The ties that bind.
What They Say:
The Mandalorian and the Child continue their journey through a dangerous galaxy.
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
The arrival of Ahsoka Tano in live-action form has finally arrived and opened a whole new round of endless debate for fans to sink their teeth into. Played Rosario Dawson, we get to see her in this post-Empire world just a few years on from them but probably close to ten years or so since we last saw her at the end of Star Wars Rebels. People change in that amount of time and Tano looks like she’s matured a bit more – obviously – and has less to say simply by the nature of how this works compared to an animated series aimed at younger audiences. I’m sure there are plenty of pros and cons going on about how she’s presented, and whether the original voice actor should have had a better shot at it, but overall I think they captured it well and that’s really as far as one can dig into it based on such a limited amount of time overall.
Arriving on the planet Calodan and the apparently very tiny city of Corvus, Mando is very close to finding the Jedi that he’s been able to get information on. Unfortunately for him, said Jedi is engaged in a one-person war against the woman who has taken over the town and the mercenary that she has working for her. The Jedi, obviously, is Ahsoka Tano and I’m sure she wouldn’t quite call herself a Jedi based on the canonical appearances as of this writing since she’s long left the order and the order itself fell anyway. But that’s semantics as she was trained as one and employs her use of the Force in the same way. For her, she’s on a mission that we’ve known about since the end of Star Wars Rebels and was suspected to still be ongoing. The hunt for Grand Admiral Thrawn is a worthy one as he’s too dangerous to unaccounted for as are his people. I had initially hoped that Thrawn would be the one behind the First Order as it would make a lot of sense in the sequel trilogy, if things had been tightened up differently, but alas.
Ahsoka’s mission is simple in that she’s still trying to get information on him (and presumably still looking for Ezra as well) and since she’s here and Bo-Katan knew that very recently, the two must have been working together not that long ago as well. What Ahsoka is up to here isn’t something that takes a lot of time, but it is playing out beautifully as we see her slowly taking down the guards that Elsbeth has hired to protect her outside the city walls. Ahsoka’s using the basics of the Force but in a way that we wanted to see in The Phantom Menace but didn’t come across right as it was almost too childish then. Here, it’s serious and dangerous, but it doesn’t reach far beyond that. With her two white(??) lightsabers, she’s able to put things in motion to get closer to Elsbeth soon and demand answers. Which is, of course, why we’re all hoping for an Ahsoka series in order to follow that storyline. I am, admittedly, hopeful that the story of this and Ezra Bridger will be the “gap” years between the original and sequel trilogies to explore.
Now, the main reason for Mando seeking out Ahsoka is in regards to The Child. The whole idea is that he’s been tasked to get him to them, or one of them, and basically hand him off to where he’s supposed to be. But that would be the end of the series and the show has done well to seed so far this season that the two have really bonded well and there’s a natural parental relationship that has formed here, which ties into Mando’s own background as a foundling. Ahsoka, sadly, doesn’t really just provide some background here to fill him and the viewer in, but she is able to communicate with him on some level through Force and learns his real name, which was always going to be controversial for a lot of fans. Regardless, we see just how well these two are together and that Mando is where the child needs to be for the moment. I think there’s a lot more that could and should have been done with this meeting but sparse is the name of the game with The Mandalorian.
The pacing for this episode is really slow and distinct, which at times felt like it was a long form version of some of those really cool Mondo posters out there with its color design. Corvus looks like a ruined forest world in a lot of ways and there are neat details there, but it’s a foggy dark green thing that seemingly takes place almost entirely at night or the evening. Dave Filoni both wrote and directed this one and you can see his growth in directing live-action from the first season while also playing this as you know Lucas would have way back when. The show has played to the spaghetti western aspect so much but while also into the Japanese interpretation of it with the whole Lone Wolf & Cub thing. Here, we get the whole samurai versus gunfighter thing but we also get a lot of extended ninja time as Ahsoka largely fills that role as she leaps from roof to roof while hunting the mercs and droids. I do like that we got Michael Biehn in for an episode of this. I’ve loved him for all his work on James Cameron films over the years but this was a franchise he had never gotten involved with before. It’s crossing a whole lot of streams.
In Summary:
The Mandalorian finally gives us the other really big moment a lot of fans have wanted for a long time. While Bo-Katan was a big get and could have been all that we’d get, bringing Ahsoka into live-action at long last pays off even bigger dividends. The character was huge for younger fans when she first appeared in the TV series well over a decade ago and sold a ton of merchandise over the years. Bringing her out now, older and wiser, as a lot of that audience has grown up and is engaged with some strong serialized storytelling out there, the potential is there. But at the same time, the addition of Tano here could have been just any random new creation if you aren’t familiar with the non-film material and you wouldn’t miss a bit. Fans get the deeper cut with some of the namedropping going on here that will excite even more, but it’s still incredibly accessible and that’s a hard line to walk.
Grade: A-
