In the Flesh: Ahsoka s1e07: Dreams and Madness

After last week’s light snack of fun fantasy stuff, it’s back to starvation rations for Ahsoka. The show’s seventh episode opens with an airless courtroom drama scene on a set that looks like something out of a fan film. Filoni has no ear for political dialogue, and no apparent comprehension of how governments, or the people in them, function. Why is Senator Xioni (Nelson Lee) able to call a court martial when he apparently isn’t even on the New Republic’s defense council? Why did no one think to speak to Princess Leia, who is? What kind of military tribunal is headed up by the chief of state of a galactic government? It’s all muddled, ineffectual, tedious stuff, and C-3PO (Anthony Daniels) showing up to cut right through it feels less like a last-minute save than an admission that this entire subplot was a plodding waste of time. It’s even worse when Thrawn starts plotting out loud. For the galaxy’s greatest strategist, his every statement on tactics reads like Chicken Soup for the Warlord’s Soul. Always be one step ahead. Look at where they’re going, not where they are. “Have better ideas,” basically.

If he wasn’t stuck constantly trying to spin failing and sucking (shit) into reasons he’s a genius (gold), Lars Mikkelsen’s icy, detached affect would really work here. Ahsoka, though, is a children’s show at heart, where fights have no stakes and the bad guys never really win, so a ruthless chessmaster general with nerves of steel isn’t really in its wheelhouse. You can’t tell us over and over again how brilliant a guy is if you refuse to show it on the screen, just like you can’t expect us to care about another slow, indifferently staged and choreographed fight scene between characters who have yet to do anything more narratively daring than tossing each other off cliffs. There’s just no spine here. There’s no substance to it beyond the jangling keys effect that comes with jamming a bunch of Star Wars shit into one place. Why are we doing a hologram of Anakin (Hayden Christensen) just two episodes after we saw his Force ghost/vision self? What new information are we supposed to glean besides that someone has given Filoni the keys to the big boy budget?

‘Dreams and Madness’ (gun to my head, I couldn’t tell you why that’s the episode title) spins its wheels for another forty minutes, and as nice as it is to see Rosario Dawson stretch just the tiniest bit beyond stoic standoffishness, there’s not enough to fill that time. More godawful dialogue you’d be thrown out of a 101 course for dragging in, more lackluster reunions between characters without much chemistry, more plotting that wouldn’t fly in an episode of Frasier — all of it going nowhere at a sedate Sunday Drive pace. The late Ray Stevenson, as usual, does heavy lifting for Baylan’s underwritten goodbye with his apprentice, the two actors wringing genuine emotion out of the end of their relationship, but what follows is two more fights to lackluster draws and then an unbearably cheesy line read from Eman Esfandi’s Ezra, roll credits. All I know at this point is that if I have to listen to one more soporific line by Diana Lee Inosanto as Morgan Elsbeth, I’m going to shoot my television.

This piece was written during the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike. Without the labor of the actors currently on strike, the show being covered here wouldn't exist.