In the Flesh: Ahsoka s1e02: Toil and Trouble

Nothing in ‘Toil and Trouble’, the second episode of Dave Filoni’s lifeless Ahsoka, is framed right. The lightsaber fight alongside the dry dock fails to utilize the empty dock’s depth. Sabine walking down a broad enamel staircase to look longingly at a (truly godawful) mural commemorating her friends is angled to strip all impact from the sight of the young Mandalorian newly kitted out in her ancestral armor. An earlier scene in which Sabine attempts to modulate the power supply to a droid’s severed head in order to recover point of origin data related to its manufacturing, risking a catastrophic explosion, is completely devoid of tension thanks not only to the empty, palpably unreal hospital room in which it’s set but to director Steph Green’s puzzling decision to shoot mostly full-body shots with only a few close-ups to manufacture suspense. As in the Filoni-helmed pilot, the scene plays as a kind of PS4 quicktime event, a bar slowly filling as Sabine… moves a stick around without much urgency. The show’s apparent lack of interest in convincing us its stakes are real extends to its action sequences as well.

Take Ahsoka’s duel with inquisitor Marrok (Paul Darnell). No one is injured. No one comes particularly close to being injured. There is no sense at any point that anything disastrous could occur, or even that the fight has clear stakes. A combat droid participates solely so that something can happen in the midst of all that whooshing and humming as the two combatants face off. Last week’s dramatic ending is undone in the space of an instant as Sabine wakes up in a hospital bed after having been stabbed through the stomach by Shin Hati. It all has the feel of action figure playtime, or of a serialized cartoon like the ones Filoni helmed for LucasFilm before graduating to live action. Nobody dies. Nothing changes. Hell, the whole show is premised around undoing the climax of his own previous show, Rebels, which we learn immediately had no real long-term effect beyond sending everyone on a treasure hunt for characters briefly believed dead.

Nobody does much of anything here. Balan and Shin spend the whole episode standing in a big circle of rocks that acts as a conductor for the map sphere. Hera keeps urging Ahsoka to return to Sabine’s training, and urging Sabine to do the same. The extremely unpleasant to look at Jedi protocol droid Huayang (David Tennant) does pretty much the same thing. It might be more bearable if Sabine and Ahsoka had the slightest detectable amount of interpersonal chemistry, but their scenes together are completely inert. There’s no charge. Nothing. As Hera, Mary Elizabeth Winstead does her best to inject a little life into the plodding script as she and Ahsoka investigate a shipyard harboring imperial loyalists, but there’s no tension to it, no suspense, no real threat. She and Ahsoka execute a control room full of bureaucrats and stevedores who turn on them for no apparent reason. Couldn’t they just have played along and pretended to order the fleeing cargo ship to return to port? As usual, the team behind Ahsoka doesn’t seem to have given it much thought.