‘Ahsoka’ Review: Disney+’s Fluffy New ‘Star Wars’ Series Starring Rosario Dawson Is the Anti-‘Andor’

In Disney+’s Ahsoka, hulking vessels zip around space and dock and land on alien planets with an odd weightlessness, as if one could park on your foot and you’d never notice. Does this suggest an unfortunate limitation in the show’s special effects budget? A conscious effort to mimic the aesthetic of the series’ animated roots? An unconscious extended metaphor for a show that, at least through two of its eight episodes, too often suffers from a lack of dramatic gravity?

That’s not to say that Ahsoka is entirely without emotional heft, but most of that investment depends on familiarity with its predecessor, Star Wars Rebels (which aired from 2014 to 2018 on Disney XD). Viewers who haven’t watched Star Wars Rebels or the The Clone Wars — or any of the stories featuring Ahsoka Tano before she first appeared in live-action form played by Rosario Dawson in The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett — won’t be confused. Series creator Dave Filoni has, especially in the premiere, piled on enough exposition to satisfy anybody with vague curiosity.

Related Stories

Movies

Cannes: George Lucas to Receive Honorary Palme d'Or

Movies

Billy Dee Williams Says Actors Should Be Allowed to Wear Blackface

But that’s just being told about things, and for viewers who haven’t experienced those things in their original contexts, I’m guessing it will be hard to deeply invest in a series in which the biggest villain (nefarious Grand Admiral Thrawn), biggest inspirational figure (heroic Ezra Bridger) and biggest name in mythological lore (Anakin Skywalker) are initially just conversation points. It presents as a story of strong women who are defined primarily by all of these off-screen men, rather than being given any self-definition.

If I had to say what Ahsoka was about, on a bigger thematic level, it’s that if you don’t fully address the regrets and traumas of your past, you can’t forge a new future. But only hearing about these backstories cheapens the resonance. Take away any richness from narratives that unfolded over dozens of episodes, and you’re left with a series that’s primarily bland, albeit packed with potentially interesting characters, plus an exceptional anchoring performance from the late Ray Stevenson, whose charismatic presence here left me moved.

Stevenson actually gets the series’ first introduction as Baylan Skoll, a mysterious mercenary who stages a daring prison break with the help of his brooding apprentice (Ivanna Sakhno’s Shin Hati). Baylan insists that they’re not Jedi, but they wield lightsabers and he can definitely do Jedi stuff with his mind. Their target? Diana Lee Inosanto’s Morgan Elsbeth, who spends all her time talking about getting Grand Admiral Thrawn back from exile, presumably in the name of helping the Empire strike back again. So you know she’s bad news.

Meanwhile, Ahsoka (Dawson), the former Jedi who studied under Anakin Skywalker, is on a ruined desert planet doing Indiana Jones stuff in search of a hidden MacGuffin of some sort. The MacGuffin in question is a shiny orb that’s apparently a map to the location of Thrawn’s exile, or would be if Ahsoka could activate it. Ahsoka’s buddy, the very green General Hera Syndulla (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), suggests the key to opening the map might be Sabine Wren (Natasha Liu Bordizzo), who was once Ahsoka’s apprentice — the show is very big on mentorship, especially flawed mentorship — before some type of stubbornness-based estrangement.

Soon, everybody is going in search of the map and converging around Sabine, who has left her past as an aspiring Jedi and as a Mandalorian behind — she’s a topical Star Wars grab-bag, with hair the color of a toxic sunset — to hang out in isolation with her adorable white Loth-cat pet [Plushie Available in Stores at Christmas.]

Nothing less than the fate of the galaxy is at stake. 

A mantra I kept trying to repeat to myself while watching Ahsoka was, “Not everything needs to be Andor” and, in ethos, Ahsoka isn’t quite the anti-Andor. But it’s pretty close. Andor was all gravity. When its CG ships moved through the atmosphere, you could feel whole planets shudder in their wake. It was a world so saturated with pre-fascistic menace that there was no room for many bedrock Star Wars elements. Skirmishes were bloody and visceral and chaotic. There were no cute creatures, and the one featured robot was profoundly sad. There were Easter eggs, but you felt that in noticing them, you were doing a great disservice to the core Marxist critique. 

If Andor was a complex whiskey, aged to peak smokiness in a bespoke barrel, Ahsoka is a hard seltzer, all fruity and fizzy. Absolutely everything feels like a reference, and if you don’t get why the camera is lingering on a background character or drawing or piece of technology, a bigger fan surely will. [Plushie Available in Stores at Christmas] is just the highest-profile of the show’s myriad adorable creatures, though probably the only one designed to make viewers cheer for every purr or burble. The Loth-cat’s only competition for shelf space at Target is likely to be General Syndulla’s trusty droid Chopper, whose wildly gesticulating arms and language of bleeps and bloops can be easily translated as, “Buy my Funko Pop.” I was less amused by Ahsoka’s own overly cautious robot sidekick, voiced by David Tennant, though he did deliver my biggest laugh in the opening episodes.

So much of Ahsoka is so shamelessly tailored to fit the audience’s commodified needs that when, in the second episode, a scene at a shipping port turns into a flimsy treatise on the amorality of capitalism, it’s hard to take seriously. But not everything needs to be Andor!

Filoni is more committed to providing entertainment and instantly iconic imagery, often clearly inspired by the show’s animated antecedents. Ahsoka is full of action — when it isn’t full of exposition — but it’s the sort of action that’s better enjoyed in snapshots than cumulatively. There are multiple scenes in which Ahsoka or Sabine take on multiple droids at once, and I have no memories of the choreography or the battles’ ebb and flow. But Ahsoka posed with her two lightsabers or the rustling of Sabina’s outfit in motion are indelible. How many times does one show need characters to be introduced anonymously in a hooded robe before a badass reveal? Who cares? It’s cool every time!

Other than the flatness of many of the show’s backdrops and virtual environments — I don’t even think the CG is aspiring to realism — everything in Ahoska looks right, from the hue of Syndulla’s skin to the wrappings around Ahsoka’s lekku (you know, the head-penises that are distinctive to the Togruta species) to each of those billowy robes. Kudos, then, to Shawna Trpcic’s costumes and Maria Sandoval, Cristina Waltz and Alexei Dmitriew on the hair and makeup teams.

Of course, “looking right” only gets you so far, and it’s frustrating how much Filoni and company have coasted — across three shows now — on how perfectly Dawson embodies the look of Ahsoka, without giving her anything to do. Not only does Bordizzo look the part, but she has a discernible arc over just two episodes, enough that the show might as well be called Sabine. Or possibly it could be Where’s Syndulla? because Winstead makes a fast enough impression that when she subsequently spends a long stretch just as a wryly amused hologram, it’s a waste.

It wouldn’t be possible to know much about Sakhno’s acting from these first two episodes, but her angular features and icy glare just pull the camera in. Plus, Sakhno benefits from sharing scenes with Stevenson, whose somber authority — you can tell immediately that Baylan has exercised his power so much that he’s weary — makes him the one person in the show who absolutely could have done duty on Andor as well. The writing has every returning character from Rebels living in the past, while Baylan and Shin are living in the present, making them easy to root for, though with overtones of sadness in Stevenson’s case. We’ll never know the direction Ahsoka could have taken the Rome star’s career, but people will be talking about him.

There’s a chance that when some of the people everybody keeps talking about finally make appearances in Ahsoka, the entire show will gain the immediacy that’s currently lacking. Even Andor, which not every Star Wars show needs to be, started slow, but it was never bland.