Ahsoka Has Overstayed Her Welcome
“Too much of a good thing” still applies to a galaxy far, far away.
Tony Sofia – Staff Writer

Rosario Dawson as Ahsoka in The Mandalorian season two, 2020, nerdbot.com, 2 October 2024, <https://nerdbot.com/2020/12/01/rosario-dawson-as-ahsoka-tano-happened-because-twitter-fancasting/>

SPOILERS AHEAD FOR VARIOUS STAR WARS TV SHOWS AND THE BOOK “STAR WARS: DARK DISCIPLE”
With her own show wrapping its first season on Disney+ just over one year ago, Ahsoka Tano has come a long way since her first appearance. She originated as Anakin Skywalker’s padawan in the animated movie “Star Wars: The Clone Wars” and her story continued in the show of the same name. Considering she wasn’t in any of the six live-action films, which at the time were the only ones, many fans wondered whether or not Ahsoka would survive the end of the series. Originally, she wasn’t supposed to.
“The Clone Wars” started airing on Cartoon Network, a Warner Bros channel, in 2008. After Disney bought Lucasfilm in late 2012, the fifth of eight planned seasons would be the last to air on TV, with shortened sixth and seventh seasons released on Netflix in 2014 and Disney+ in 2020, respectively. With a number of storylines left unfinished due to the cancellation, the team behind the show used their next show “Star Wars Rebels,” which aired on Disney XD, as a way to tie up some of those loose ends. One of these loose ends was Ahsoka, who managed to survive her planned demise.
The writers had many ideas of how to kill her, but the one that seemed most likely was for her to die at the blade of her former master turned Sith lord Darth Vader. The idea of Anakin striking down his former padawan, one of the few people who truly understood him, would’ve helped solidify his tragic turn to the dark side and transformation into Darth Vader. Despite the cancellation, she still almost got this ending.
In the season two finale of “Rebels,” Ahsoka Tano and Darth Vader have an epic duel for the ages. Surprisingly, she survived. The thing is, it wasn’t explained how until season four. How did she do it? Well, Star Wars decided to introduce time travel just so they could keep her alive, something that many fans felt broke the pre-established rules of the universe. To make things even worse, the epilogue at the end of the series finale, which takes place after the original trilogy, showed that she was still alive. The reason she was originally supposed to die was to explain her absence from the films as she was not the kind of character to sit on the sidelines. Part of her character in both “The Clone Wars” and “Rebels” is that, similar to her master before her, she was always fighting the good fight and doing what she could to save and help as many people as possible. Keeping her alive through the original trilogy raises so many questions. Why did she not continue to be one of the leaders of the Rebel Alliance? Why didn’t Obi-wan or Yoda tell Luke to seek her out? Why didn’t she track down Luke herself? Why was she not part of the attacks on either of the Death Stars? Why did Yoda tell Luke he was the last Jedi if he could still feel Ahsoka through the Force? Why was she not at least mentioned by our main cast of heroes? Being such an active character turns her absence from major events into blatant character assassination, and the blame lies squarely on one man.
Star Wars fans have probably heard the name Dave Filoni before. He was one of the main people behind shows like “The Clone Wars” and “Rebels” and is currently working on shows like “The Mandalorian” and the aptly titled “Ahsoka.” He’s credited as being the creator of Ahsoka Tano and this is potentially the crux of the issue. When Ahsoka was first introduced, the fans absolutely hated her. By the end of “The Clone Wars’” run on Cartoon Network, she had turned into a fan favorite. Filoni’s pride in making such a beloved character clearly made him reluctant to kill her off and had him take on the role of a devouring mother. Refusing to let her go has actively hurt her character and it’s entirely his fault. It’s nice to see a fan favorite in more projects, yes, but she’s lost what made her so great in the first place. Ahsoka’s continued presence in Star Wars embodies the two biggest problems with the franchise today.
The first issue is that a lot of stories aren’t self-contained anymore. The original trilogy was self-contained, as was the prequel trilogy and the original plans for “The Clone Wars,” but you got more out of each story by experiencing all of them together. However, modern Star Wars shows almost require you to watch everything else. Ahsoka’s show requires you to have seen “The Clone Wars,” “Rebels” and “The Mandalorian.” The Ahsoka show is more of a fifth season of “Rebels” as they don’t bother to set up any of the returning characters or even Ahsoka herself; they just assume you’re caught up. To understand the third season of “The Mandalorian,” you need to watch “The Book of Boba Fett” after Mando’s first two seasons. “The Bad Batch” acts as a direct follow-up to “The Clone Wars,” but most of the plot lines it set up never got resolved (possibly for another show). Star Wars’ episodic structure allowed newcomers to jump in wherever, but requiring your audience to watch three separate TV shows just to understand your new one makes it feel less like entertainment and more like homework.
The second issue is Filoni’s pride. Back when George Lucas was still in charge, the rules were that the only official stories were the movies and “The Clone Wars;” everything else was labeled as the Expanded Universe. This meant that everyone had to follow the rules and stories that Lucas, Filoni and the rest of the Lucasfilm crew came up with and not the other way around. “The Clone Wars” would make references to the EU as it was still all the same universe, but it would also contradict certain elements since so many people had touched the franchise and Lucas didn’t want his team to be limited creatively. When Disney bought Lucasfilm, they made the EU non-canon (in other words pretended none of it happened). The first Star Wars book under Disney titled “A New Dawn” has a foreword by Filoni himself stating that everything from here on out will be equal levels of “canon” and there would be no more contradictions between the movies, shows, books and games. This turned out to be a bold-faced lie as Filoni continues to follow the old rules of “movies and shows make the rules, everyone else follows them.” In other words, he gets to make the rules since Disney seems to have all but abandoned making Star Wars movies and he’s the one doing all of the TV shows. There are a few minor discrepancies with how events play out between books and shows, but the most egregious example is when he revived a character from the book “Star Wars: Dark Disciple.”
When “The Clone Wars” was canceled, a few of the unmade storylines made their way into various mediums. Some unfinished episodes were put on the Star Wars website while other storylines made their way to print. One of these was the Dark Disciple story arc which would have been a lengthy eight episodes compared to the usual two to four episode arcs they made. A major character from “The Clone Wars” is killed off in the book, only to suddenly be alive and well in the third season of “The Bad Batch.” This was the final straw for many, as this makes the events of the book (which is arguably better than the entirety of “The Bad Batch”) completely invalid. Filoni just can’t seem to let go of some of these characters.
Part of the Jedi code is that attachments are forbidden. Forming an emotional attachment to something or someone will cloud a Jedi’s judgment and make them unable to look at things objectively, which is something Filoni could learn from. He’s a smart man and helped make one of the highest-rated shows on television, but his attachment to Ahsoka is clouding his judgment. He needs to let go. Ahsoka’s story needs to end.
Many online Star Wars fans have a running joke that the prequel trilogy was too much Lucas, the sequel trilogy was not enough Lucas and the original trilogy was just the right amount of Lucas. Adding on to the Goldilocks-themed joke, one could say that “The Clone Wars” was just the right amount of Filoni while everything we have now is way too much Filoni.