not in his skin, which is the green part she has, but in his hair? Do they think that mixed race children are usually brown-haired because the brown skin of one parent overrides the cases of light hair from a white parent?

And does this mean someone in Disney Star Wars had sex?

13:13 I love how quickly Disney Star Wars pivoted to prequel nostalgia, when ten years ago they were supposed to be erasing those failures of the franchise from our memories with their awesome new content.

13:31 That cannot be the actress who voiced Ahsoka as a kid. Actually, I thought she was animated for a moment. There was no reason they could not have Dawson playing her in this scene. If Anakin is going to respond differently than he did in the original event, there is no reason she can’t be her adult self, and played by a presumably superior actor.

Also, that’s apparently the same actress who played a young Gamora in the MCU! I thought I was the only one who got Rosario Dawson & Zoe Saldana mixed up!

Speaking of Ahsoka actresses’ Marvel roles, I much preferred Claire.

16:31 This shadowy lighting to obscure Hayden Christiansen’s ago, presumably, means we can’t tell the characters’ facial expressions.

16:47 This is very flawed thinking. Right, good and justice don’t change with the times, and one’s relationship to an all-powerful, omnipresent and eternal benevolent power should also be a constant that does not change with the times. If Obi-Wan and Yoda and all the rest were trained in an era of peace, why are they leading and how are they competent to lead in a time of war? Normal Jedi training should suffice. Also, as always, his answer does not quite line up with the statement to which he is replying. She is saying this is not what she signed up for and he is saying she needs to be trained differently than he was. She is not questioning the training methods, she is questioning the application of that training. But Anakin is giving the fallacious answer about adjusting to the times.

From a bigger perspective, she’s even more right, because the whole Clone War was a trap in which fighting at all was how the Jedi would lose.

16:57 “How to fight” is the only useful or applicable skill in Disney Star Wars, which appears to value nothing other than combat proficiency.

17:42 None of this is wrong, it’s just out of place. This is just what I predicted for the narrative message at the outset of their interactions this episode. Even if this turned into more than a simple lightsaber duel, it’s still basically saying that Ahsoka was right from the very beginning. This is not young Ahsoka confronting her older, jaded self, who has strayed from their ideals, this is current day Ahsoka in a padawan guise saying that Anakin was wrong in his teachings. If this is at all representative of her conflict at the time (which I don’t remember one way or another from the movie with Jabba the Hutt’s flamboyant uncle, my sole prior experience of Ahsoka) we’re back to the point that she was always right. So much for character growth. Female action heroes can’t. All they do is acquire skills and powers and get vindicated.

Also, this is not really getting Anakin Skywalker back, this is a flashback to the guy who became Darth Vader, not the one who rejected Vader and saved Luke.

18:44 The hair doesn’t really look green here. Maybe it was just reflecting Hera.

18:47 That is a ridiculously close formation for a search pattern. The snowspeeders were flying farther apart in Empire Strikes Back.

19:16 As a gesture of good faith, I am not going to question the fuel issue for a couple passes of SAR flight versus the interstellar capabilities of the ships in question. I would assume that if they are capable of making multiple hyperspace jumps, fuel is not an issue, but I will headcanon the difference being the fuel necessary for atmospheric flight and even flip that over to why the rebels did not use X-wing fighter to shred the Imperial walkers attacking Echo Base in Empire, as they did on Scarif in Rogue One.

21:24 “How low?” is a meaningless question, because no one established the operating parameters of space ships, which can always do whatever the plot needs them to. When necessary, they are fully submersible, because, after all, they are air-tight and equally when necessary, a slash of water on the wrong exposed external machinery can short out all their systems.

21:26 Is she carving her way through Mandalorians? Why?

Never mind. I guess they fought for the separatists, which is why the Empire bombed Mandalore.

23:26 Who did not realize how powerful and dangerous Anakin was? The Jedi Council were suspicious of him from the moment Qui-gon showed up with him, to the day he turned renegade! Mace Windu refused to bring him along to confront Palpatine.

23:46 Vader will be there and we will get Vader voice saying “…or die!”

23:51 Huh. I was sure that was the only reason to turn the camera way from him while he is talking, especially if Ahsoka’s expression is not changing.

24:50 That was an awfully long stretch with her back turned to her opponent in a sword fight. Have I mentioned Disney fight choreography sucks?

24:56 One of her blades is locked with his and the other is just hanging there! Why isn’t she using it?

26:23 I could probably rationalize what Ahsoka learned or proved here, but that’s not my job. The show should be making that clear, especially if, rather than follow the more interesting characters (and Sabine) to another galaxy, this whole episode is going to be consumed with her after-death experience and the search for her body.

28:21 According to that shot, retrieving a 5’7” body the weight of a conventionally attractive woman from flat water, required two fighter pilots to leave their fighters and transfer to a multi-purpose transport ship, while a third fighter hovers nearby shining a light on the whole thing. This whole thing could have been managed by Hera and 10-NT. Except due to CGI limitations and the reality of makeup, we could not show either of them swimming.

31:13 Why wrap herself in a blanket if one side and her bare arm is going to be hanging out?

32:16 Madalorian helmet cams might be a really good idea for things like this, so you don’t have to rely on magic.

34:34 Just have to point out that the events here are going to completely vindicate Hera’s bosses’ concerns that they prioritized finding Ezra over actually stopping the plot to find Thrawn that they presented the operation as. Sabine actually facilitated the hunt for Thrawn in order to save him.

Not saying she’s wrong to have done so, just that this is not going to look good to the New Republic.

35:34 Rather than just passive-aggressively answering Mon Mothma’s questions with a flat ‘no’, better answers might be “We could not capture Morgan Elsbeth because she was in a giant starship of a scale that could have been completely predicted based on the engines we discovered she was acquiring, and you refused to provide us with any significant fleet assets, she was able to basically roll right over us” or “We had no way of retaining any of the Imperial Remnant activity we found here, because you did not give us sufficient assets and they steamrolled us and left.”

And for the record, there should be SOME kind of recording or black box or sensor logs showing that they did, in fact, encounter Imperial Remnant activity. There should be a few droid corpses and what’s left of Morrock.

36:35 So they are just going to follow those tentacle whales? What, pray tell, is the reason the Imperials could not do that?

And did the issue of Hera’s orders never come up? I can’t believe Ahsoka didn’t catch at least some of that.

36:54 Why do Star Wars characters only express misgivings about a plan after it is underway? Why was she not objecting BEFORE she took off and told Only X-Wing Pilot and his Sea Rescue friends, to follow?

39:04 I’m guessing the entire rest of the episode is going to be spent on her communing with the space whale and they get the coordinates, or follow it, at the last moment.

40:12 You know, Hera stupidly questioning the plan as they are about to carry it out was a reminder of Leia doing the same thing at the beginning of The Last Jedi. No we’re going to follow up on that by having Only X-Wing Pilot play Poe’s game of stalling by playing dumb?

41:48 From what they are saying, only Ahsoka is going if the whale plan succeeds, so why is Hera farting around here instead of talking to the fleet?

42:03 All sorts of dialogue from Star Trek IV is running through my head.
“Attempting the hell to communicate”
“They like you very much, but they are not the hell your whales.”
“Are they going to help us? I believe I was successful in communicating our intentions.”

45:34 If I didn’t know I was in a Star Wars show and the female protagonists were going along with all of this, so of course it’s going to work, I would be looking at these things and seeing Old Ones or some other Lovecraftian abominations.

46:12 So will the next episode feature this other galaxy farther away, or will it be all about the efforts of every character left behind to find THEIR way to follow Ahsoka, following Sabine, following Ezra and Thrawn?

TL;DR? Dumb show by dumb studio still dumb.