In the Flesh: Ahsoka s1e03: Time to Fly

There’s no need to set Ahsoka alongside Andor to make its failings abundantly clear, but when it transplants Mon Mothma (Genevieve O’Reilly) from Andor’s tense, sweaty, sexually charged and politically complex environment to the kiddie games of Filoni’s show, it’s begging for a comparison. The results are less than flattering. Take Mon Mothma’s first conversation with her husband, Perrin, during her introductory episode in Andor. You can see the fault lines in their joyless marriage right away, and not only is their verbal antagonism sharp and fast-moving, it’s underscored by genuine hurt and cruelty. Perrin’s boredom with Mon’s political conscience, Mon’s pain at being thrust into the company of fascists for her apathetic husband’s amusement. The sheer toxic heat in O’Reilly’s delivery of the line, “Don’t make me pay attention, Perrin, because I will, and you will regret it” is enough to scorch your eyebrows off. Set it next to five holograms telling Mary Elizabeth Winstead she can’t fight the Imperial Remnant for vague tax reasons because one of them thinks she’s using it as an excuse to chase after her dead friend Ezra and it’s like the difference between a human being and a life-size cardboard promotional cutout. That the scene seems to drag on for half the episode’s half-hour runtime doesn’t help.

Speaking of interminability, the opening sequence in which Sabine takes up drilling her lightsaber skills is one of the limpest things I’ve ever seen. Not only is the choreography exaggeratedly slow and broad, but the show once again runs aground on the complete lack of tension or chemistry between Ahsoka and Sabine. Training is hard for Sabine, who seems to lack aptitude for the Force (how a droid with no access to the Force himself could deduce this seems murky, but whatever, it’s Star Wars). Ahsoka seems to have no opinion on this, gliding serenely through exercise after exercise. I’ve seen Rosario Dawson do good work many times, but here she’s as animated and interesting as a pound of wet cotton wool. Bordizzo, sadly, is no better, straining for lively and sassy and landing instead somewhere in the “aw gee whiz” Disney Channel original series valley of performing uncanniness. It’s like watching an improv session where one person refuses to participate and the other is reading off of scripts for an episode of the promotional G. I. Joe cartoon from the 90s.

Then there’s the orbital dogfight. Good god, what a stinker, what an absolutely lifeless piece of action filmmaking. No tension, no sense of space, no emotion whatsoever. A bunch of faceless guys die very slowly with no perceptible buildup or reward. Ahsoka spacewalks to cut a fighter in half with her lightsabers in what the show clearly intends to be a moment of badass awesomeness, but it comes off as goofy, muddled, and limp. At no point does it feel like we’re physically with these characters, or like something that matters might happen to them, or that they might do anything that matters! It’s so anesthetized you could hardly even call it a fight. Stack it up next to Luke and Han nailing TIE fighters after their escape from the Death Star, or heck, even Rey and Finn flying the Millennium Falcon for the first time in the otherwise forgettable The Force Awakens, and it’s about as compelling as a car commercial. No one working on Ahsoka seems to have the faintest idea how to convey physical sensation through filmmaking, the basic building block of nearly all genre film. Just a comprehensive failure.

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