This week on Ahsoka, the season ended–but not the series. It’s not really that surprising. There was little chance that this episode could actually wrap any of these threads in a satisfying way, because there just wasn’t enough time left. I hope you’re excited for more Ahsoka.
Warning: This article is all spoilers for the Season 1 finale of Star Wars: Ahsoka.
This episode carries a pretty straightforward premise: The bad guys, led by Grand Admiral Thrawn and the Great Mothers of the Dathomiri, are trying to fly away from Peridea and the galaxy it lives in; and the good guys, led by Ahsoka, are trying to hitch a ride by whatever means necessary, because there’s no other way out of this place as far as anybody knows. We’ll revisit that point at the very end of this article.
The witches take center stage this week, as well. Near the beginning of the episode, the Great Mothers decide to reward Morgan Elsbeth’s endeavors by giving her a promotion–she gets some creepy new markings on her face and a sick magical flaming sword. Yeah, she’s gonna get to use it. But not yet.
First, the Mothers have their own stunt to pull. After Ahsoka, Sabine, and Ezra fight through a thick pack of stormtroopers, the Mothers do some kind of incantation that brings them back to life as zombies. As the fight drags on, the stormtroopers simply will not stay dead, and it’s making things pretty difficult.
Not difficult enough, though. Thrawn decides that Ahsoka and co. are moving too quickly and sends Morgan to deal with them. She ends up solo-fighting Ahsoka while Sabine and Ezra try to get into Thrawn’s star destroyer. Ezra manages it, but Sabine stays behind to help Ahsoka fight Morgan. They win, and Ahsoka kills Morgan. But the star destroyer is flying away with Ezra aboard.
Fortunately, Huyang very conveniently finished repairing Ahsoka’s ship right at that very minute, and they all fly off after Thrawn and Ezra. It’s too late, though. Thrawn monologues at Ahsoka a little bit to gloat and then flies back to the known galaxy–leaving Ahsoka and Sabine stranded in the wrong galaxy.
Oh, but they’re not alone there. Remember Baylan Skoll and Shin Hati? Those two aren’t referenced at all during this episode until they each get about five seconds of screen time right at the end. We’ll also talk about that at the end of this article.
Before we take a look at the finale’s collection of Easter eggs and references, don’t forget to check out our previous Easter egg guides to Ahsoka if you missed them.
Episode 1 and 2Episode 3Episode 4Episode 5Episode 6Episode 7
1. The Jedi, the Witch and the Warlord
This episode’s title is a reference to the first Chronicles of Narnia book: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Series creator Dave Filoni has cited the Narnia series as a key influence on some of the more fantastical aspects of the Clone Wars and Rebels shows–this episode gets into some pretty weird stuff, so the title tracks in that sense.
2. The Blade of Talzin
When Morgan gets her big promotion, the Great Mothers conjure for her a green-flaming scimitar that they refer to as “the blade of Talzin.” Talzin was the Great Mother who united all the Nightsister clans of Dathomir prior to the rise of the Empire. Talzin isn’t some ancient history name-drop, though–she was a character on Clone Wars, and she even got into some wild shenanigans after her death when she possessed Count Dooku. But her spirit has been perma-killed. It’s a fun reference to make considering the next item.
3. Thrawn “woke up the witches”
Oddly enough, we know basically nothing about what happened on Peridea during the decade or so that Thrawn and co. have been stranded there–they simply haven’t talked about it. But we got this one weird detail from Ezra this week, when Ahsoka asked him for info about the witch temple that Thrawn’s ship is docked on. But he had no intel, because Thrawn has been sitting on it since he found the place and “woke up the witches.”
The one piece of lore that we have on Peridea is that it’s where the ancestors of the Nightsisters originally came from tens of thousands of years ago–it’s why Morgan was able to find that star map several episodes ago. But until this offhand comment, we knew nothing about these Great Mothers that Thrawn has been working with–no hint of an explanation had been offered for their presence or their relationship with Thrawn. This detail doesn’t tell us why they serve Thrawn, but it does tell us that they were on Peridea already when he got there, and they were in, I suppose, some kind of hibernation.
Are these witches left over from the ancient witch kingdom? Or did they also somehow end up here from the known galaxy? That they name-dropped Talzin and conjured her sword could indicate they knew her personally–but they already demonstrated that they could communicate with Morgan across the void, and Talzin’s ghost has been floating through the ether for a couple decades.
4. That Death Star siren
Multiple times during the episode we can hear the very dramatic alert siren that we first heard on the Death Star in A New Hope.
5. The real death troopers
One of the Great Mothers’ tricks in this episode is the zombie stormtrooper thing, a cool bit that can trace its heritage back to an old Expanded Universe novel, Death Troopers.
In the current Disney continuity, Death Troopers are the particularly cool brand of black-armored stormtroopers we saw in Rogue One. In the old Expanded Universe, however, there was an ancient magical Sith plague that ravaged the crew of a star destroyer and turned them into zombies, including a large number of stormtroopers–aka those titular Death Troopers. Star Wars has recycled many details from the Expanded Universe in the Disney era, and this is one of the better examples of that.
6. It’s like poetry
During the hour-long documentary The Beginning, about the making of The Phantom Menace, Star Wars creator George Lucas had a quote that’s been memed many times over the past two decades. While talking about recycling and rejiggering original trilogy plot points for the prequel trilogy, he said, “It’s like poetry. They rhyme.”
Dave Filoni and the writing staff on Ahsoka certainly did some poetry in this episode with the ending: Ezra, stowed away on Thrawn’s ship, is whisked away back to the known galaxy while Ahsoka and Sabine are left behind, unable to follow. It’s the exact same thing that happened in the Rebels finale, but this time they’re moving toward known space instead of away from it.
7. And this was also like poetry
Just for good measure, we get another of these mirror scenes, when a stolen Imperial shuttle lands in the hangar bay of a New Republic cruiser and is met by a welcoming party of armed Republic forces–just like in the first scene of the series. But whereas it was Baylan Skoll and Shin Hati the first time, and they killed everyone on the ship, this time it’s Ezra (in stormtrooper armor), and there is no fighting because Hera Syndulla is very happy to see him.
8. The Force gods are here
Baylan Skoll gets only one scene in this episode, and he has no lines, but it’s a doozy nonetheless. At the very end of the episode, we see him standing on a gigantic statue of an old man that we know as the Father. The ethereal Father and his family together are sort of the personification of the Force, as we saw when our heroes encountered them on Clone Wars.
In addition to the Father, there was also a statue of the Son, and Ahsoka also separately encountered the space owl known as Morai–a magical entity who carries the spirit of the Daughter and likes to protect Ahsoka. These beings hail from a world called Mortis, which exists outside normal reality and is related to the World Between Worlds in some way–maybe there was more going on during Ahsoka’s trip there a few episodes ago than we realized.
There’s one more member of the family who isn’t referenced here. The old Expanded Universe added to the dynamic of the Father, Son, and Daughter by introducing Abeloth, the Mother. But unlike the rest of the family, Abeloth was a mortal who ascended to godhood, and that process corrupted her and turned her into an extremely destructive entity who started a big galactic war–sounds familiar.
I don’t know where they’re going with this, but it’s pretty clear now that the First Family of the Force is what Baylan Skoll was talking about when he told Shin about wanting to find “the beginning.” He’s likely on a quest to kill all of them in hopes that that will destabilize or shut down the Force.
Unfortunately, the actor who plays Baylan, Ray Stevenson, died in May–that will require some kind of pivot, but I doubt anybody knows for sure what kind of pivot it’ll end up being.