Since the early days of the franchise, Star Wars has introduced an enormous collection of beloved heroes and villains, with some of their fates shrouded in mystery.
However, in the recently launched “Ahsoka” series, which features some characters from “Star Wars: Rebels” and “Star Wars: The Clone Wars,” long-awaited answers to questions held in the minds of die-hard fans of the franchise were revealed.
The series follows Ahsoka Tano (Rosario Dawson), a former Jedi Knight, and Sabine Wren (Natasha Liu Bordizzo), a warrior from the planet Mandalore and former student of Ahsoka. The team races to prevent the return of Grand Admiral Thrawn, an officer of the Empire, before he can throw the galaxy into another war.
The Jedi are wielders of the Force, an energy field that exists in all living things, which grants them various abilities such as telekinesis and mind reading. Unfortunately for them, they were massacred by the Empire and hunted down until its eventual fall.
While their main objective is to locate Thrawn and stop him from reconstructing the Empire, Ahsoka and Sabine also seek out an old friend, Ezra Bridger (Eman Esfandi), who seemingly sacrificed himself to stop Thrawn from destroying his homeworld and disappeared in the process at the end of “Star Wars: Rebels.”
Throughout the series, Ahsoka and Sabine work together and determine whether their main goal should be stopping Thrawn and leaving Ezra stranded or locating him and risk letting Thrawn escape his solitude in another galaxy.
The main antagonists of the series, besides Admiral Thrawn, are fallen Jedi Baylan Skoll (Ray Stevenson), his apprentice Shin Hati (Ivanna Sakhno), and Morgan Elsbeth (Diana Lee Inosanto), a descendant of the Nightsisters who practice the dark side of the Force and can revive the dead as zombies.
Baylan, the former Jedi, and Shin, his pupil, have similar abilities to Ahsoka and were hired as mercenaries by Morgan in order to break her free from custody at the start of the series and help with her plan to get Thrawn back into their galaxy.
Each actor brings out their character’s personality well, especially Dawson and Esfandi. Dawson captures Ahsoka’s solemn yet serene attitude and her slightly playful change towards the end of the series, and Esfandi manages to nail Ezra’s goofy and witty demeanor.
Over the years since their debut in their respective series, characters such as Ahoska, Sabine, Ezra and Thrawn have each built up their own collection of fans and the live-action series offers a continuation for each character’s story, which was thought to have been concluded long ago.
The show successfully brings them to live action while still maintaining their signature personalities from their original series.
Ahsoka currently has one season with eight episodes that range from 35 minutes to 55 minutes in length.
The season finale closes on a somewhat mixed, yet satisfying tone and leads the audience to question what comes next for both the protagonists and the antagonists.
