When someone says they’re not here to discuss the past, it’s a sign that their past is pretty interesting. That was true of Mark McGwire, and it’s true of Ahsoka Tano too. I can certainly see where Ahsoka is coming from: If I were the former apprentice of a soon-to-be Sith lord and the survivor of two galactic conflicts and a Jedi genocide, I’d probably prefer to focus on the future myself. But Ahsoka’s past is why we care about her present, and her series couldn’t move forward without allowing its characters and its audience some time to look back.
Big Mac talked about his past eventually. Ahsoka the character still hasn’t. But in Episode 4, “Fallen Jedi,” Ahsoka the series starts to delve into its characters’ complex histories and finally fulfills its promise. Ahsoka’s early episodes danced around the buried bad blood between Ahsoka and Sabine Wren; Episode 4 reveals the roots of their schism and adds a dollop of fresh conflict. Previous episodes’ combat felt flat; this week’s ample action is better choreographed, more consequential, and more tightly intertwined with meaningful moments. Early episodes teased a trip to another galaxy; at the end of “Fallen Jedi,” that journey begins. Though it barely lasts longer than last week’s low-stakes installment, “Fallen Jedi” is propulsive and suspenseful. And as the Eye of Sion sets off on the Pathway to Peridea, Ahsoka accelerates with it, justifying the Disney+ spinoff’s existence as more than a Rebels reunion. “That’s a tremendous surge in power,” Captain Carson Teva exclaims. Ahsoka’s audience could say the same.
“Fallen Jedi” succeeds on the strength of the apprentice-on-apprentice grudge match between Sabine and Shin Hati, the continued development of incredibly compelling anti-villain Baylan Skoll, and the closing encounter between Ahsoka and Hayden Christensen’s Anakin Skywalker in our first live-action look at the World Between Worlds. But Ahsoka starts cooking with this week’s first scene, a conversation between Ahsoka and Sabine during the calm before the storm. As Huyang tries to repair Ahsoka’s shuttle and restore contact with Hera Syndulla and the New Republic fleet, Ahsoka warns Sabine that they may have to make a difficult decision. To prevent Morgan Elsbeth and her mercenaries from finding Grand Admiral Thrawn, they may have to destroy Morgan’s map, even though that would also prevent Ahsoka and Sabine from crossing the galactic gulf themselves in search of Ezra Bridger.
“Sabine, can I count on you?” Ahsoka asks.
“You know you can,” Sabine says.
Yet we’ve already seen Sabine defy Ahsoka’s wishes for the map once, when the former lifted it from the latter’s ship. Remember holo-Ezra’s message to Sabine from the two-part premiere: “I’m counting on you to see this through.” Remember, also, the last line of Rebels, in which Sabine reinterprets what Ezra is counting on her to do: “Ezra’s out there somewhere, and it’s time to bring him home.” If Ahsoka asks Sabine to destroy the map, Sabine will be forced to let down one important person who’s counting on her: either her master or her adopted brother. (A brother who had a huge crush on her, but let’s ignore that for now.) And for Mandalorians and Spectres alike, family comes first. Especially since—as we learn later in “Fallen Jedi”—Sabine evidently learned she couldn’t count on Ahsoka when Sabine’s birth family was in danger.
At first, the hatchet seems to be buried. Master and apprentice have heart-to-heart chats, and as Sabine roots around in her satchel for her missing ammunition, Ahsoka supplies it. When Morgan’s droids and henchmen attack, the two fight effectively as a team—tipped off by Huyang, who cleverly alerts them by shorting out the ship’s lights in the middle of a droid-on-droid boxing match. Ahsoka Force pulls a foot soldier into another’s line of fire, shielding Sabine; Sabine then uses her grapple to pull another minion into Ahsoka’s saber slash. “Stay together,” Huyang implores them as they set off for Seatos’s mystical standing stones. “You always did better that way.” As they humor the droid, Ahsoka and Sabine are all smiles, looking for a moment like their old, less somber selves.
The rest of the episode plays out like a cross between the Battles of Yavin and Endor, the climactic conclusions of A New Hope and Return of the Jedi, respectively. From the showdown at Yavin at the end of an earlier Episode IV, “Fallen Jedi” borrows the conceit of a space station slowly completing a computation as our heroes race against time. From Endor, the episode adopts a three-setting structure, flitting from the ground to the station to rebel fighters in space and focusing on a classic Star Wars scenario: a villain inviting a protagonist to join them. In vintage Dave Filoni fashion, though, the episode draws on a wider range of influences than the original trilogy alone, from the prequels and sequels to Tales of the Jedi.
Those rebel fighters in space come courtesy of Hera, who knows she’s needed on Seatos even without receiving a distress call. Like Jyn Erso and Cassian Andor in Rogue One, she decides to take matters into her own hands after Mon Mothma and Co. come up short. And so General Syndulla goes AWOL, putting on her distractingly butt-hugging pilot pants, inspiringly skipping a staff meeting, and getting the Ghost out of storage. With Jacen as her copilot and Captain Teva as her wingman, she rides off to the rescue as the leader of a reconstituted Phoenix Squadron, her old unit from Rebels. (Mercifully, Filoni resisted the temptation to write Trapper Wolf into this scene.) As The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett taught us, Captain Teva has no fondness for New Republic red tape, so he’s the perfect accomplice for Hera. “Once a rebel, always a rebel,” she says, evoking Erso’s deleted line from the Rogue One trailer: “This is a rebellion, isn’t it? I rebel.”
(A minor Mandoverse chronology note: Previously, it seemed as if Ahsoka might start before The Mandalorian’s most recent events, but if that’s the case, it’s strange that Teva doesn’t tell Colonel Tuttle about the huge hyperspace ring that just killed a few of his friends. Seems relevant to Teva’s “There’s something dangerous out there” hypothesis!)
Back on Seatos, Ahsoka and Sabine run into trouble, in the forms of Shin and Marrok, en route to the henge. Ahsoka and Marrok, and the two apprentices, pair off for rematches of their duels from the first two episodes, in a dual duel reminiscent of the forest fights from The Force Awakens and Ahsoka’s first episode of The Mandalorian. Ahsoka kicks Inquisitor ass in Filoni’s animated series, and this time she makes quick work of Marrok and his helicoptering blade, striking him down with a single samurai-style diagonal slash as she did the Inquisitor on Tales of the Jedi (and as Obi-Wan did Darth Maul):
Much to the audience’s surprise—and to Sabine’s and Shin’s—Marrok expires in a puff of greenish-black mist, taking “to dust you will return” very literally. All along, it seems, Shin’s companion was a cross between Melisandre’s shadow baby and the Smoke Monster from Lost. For the past two weeks, Marrok’s identity was the subject of rampant speculation, as Reddit-brained fans suggested far-fetched potential unmaskings: Maybe Marrok was Ezra, or Barriss Offee, or Mara Jade, or Starkiller, or Petro, or Luke Skywalker’s clone from the Thrawn Trilogy, Luuke. As it turns out, Marrok was no more a famous secret character than Mephisto was WandaVision’s big bad: With one swing, Ahsoka sent those theories up in smoke. Marrok was a Force phantom—perhaps an ex-Inquisitor’s or Nightbrother’s spirit reanimated by Morgan’s magick, specifically the Nightsisters’ Chant of Resurrection. (Then again, who’s to say that spirit didn’t belong to Barriss, or Mara, or Starkiller, or … ? Here we go again!) Given his unceremonious demise, it’s hard not to see Marrok as a bit of bait dangled playfully by Filoni—a red herring for fans who find Easter eggs where none have been hidden. As Baylan says about the stones: “Witchcraft.”
With Marrok defeated, Ahsoka could join forces with Sabine to finish off Shin. Instead, she accepts Sabine’s instruction to go get the map. By splitting up, Ahsoka and Sabine disregard Huyang’s plea to stick together, which ultimately leads to Ahsoka’s literal downfall.
It also leads to Shin’s survival in this fight, and for that I’m grateful. We know next to nothing about Shin, who speaks roughly as often as Maul in The Phantom Menace, but Ivanna Sakhno’s stares, scowls, and slouches have turned her into a mesmerizing sidekick. I’m glad she’ll get to glower on and spend some quality travel time with her nemesis Sabine.
Speaking of Sabine, she holds her own in her second confrontation with Shin, which she begins with blasters, extends with Ezra’s saber, and ends with a trick up her sleeve. As she and Shin trade saber blows, we see Sabine’s helmet lying in the foreground. The implication is that she’s embraced the Padawan path but discarded her Mandalorian lineage—that she hasn’t figured out how to synthesize her two types of training, as Grogu does in The Mandalorian’s third season. That takeaway is initially reinforced when Shin disarms her and knocks her down, and Sabine flings out her hand, as if to return Shin’s earlier Force push. Shin flinches, then realizes she has nothing to fear from the telekinetic prowess of the Padawan who failed to move a mug last week. “You have no power,” Shin whispers, as if she’s staging an intervention for a misguided student whose master has misled her.
That’s when Sabine hits her with a wrist rocket, surprising Shin, and us, with a go-go-gadget Mandalorian move. But Shin has her own unanticipated accessory: a Batman- or ninja-style smoke bomb that she hurls at Sabine’s feet. Like Marrok, she vanishes in a dark cloud, but unlike Marrok, she’ll be back. The apprentice rivalry is real.
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Meanwhile, at the stones, Ahsoka squares off with Baylan, whom Morgan left planet-side to protect the map as the droid navigator on the Eye of Sion uses its data to chart the tricky hyperspace jump. The two ex-Jedi engage in some prebattle banter. Baylan, who seems to be aware of Darth Vader’s origin story—which is very rare, as I explained on this podcast—knows how to hurt Ahsoka: by bringing up Anakin and her Jedi divorce. “Everyone in the order knew Anakin Skywalker,” he says. “Few would live to see what he became. Surely that must leave a mark. Is that why you walked away? Abandoned him?” It’s a verbal knife twist that threatens to reopen the emotional scars under Ahsoka’s impassive facade; no wonder she retorts that she hasn’t come to discuss her past. (“She quit on me,” Sabine claimed in Episode 2, anticipating Skoll’s question.) But we want her to, and even though she doesn’t rise to Baylan’s bait, it’s thrilling to hear him present a version of events in which Ahsoka is the baddie, from a certain point of view.
From the start of the series, Skoll has projected an air of world-weary, resigned determination. Believing himself to be acting for the greater good, he goes about his business like the Thanos of Star Wars. “To kill her will be a shame,” he says, speaking of Ahsoka in Episode 1. And in Episode 4, he refuses to be the aggressor: Ahsoka ignites her blade first and takes the first swing. “How inevitable,” Skoll sighs.
Once the battle is joined, he gives as good as he gets, audibly grunting like a tennis player serving for the set and sometimes dropping down to swing his saber like a polo mallet. The late Ray Stevenson’s hulking frame lends a Vader-esque brutality to Skoll’s hacks and slashes, mixed with impressive precision and economy of movement—an outward representation of his blend of light and dark disciplines. (When he can, he nimbly steps out of range of the single blade Ahsoka uses for the fight, and later on, he blocks Sabine’s blaster bolts with surgical, calculated grace.) But when he has time to talk, he continues to cast Ahsoka as the fruit of a poisoned tree, another “nontraditional Jedi” who’s tainted by her tutelage. “Your legacy, like your master’s, is one of death and destruction,” he says. And, at the end of the fight, as Ahsoka is poised on the precipice: “It didn’t need to come to this. But you know no other way.”
Granted, this is all pretty rich coming from a man who massacred the crew of a New Republic prison ship in the first scene of the series. Baylan thinks he has the high ground, from an ethical standpoint, but those dark robes he wears aren’t just a fashion statement. (At what point during your fall to the dark side do you decide you need a new wardrobe? Which come first, the Force chokes or the black gloves? Is dressing for the dark side like becoming an orgy guy?) But Baylan is fascinating because he seems to see himself as more of a morally upright, genteel Jedi than Ahsoka, and he views his cause as more righteous than hers. No, he’s not really “the good lord Baylan,” as Morgan dubs him, but he doesn’t seem driven by allegiance to the Sith or the Empire, and he regards the conflict that Thrawn is bound to rekindle as an “unfortunate evil.” He wants to “secure the future,” and he seems to think that starting over in a new galaxy or wiping the old galaxy’s slate clean—destroying “in order to create”—is a necessary solution. Beware of villains who think they’re the good guys; as Ahsoka said in the premiere, “Sometimes even the right reasons have the wrong consequences.”
In the midst of this fight/scolding session, Ahsoka manages to sideline Skoll long enough to remove the map from its pedestal, pausing the data transfer. The bauble burns her hand like the medallion that scars Arnold Toht in Raiders of the Lost Ark; maybe this map, like that medallion, points the way to what should be forbidden knowledge. This disruption of Skoll’s plans pierces his composure, and he goes on the offensive, pushing Ahsoka to the brink. That’s when Shin arrives, alone, spurring Ahsoka to fear the worst about Sabine. Her reserve snaps too, and she Force lifts Shin headfirst into the nearest standing stone—not a very Jedi gesture. But then, she’s no Jedi. No one in this series is.
To Ahsoka’s relief, Sabine soon arrives, retrieves the map, and holds it at blasterpoint. Skoll, eager to focus on Sabine and the prize in her hand, dispenses with Ahsoka, knocking her off a cliff. An anguished Sabine fires at Skoll, but not at the map; she can’t bring herself to comply with her master’s last words: “Destroy it!” She can’t toss the hyperspace ring into Mount Doom, knowing it would rob her of her hope to see Ezra again.
It doesn’t really matter that there’s no way a blaster bolt would destroy the map, or that Baylan could easily overpower her and yank the map away. The stakes of this face-off concern Sabine’s decision. How many times have we seen some variation of this scene? And how many times have we seen it play out the same way? Luke resists Darths Vader and Sidious; Ezra resists Sidious and Maul; Rey resists Kylo Ren. Anakin, of course, succumbs to Sidious, but Anakin’s breaking bad wasn’t exactly a plot twist. “Come with me,” Skoll says. “Willingly.” It’s not “Join me and together we can rule the galaxy”; it’s “Join me and together we can visit another galaxy.” Decades of Star Wars watching have conditioned us to expect Sabine to pull her hand away, just as decades of Star Wars watching taught us that her training last week with a visor wouldn’t go well.
But no; here we have a new spin on the time-honored dilemma. Sabine accepts Skoll’s offer, which he makes after seeming to probe her feelings with the Force. (Is Force-aided mind reading how he knows so much?) She surrenders the map. He puts it back in place, and lickety-split, the jump calculations are completed. When Shin comes to, she starts choking Sabine, but Baylan puts a stop to that: “I gave her my word,” he says. “And unlike her former master, I shall keep mine.”
Ahsoka couldn’t count on Sabine—at least, not to do what Ahsoka wanted. And now we know why, thanks to a mid-standoff reveal that’s not news to Sabine but that lands on our ears like a lesser “No, I am your father.” It’s not just that Sabine isn’t willing to burn her bridge to Bridger. It’s also that Ahsoka had already betrayed Sabine’s trust. “Your family died on Mandalore because your master didn’t trust you,” Skoll says. We don’t know the details, but it sounds as if Ahsoka stopped Sabine from joining the fight or saving her family before the Purge. Maybe, like Yoda in The Empire Strikes Back, she told her pupil not to go. And maybe, unlike Luke, Sabine listened. “I go where I’m needed,” Ahsoka said in Episode 1. “Not always,” Sabine responded.
“I know you feel that Ezra Bridger is the only family you have left,” Skoll says. If you ask me, that’s Hera, Zeb, and Chopper erasure. (So far, the whole series has erased Zeb; would more of the CG Lasat we glimpsed in Mando have broken the budget?) But the nasty case of survivor’s guilt that must have ensued from the destruction of Clan Wren would explain why Sabine felt she couldn’t keep wearing her armor. It would explain why she hasn’t been herself. And it would also explain why she ended her initial attempt at Jedi training. Ahsoka didn’t support Sabine’s desires. Now Sabine has defied Ahsoka’s Jedi-like demand that Sabine prioritize duty over personal attachment—a demand that’s doubly steep because it already cost Sabine Clan Wren. Maybe they’re even now, but if Baylan gets his way, a purge of a different kind could be coming.
As soon as Baylan, Shin, and Sabine board the hyperspace ring, Morgan commences the intergalactic hyperspace jump, paying no heed to the Republic craft in her path. If the Eye of Sion weren’t O shaped, this might have had a Holdo maneuver effect, to the detriment of all involved. As it is, the Ghost and the X-wings are just jostled by its hyperspace wake, which causes a few fatal collisions. “I’ve got a bad feeling,” Jacen says, not quite finishing the traditional line. (Perhaps he’s Force sensitive, like his father before him, but you don’t need the Force to feel bad about a bunch of friendlies going up in flames.)
The episode ends on a good feeling, for fans. This chapter’s title could refer to any or all of its several ex-Jedi, but before the credits roll, we return to the one who physically fell: Ahsoka. She awakens on a walkway in space, surrounded by star systems like the ones that were projected from the stones on Seatos. But this backdrop isn’t Morgan’s map; it’s the World Between Worlds, the mysterious realm featured on the fourth season of Rebels. In an eponymous episode of that season, Ezra entered the World Between Worlds and saved Ahsoka from being sabered by Vader in a one-on-one duel that had taken place in Season 2.
As the present Ahsoka stirs, she hears a voice: “Hello, Snips,” it says, using Anakin’s nickname for her.
“Master?” she asks.
“I didn’t expect to see you so soon,” Christensen’s Anakin says, looking lightly, and only a little unnaturally, de-aged in his pre-youngling-slaughtering Revenge of the Sith attire.
“Anakin,” she breathes, and he smiles—but the warmth of their reunion is undercut by the ominous strains of Vader’s theme, and the fact that Anakin appears to be carrying Vader’s saber.
What is the World Between Worlds? Great question! No one knows, exactly, save for Filoni himself. And Filoni has defined it more in terms of what it isn’t than what it is. “It’s really not about time travel at all,” he once explained, despite the fact that Season 4 Ezra saved Season 2 Ahsoka. “It’s just about a place where everything comes together.” And in case you were wondering, it isn’t a series of tubes. “It’s not this system of doorways, like you’re on an elevator getting off at different floors at different times. … It’s more about knowledge. Knowledge that you can use for your benefit, of good, or knowledge that will lead to destruction. … It’s not my intention that it be this ability to walk through into somebody else’s world.”
It’s possible, then, that Anakin’s spirit pulled Ahsoka into the WBW, saving her from death as Ezra did in Rebels. There would be a fitting sort of symmetry to that, given that the last time Ahsoka entered this domain, Vader was trying to kill her. There’s a reverse symmetry to the visuals, too: Anakin’s and Ahsoka’s positions are swapped from the last time they met, in The Clone Wars. (Which was itself an echo of other partings—it’s like poetry, they rhyme.)
If that’s the case, then Anakin may offer Ahsoka some knowledge she needs, perhaps hastening her metamorphosis into Ahsoka the White. But judging by the mostly sentimental scene’s dark undercurrents, that knowledge could come at a cost. What does seem certain, if Filoni sticks to his previous explanations of the WBW, is that Ahsoka can’t simply pop out of the WBW and into Thrawn and Ezra’s galaxy; the WBW was inspired by Narnia’s Wood Between the Worlds, but it doesn’t work the same way. (Star Wars may be escaping the galaxy far, far, away, but it’s probably not fully leaning into time travel or the multiverse.) She’ll have to go back out the way she came in, as she did in Rebels. (Though she, and we, could at least get the chance to peek at previous events.) Which means she’ll still need a way to follow the Eye of Sion without a working map. And if she doesn’t get a hot tip on that topic from Skyguy, she’ll have to try to talk to the purrgil—or seek help from someone (Grogu? Jacen?) who can. Which, come to think of it, might have been an option worth exploring at some point in the past 10 years. (Will Hera hitch a ride? If not, she may have even less to do in the second half of this season.)
“The past is the past,” Huyang told Sabine in Episode 2. “Move forward.” Sometimes, though, there’s no way to move forward without reckoning with one’s history. “Fallen Jedi” did that work, in a way that was more meaningful for fans of the Filoniverse, but not impenetrable to the live-action-only crowd. And it did so with an improved pace, likely a testament to director Peter Ramsey (of Into the Spider-Verse and a decent chapter of The Mandalorian Season 3). Ahsoka still suffers from a washed-out look (which may be inadvertent), but this week’s action is clever, convincing, and comprehensible, which compensates for the uneven dialogue. Like its predecessors, Episode 4 has plenty of protracted pauses—Ahsoka and Skoll wordlessly circle each other for a full minute before their battle begins—but this time, those silences (aside from Kevin Kiner’s skillful score) serve to heighten the tension, rather than defuse it. “When the stakes are this high …” Ahsoka says, and it finally feels like they are.
The most exciting aspect of “Fallen Jedi” is that it’s so strong despite seeming like an appetizer for an upcoming main course. Next week, for better or worse, is the second and final Filoni-directed episode of the season, which means it could be a bigger one. In fact, it’s going to be on the big screen. (Unsurprisingly, it’s reportedly longer than these last two episodes.) Presumably, we’ll get much more of Anakin and Ahsoka. We’ll probably get to glimpse the galaxy far, far, far away. And at long last, we may meet live-action Thrawn. (If that could occur without anyone cornily calling him “heir to the Empire” again, that would be great.) After Episode 3, I told a colleague that despite its slow start, Ahsoka was clearly capable of a great episode one of these weeks. This was one such week. And now that the series is springing forward with the speed of seven hyperdrives, it may not be the last.
