All Huyang wanted was for Ahsoka Tano and Sabine Wren to stay together. In the end of the action-packed season finale of Ahsoka, that’s what they did. But not before they jeopardized the fate of the entire galaxy for a ride home for Ezra Bridger that also brought back Grand Admiral Thrawn, the enemy Ezra spent years marooned on a distant planet to neutralize.
The latest Star Wars series had its share of highlights in its first season, but the show’s uninspired conclusion adds another missed opportunity to what has become an unfortunate pattern in the franchise’s growing TV catalog. Across eight episodes, Ahsoka could have been a great character study of a former Jedi who holds a unique place in Star Wars history as the apprentice of Anakin Skywalker, and at times it showed that potential. But the season seemed less interested in exploring the depths of Ahsoka—or other characters, like Sabine—than it was in simply getting everyone to where they needed to be. There’s a prevailing sense that Ahsoka is just a small piece of the franchise’s greater narrative designs, and the attention required to make characters work—and for emotional moments to really land—within the confines of the show was sacrificed to service fans of Dave Filoni’s animated The Clone Wars and Rebels series and future Star Wars agendas.
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In this way, Ahsoka has fallen victim to Star Wars’ recent attempts to weave together an interconnected narrative akin to the MCU. The Mandoverse—or Filoniverse, or whatever we’re calling this verse—is building toward a culminating crossover event, an untitled film to be directed by Filoni, that will combine the story lines of Ahsoka, The Mandalorian, The Book of Boba Fett, and the forthcoming Skeleton Crew. At the expense of ending its first (and potentially only) season as a better, self-contained story, Ahsoka succeeded in setting future Star Wars stories in motion. Let’s explore some of the biggest questions coming out of the finale.
What’s next for Ahsoka and Sabine?
It remains unclear whether Tuesday’s finale was the conclusion of the season or of the entire series, as Lucasfilm has yet to announce the fate of Ahsoka. With as many loose ends as “The Jedi, the Witch, and the Warlord” leaves open, it would make more sense if Filoni has plans in place for Ahsoka to continue for a second season, but it’s certainly possible that future Mandoverse projects will pick up where the finale left off. Regardless of whether it’s in new installments of Ahsoka or some other Star Wars enterprise, Ahsoka and Sabine now find themselves in the same predicament that Ezra was previously in, stranded in a galaxy farther, farther away.
Sabine’s desire to rescue Ezra led directly to Thrawn’s successful escape from exile, and though Ahsoka says at the end of the finale that Ezra is “where he needs to be,” Sabine’s choice hasn’t yet been justified or redeemed in any meaningful way. Sabine has her semi-miraculous (yet completely predictable) Force breakthrough when it’s most convenient for the plot, and Ahsoka forgives her misdeeds without providing anything that resembles a valuable lesson. Ahsoka even congratulates her Padawan for a job well done as they begin life among Peridea’s nomadic hermit crabs while the greatest threat to the New Republic prepares to bring the Empire back to its former glory.
Ahsoka and Sabine still have a lot of room for improvement in their dysfunctional master-and-apprentice relationship, and their time together on Peridea will afford Ahsoka the chance to give Sabine some good old-fashioned Jedi training. However, their shuttle’s hyperdrive won’t get them to their native galaxy, so unless they can hop in a purrgil, returning home will be no easy feat. Peridea is an ancient migratory stop for the star whales, as evidenced by its purrgil-remains ring system, but it’s not clear how often the animals visit of their own accord. However, there’s theoretically nothing stopping Ezra from making the same journey to rescue them that he did to help liberate Lothal.
Thanks to Sabine and Ahsoka, Ezra was able to find his way home for a heartwarming reunion with Hera Syndulla and Chopper. The finale didn’t leave any room for him to bear the bad news of Thrawn’s return and Ahsoka and Sabine’s abandonment, but Ezra’s return may be vital to Ahsoka and Sabine’s inevitable return from Peridea. If Zeb ever gets any live-action love beyond a cameo here and there, Filoni may be lining up the pieces for a full-fledged Rebels reunion tour further down the line.
What does Thrawn’s return mean for the rest of the Star Wars universe?
It took some poor decision-making on Sabine’s part to provide a means for Thrawn’s escape, and a lack of any coherent plan from a trio of former and current Jedi to allow him to leave Peridea, but the grand admiral has made his way back from a land once believed to be the stuff of Jedi folklore. How he’ll fit into the picture of the greater Star Wars universe is nearly as puzzling as Palpatine’s sudden return in The Rise of Skywalker. The various Star Wars series have been making efforts to fix the lackluster sequel trilogy, and some narrative maneuvering will likewise be required to retroactively fit Thrawn into an intergalactic conflict that he played no known part in.
Thrawn was a terrific villain in Rebels and a formidable enemy brought to life in Ahsoka. But given that he was never even mentioned in the sequel trilogy, it’s difficult to see how he’ll slot into the increasingly cluttered timeline that Star Wars is trying to navigate. As Hera made clear in every headache of a political detour that Ahsoka took to broadcast the complacency of the New Republic, Thrawn and the Imperial Remnant pose a tremendous threat to the galaxy’s newfound peace. Now, he and the Great Mothers have arrived in his Star Destroyer Chimaera with some mysterious cargo and an army of stormtroopers who can be reanimated by dark magick should they ever be killed in combat.
There’s a lot we don’t know about Thrawn and his plans to reignite the dying embers of the Empire—including whether he’s been in any kind of contact with old ally Gilad Pellaeon and the rest of the Shadow Council seen in Season 3 of The Mandalorian—but it’s clear that, after being bested by Jedi in the past, he’s leaving nothing to chance as he plots his next move. His faith in the magick-wielding Nightsisters has set him on a course to Dathomir, the home planet of the decimated witches in the usual Star Wars galaxy and the birthplace of Darth Maul. Given how important Dathomir was to Filoni’s Clone Wars series, this move brings Ahsoka and the Mandoverse yet another step closer to the expansive story that Filoni has told across multiple animated projects, and the setting will surely factor into his upcoming film. How it will all logistically fit into the rise of the First Order and the events of the sequel trilogy remains to be seen.
What part will the Nightsisters play?
Speaking of the Nightsisters, the witches of Dathomir—or, rather, their counterparts from the Nightsisters’ ancestral homeworld Peridea—have quickly emerged from near extinction to become close allies to Thrawn. They might have had to sacrifice Morgan Elsbeth (right after she got her hands on a legendary sword), but they’ve managed to parlay their alliance with the grand admiral into a cross-galaxy trip back home. Though magick has largely been limited to Star Wars animation, it’s made a leap to live action in a major way and could be a game changer for future TV series and films.
Unless the Great Mothers’ only motivation to work with Thrawn was to get a ticket to Dathomir and leave their home on Peridea behind, there must be something we don’t know yet about the terms of their alliance. We also still don’t know what’s in any of the boxes that Thrawn and Co. so desperately needed to load onto their ship before jumping into hyperspace, so it’s possible that the cargo and the Nightsisters’ goals are related.
In an offhand comment Ezra made in the finale regarding the limited intel he had on the witch fortress where Thrawn docked the Chimaera, we learn that Thrawn “woke up the witches” some time after he arrived on Peridea. It’s a strange bit of phrasing that calls back to the revelation in Episode 6 that the Nightsisters originated on Peridea. If Thrawn was able to awaken the Great Mothers on Peridea, it seems plausible that there are other Nightsisters still to be woken up and recruited to his cause. Those boxes could be full of hibernating or deceased rank-and-file Nightsisters that the Great Mothers can awaken or resurrect on Dathomir, or they could contain some other means of deepening their power.
Even if the boxes carry something else entirely, Ahsoka ends with Thrawn and the Great Mothers heading toward Dathomir. So whatever comes next, the Nightsisters will surely play a prominent role. And with the Sith temporarily out of the picture and Luke Skywalker’s new Jedi order just getting on its feet, there’s something of a Force-power vacuum that the Nightsisters could step into.
What will happen with Baylan Skoll and the Mortis gods?
Of the sins that Filoni and his team committed with Ahsoka’s unmoving finale, the most unfortunate may be the near absence of Baylan Skoll. Played by the late, great Ray Stevenson in one of his final performances before his death earlier this year, Baylan was one of the highlights of Ahsoka, an underutilized foil who commanded attention every time he graced the screen despite being given very little to do. Baylan is sidelined for almost the duration of the episode, save for a single, wordless scene that leaves a major hint about what his ulterior motives for finding Peridea were all along.
Near the end of the finale, Baylan looks toward a distant mountain—with a light emanating from its peak—as he stands on the outstretched arm of a towering statue pulled straight from The Lord of the Rings. The statue is a monument to the Mortis god known as the Father, and standing beside it are two other statues—the Son and the Daughter—that complete the trio of Mortis gods known as the Ones. Crucially, the statue depicting the Daughter is damaged, with its head nowhere to be seen.
The scene, which lasts for about 30 seconds, calls back to a three-episode arc in the third season of Clone Wars, as Ahsoka relies on Filoni’s animated lore to the very end. This Clone Wars story arc is a strange, dreamlike departure from the regular proceedings of the animated program that essentially tells the story of the Force and the never-ending battle between its two sides: the light and the dark, the Jedi and the Sith. It features Anakin, Obi-Wan, and Ahsoka as they follow an ancient Jedi distress signal and end up stranded on a mysterious planet known as Mortis. They cross paths with the realm’s three deities: the selfless, good-natured Daughter, who represents the light; the selfish, evil Son, who represents the dark; and the Father, who keeps the balance between the two.
To cut a long (and rather convoluted) story short, Anakin is brought to Mortis because the Father believes him to be the Chosen One who can take his place in keeping the peace between his warring children, thus bringing a balance to the Force. But everything quickly goes awry. The Son tries to kill the Father, and Ahsoka dies and is resurrected by the Daughter, who sacrifices herself to save the Father. In the end, the Daughter, the Son, and the Father all die, and the trio of Jedi return to the war—though a part of the Daughter remains connected with Ahsoka after the former transfers her life essence to the Padawan. This deeper relationship between the Daughter and Ahsoka, as well as Ahsoka’s connections to the Mortis gods, is echoed in the finale’s closing moments, when Ahsoka sees her (and formerly, the Daughter’s) owllike spirit animal, Morai.
Ahsoka reveals that the Ones have a history on Peridea, and whatever that history may be, Baylan believes that Peridea holds the key to ending the eternal conflict between the light and dark. “As you get older, look at history, you realize it’s all inevitable,” Baylan says to his apprentice, Shin Hati, in the fifth episode. “The fall of the Jedi, rise of the Empire. It repeats again and again and again. … What I seek is the beginning, so I may finally bring this cycle to an end.”
It’s possible that Baylan’s quest is leading him to another important mythical figure related to the Mortis gods: Abeloth, the Bringer of Chaos. As the story goes, Abeloth was once a mortal woman who served the Ones, eventually growing close enough to them that she became the Mother—another being who could keep the peace between the warring Son and Daughter. Because of her mortality, which separated her from the immortal gods, though, she eventually turned to a pair of forbidden, mystical power sources—the Font of Power and the Pool of Knowledge—that could extend her life indefinitely. But the process corrupted the Mother and transformed her into Abeloth, a demonic figure with immense power. The Father, Son, and Daughter deserted Abeloth after learning what the Mother had done, and Abeloth was imprisoned, with the evil entity attempting to escape again and again forever after.
Abeloth was a major antagonist of the Fate of the Jedi books, which were published shortly before Disney acquired Lucasfilm. She’s not a part of the current canon, which makes it less likely that she’ll show up in the Mandoverse—but Filoni frequently pulls elements of old “Legends” stories (including Thrawn) into his shows. Although the Ones may be dead, Abeloth could be in some sort of prison on Peridea, and Baylan could be on his way to free her, unleashing an all-powerful force that could end the endless war between the Jedi and the Sith for good.
There’s no telling how Baylan’s story will continue without Stevenson. But the finale made it clear that plans were in place to extend the journey of Ahsoka’s subtle MVP. Aside from the likely solution of recasting the role of Baylan, it’s possible that Shin will carry on his legacy. Although Baylan foresaw a different path for his ambitious and power-hungry apprentice in the new Empire, Shin remained on Peridea to join (and potentially lead) a group of bandits instead of returning with Thrawn. And all this god talk sounds just a bit more important than a lifestyle that seems to revolve around periodically mugging a nomadic band of hermit crabs.
It’s a shame that we won’t be able to see Baylan’s story proceed as planned with Stevenson reprising the role. But given the significance that the Ones have in Star Wars canon, it feels safe to say that Baylan’s arc will continue in some shape or form. If Ahsoka is renewed for a second season, Ahsoka and Sabine’s journey will likely cross paths with Baylan’s mysterious quest as Filoni digs deeper into the creation story of the Force itself. And if not, George Lucas’s former protégé must have another project in mind to pick up the narrative threads.
How will Skeleton Crew tie into everything?
The next project coming up in the Mandoverse will be Skeleton Crew, another eight-episode Disney+ series that was expected to be released in late 2023, though the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes may delay its release. The series has been described as a 1980s Amblin–style adventure (such as The Goonies or E.T.) that centers on four children. “It’s a story about a group of kids, about 10 years old, from a tiny little planet who accidentally get lost in the Star Wars galaxy,” cocreator Jon Watts told Entertainment Weekly in 2022. “And it’s the story of their journey trying to find their way home.”
Alongside its core of young actors, Skeleton Crew will star Jude Law and feature a team of high-profile directors: Watts (Spider-Man: No Way Home), David Lowery (The Green Knight), the Daniels (Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, Everything Everywhere All at Once), and Jake Schreier (Beef), as well as Mandalorian alums Bryce Dallas Howard and Lee Isaac Chung (Minari).
Beyond who’s involved in the series and its general premise, details about Skeleton Crew have been scarce. We do know that it takes place in the same post–Return of the Jedi timeline that the other Mandoverse series have been set in; that Vane, the pirate from The Mandalorian Season 3, will be one of its antagonists; and that its events will similarly lead into Filoni’s climactic movie. It doesn’t seem as if Ahsoka laid any groundwork for Skeleton Crew, unless someone like the young Jacen Syndulla—who made a few minor appearances—works his way into its plot somehow. The finale paid a price for its outsized concerns over setting up the future of Star Wars. We’ll eventually find out whether it was worth it, and just how much of a foundation Ahsoka has laid for the rest of the Mandoverse to build on.
