In the Flesh: Ahsoka s1e01: Master and Apprentice

It’s impressive how completely Dave Filoni manages to replicate in Ahsoka the stiff, lifeless feel of the CGI cartoons where he first made his bones as LucasFilm’s diligent, lore-loving, and completely untalented nerd in chief. There’s little lighting to speak of. Prosthetics and costumes are cheap-looking. Choreography is indifferent, blocking a clear afterthought. An early sequence in which Ahsoka Tano (Rosario Dawson, who allegedly assaulted longtime family friend and employee Dedrek Finley, a transgender man, in 2019) walks in a circle around an ancient chamber to adjust a bunch of plinths in particular reads as a middling Let’s Play of someone solving one of Breath of the Wild’s less inspired puzzles. Much of the episode is concerned with this sort of thing, really. Later, Sabine Wren (Natasha Liu Bordizzo) spends multiple scenes staring at a Hellraiser-style sphere before realizing she has to match its pattern to the enormous and frequently repeated icon of the temple where it was discovered, a realization that feels less wondrous and exciting than groan-inducingly obvious.

Filoni’s camerawork is the essence of mediocrity. If there’s anything to be said in his favor it’s that he clearly has no misconception of himself as a visual auteur. Every choice is safe and boring, flatly composed, devoid of depth. The show’s CGI spectacles are execrable. Its lightsabers are so indifferently animated that they often appear more like glowing sticks than actual light. When ex-Jedi mercenary Baylan Skoll (Ray Stevenson) marches inexorably down the corridors of a Republic ship in pursuit of his quarry, there’s a rudimentary attempt to recreate the claustrophobic tension and sharp urgency of a similar sequence in Gareth Edwards’ and Tony Gilroy’s Rogue One in which Darth Vader storms a Rebel warship singlehanded, but the result is almost painfully embarrassing by comparison. The angles are wrong, the lighting is lifeless, the sets are antiseptic, the performers unexamined and indistinct.

Stevenson, buonanima, as game an actor as ever there was, manages to sneak a little wry warmth into his boilerplate villain role, but there’s not much going on here in terms of character. Sabine is rebellious, Ahsoka is reserved and kind of persnickety, the witch Morgan Elsbeth (Dianna Lee Inosanto), whose name feels way too normal for Star Wars, is mysterious. Ivanna Sakhno, who plays Skoll’s apprentice Shin Hati, manages to find a little bit of heat, but her wonderfully expressive face is ill-served by Filoni’s placid camera and lack of interest in dramatic lighting. All of these flaws pale, though, in comparison to the episode’s script. On the most basic “if A then B” level it falls apart under the most cursory scrutiny, and the first-pass dialog is agonizingly stilted. In one scene Ahsoka tells Hera Syndulla (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) that she’s headed their enemies off and found a secret map which can lead them to the missing Grand Admiral Thrawn, then moments later declares that the “only thing that’s certain is that our enemies know where to look.” Moments later we see said enemies scratching their heads. It’s a tiny thing, and in a better show it wouldn’t so much as ping my radar, but here it just serves to showcase the staggering laziness and lack of creativity behind the whole endeavor.

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.