Part Six of Ahsoka went by fast, and it wasn’t a short episode. That’s usually the sign of a good one, and this was a good one. It’s also the episode where we finally get the answer to where Ezra is, and that’s the one part of it I’d have done differently.
Mrs. Know-It-All wanted to start with the cute little hermit crabs, so that’s where we’re starting. She turned to me in the middle of the episode and said, okay, so now I have another thing I want. They’re adorable. They’re called the Noti, and the pronunciator in me always wants to say it “No-tee,” because I’ve read fantasy books my whole life and I’m used to weird pronunciations, and Star Wars always has the weirdest ones. Who cares. Nobody. The Noti would, though.
One piece of business before the episode. This one goes out to a member of Know-It-All Nation, Ariana. She’s a good friend of mine, and for years and years she’s supported me and all the stuff I do. She gave me a little thing a long time ago, and I wanted her to see I still have it. It stays in my collectibles area. I’m always happy to meet new members of the Nation, and to those of you who keep following us, I just want to send the love.
Once Upon a Time
There’s a brief moment at the top that connects right up to where we left off last week, with Ahsoka and Huyang on the bridge of their ship, inside one of the hyperspace whales, the purrgil. She makes a quick mention of the histories, and he says he has some of those stories archived in his memory. Would she like him to tell her one? Yeah, sure, whatever.
And he starts with, “Once upon a time, in a galaxy far, far away.”
I love you, Dave Filoni. That’s so dope. Mrs. Know-It-All said David Tennant got to say that, and I said, I know.
That’s about all we get of them. They’re still in the whale, they’re on their way, and we don’t see much more of them this episode.
A Bridge Episode, and a Good One
Mrs. Know-It-All called it, and I think she called it appropriately. This is a bridge episode. A lot of fun things happen in it, but it’s focused on everybody arriving at Peridea, landing there, and Sabine finding Ezra. We know Ahsoka is eventually going to show up, so they had to establish what’s going on on this planet first. It felt like a bridge. A good bridge.
I thoroughly enjoyed what they were doing right out of the gate. That hyperspace ring is amazing. When they get there, there’s a signal Elsbeth is following that takes her straight to this tower with all these statues. It’s essentially the home world the sisters of Dathomir came from. You also find out this is where the purrgil go to die, and that there are legends the Jedi apparently knew about, saying the hyperspace lanes used to come out this far.
When they arrive we get a really cool cameo. You can’t tell underneath all the makeup, but that’s Claudia Black playing the lead of the Great Mothers. For those of you playing at home, Claudia Black is from Farscape, and later on Stargate SG-1 in the final seasons. She does a really fun job of carrying the weight of what I’d consider the sisters to be. There are three of them, and they’re very Furies-esque, as in Greek mythology. The threads talk to us, all of that.
They ask where Thrawn is and they’re told he’s on his way, be patient, you’ve got to wait. And while they wait, Sabine goes into isolation, because she smells like a Jedi.
Dang. She’s the least Jedi of them all. But according to them it permeates all over her.
The Thrawn of It All
It isn’t long before the Thrawn of it all finally arrives, and he’s got a Star Destroyer, but it looks rough. It has seen some stuff in its time out here in this other galaxy.
So have his Stormtroopers. Excuse me, that’s not what they’re called. They’re Night Troopers. One of them looks like the guy who fought in Gladiator with the mask. He’s got this gold mask on like a person’s face. Not your typical stormtrooper. I feel like it speaks to whatever they’ve seen on this side of things.
Then Thrawn lets Sabine go. He says he’s going to honor what Baylan Skoll promised her: a mount, her weapons, and their last data on where Ezra Bridger is. She asks what the catch is. No catch. Trust me, he says, once you leave, understand you’re stuck here. All right, I get it. Okay, bye.
And they literally give her this giant dog horse and send her on her way. It’s the ugliest cutest thing ever, because it acts so much like a dog. If I had to compare it, it’s bigger than an Irish Wolfhound, but that’s what it reminded me of.
Shortly after she sets out, they’re watching from afar, and Thrawn sends Baylan and Shin Hati out after her as well. Elsbeth asks whether they’re going to wait for them, whether they should send more people. He tells her to send two squadrons, and they aren’t backup. They’re there to finish the work, whatever happens. He doesn’t care if Sabine gets stuck here. Your two mercenaries, he tells her, fall under the same rule. Once we’re packed and ready, we go.
What’s in the Cargo
Packed is the word, because his Night Troopers are moving something. It’s cargo, and it feels like something they promised the Great Mothers they’d take with them.
I’ll give you my thought. I think it’s other sisters, in some form of stasis. These things they’re carrying up are very stasis chamber, body sized. It makes sense that they’d all rise together.
I asked Mrs. Know-It-All whether the Great Mothers go with him or stay. She said they stay. Then she took it back. They’re going with him, because they’re loading everything up, and if those are remains, or carbonite even, the three of them would go along.
I honestly thought we were going to get something else. Baylan keeps talking about a greater power, and I was under the impression they were going to bring in some form of Snoke, or something to do with what eventually becomes the First Order. At some point Star Wars has to connect this up with the sequel trilogy. Good, bad or indifferent, I’m not here to judge, but at some point the storylines have to cross.
Sabine Is Stronger With the Saber
Sabine’s out looking for Ezra and she gets jumped by these mercenary looking guys, bandits if you will. They reminded me a little of Tusken Raiders, with a little bit of HK droid looking armor to them.
She manages to fend them off relatively decently until they knock her on her butt. Then she finally whips out her lightsaber, and that’s when she really starts putting them away. She helps all these fools finish up their living.
She’s very cool, and I love seeing it. If anything, I feel like she feels stronger when she uses it. A little more confident.
Her mount, by the way, had almost thrown her off and run. So as she’s walking, he shows up behind her, and she says no, you just abandoned me, and walks off. A second later he comes walking up behind her in the shot. It’s really funny. Dave Filoni wrote a really good episode. He didn’t direct this one, but man, I tell you what, this is good.
The Ewoks of This Galaxy
Then she meets the Noti. Hermit crab people, with the stones on their backs. They’re these little froggy things wearing clothes, like a frog in a dress shirt. You see why they’re so cute.
One comes up and points at her shoulder, where she’s got the symbol of the Rebellion, the one that later becomes the Republic symbol. He’s seen one of those. He shows her his little thing with it painted on, and she says, oh, you’ve seen my friend. Then all these little guys pop up.
Mrs. Know-It-All said these are the Ewoks of this year, and they are. They’re totally the Ewoks of this galaxy. Sabine has to keep her howler from wanting to eat one.
They take her back to their village, all of them chattering away in their little language, and sure enough, there’s Ezra.
The Ezra Reveal Is the Missed Beat
And I went, huh.
I have to admit it was a little lackluster, the way we got the reveal. For me this was a missed beat. Filoni is otherwise doing this flawlessly, so this is literally a personal preference, because it’s easy to armchair quarterback. That’s me.
But I’d have preferred seeing Ezra do something very Obi-Wan. Rescue her. Show up making a scary noise so those bandits run off. Or be one of them. You find out he’s been biding his time, and all of a sudden he turns on them, and she says what the heck, and he says hey, what’s going on. Something cool.
I had a guess early on about who might be Ezra. Dude, I thought it was the gold face guy, Enoch. I’m thinking, man, he’s going to help her. I had a whole other story and a whole other episode playing in my head. That’s not what happened.
Mrs. Know-It-All doesn’t know Ezra. She doesn’t know what he did. So for Sabine to be looking and looking and looking for him, and then she finds him and he’s just kind of there, it fell flat for her.
It’s okay, though. We knew they were going to find him. That’s why it’s a good bridge episode.
Thrawn, Perfectly Pressed
I didn’t get to see a whole lot of Thrawn in Rebels, because I’d moved on and was doing different things by then. I did read Heir to the Empire, the original one. They’re handling him a hair differently here than I think he was handled there.
But I loved this. He’s calm. They’ve been stuck out there, and his men have clearly been through the wringer, but if you notice, his suit looks perfectly pressed. Everything is right in line, put together. He feels very much in control.
Even when he’s thrown a curveball. The sisters sense that another is coming, and he immediately deduces that it must be Ahsoka, and that they need to assume she isn’t dead. He doesn’t assume. Unless you know for sure, you have to figure she’s alive. That’s a smart move. Super smart.
I like him. Since this is my first real introduction to him, this is going to be an interesting villain for me.
Shin Hati Is Going to Turn on Him
Baylan has this weird hard-on for whatever’s out there. He wants something more powerful than anything, and I just want to ask him, are you delusional? Even Shin Hati says this place looks like a wasteland, shouldn’t we leave with them? And he says, can’t you see it, can’t you hear it? And she says, right.
I believe she’s lost. By that I mean she’s confused, she’s concerned, she’s asking questions, and the answers she’s getting are the I’m the master, you’re the apprentice, this is my answer and you will hear it kind. He walks away and you can tell she isn’t buying it.
So I’m going to predict the future. Shin Hati is going to double cross him or betray him, or some combination of those things. She’s going to get pushed a hair too far.
He told her himself that he misses the idea of the Jedi, but not their weakness. I think that’s a deep rooted bitterness he has, because the temple fell, and remember, he grew up in the temple. He even references how Ezra came up afterward as a Bokken Jedi, trained in the wild. And Shin asks, is that like me?
The way she says it, I’m thinking, she really wants to be part of something. She wants to be connected to the greater something. And he says no, not like you, I’ve trained you to be strong. I feel like she doesn’t feel special. Nobody said she was a Jedi. Nobody said she wasn’t. But nobody is accepting her for what she is.
Look here, Baylan. It’s called a hug. It won’t kill you.
What I Still Want to Know
I’d really love it if they got deeper into the High Republic or the Old Republic and we got to see why any of this is here. Who’s building these giant statues? They’re massive, and that’s unbelievable work.
My other question is what the heck Thrawn was doing in this galaxy the whole time. Just sitting there waiting? Why hasn’t he gone off and conquered something?
Hopefully we get more answers. We’ve got two more episodes to go.
The Verdict
Ahsoka Part Six, “Far, Far Away,” lands at an 8.5 out of 10 on the Know-It-All Index.
It’s not a bad episode. It’s a bridge episode, and we got a lot. But I was a little disappointed in the way we got Ezra back. I’d have preferred something, anything, a little more impressive. He doesn’t have to be Jedi wielding lightsaber guy, but I’d have liked to see him be more than the bearded hermit, king of the hermit crab people.
Mrs. Know-It-All went with an 8, and that’s because it wasn’t poor enough to give it a 7.5. Now that we know they’ve got Ezra, the way it happened fell flat for her. That’s fair. It was still a good episode.
Your turn. Tell me what you think the cargo is, where you think this is all going, and what you thought of Ezra. The conversation lives in the comments on the video above. And never forget: everyone loves a know-it-all.
