Mini-Blog — Why I Tapped-out of Ahsoka — and Maybe You Should, Too. By Geoff Jackson

Well, it finally hit me. Star Wars fatigue. I started getting symptoms last year when I had to gin-up energy to start and finish the Disney+ series ANDOR. (ANDOR was ultimately worth it, and thankfully it strayed from the usual Star Wars formula into a new, more dark and more adult territory — political espionage, stalker-y romance, deadly capers, double-crosses, etc.)

But Ahsoka? I just can’t make it through the series.

Let me start by grading the first four episodes I watched using the rating system I came up with in my first blog post:

1. Depicting a Hero’s Journey with relatable characters

2. Featuring some form of spiritual mysticism or unique religious creed

3. Offering cool SFX imagery and engaging looks at future technology

4. Using a familiar cinematic look-and-feel to Lucas’s original movie

5. Doing grand storytelling with an overarching vision, and (lastly)

6. "Intangible Greatness"*

These are all my own subjective scores and others can differ and take issue with the degree I rank things.

But here goes:

Depicting a Hero’s Journey with relatable characters. I have to rate this nonexistent because even though I’m not really too familiar with Ahsoka from her animated appearances, she’s 100% a Mary Sue plot device — a female character (like Rey Skywalker) who’s prebuilt and fully-formed with all the requisite powers and abilities. There’s no growth with this character — just invincibility, hoityness, and the ability to don a space suit in 2 minutes and fight enemy spacecraft using her bare hands and a light saber. Love her or hate her - she’s the text book definition of a Mary Sue as detailed on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Sue — “a character archetype in fiction, usually a young woman, who is often portrayed as inexplicably competent across all domains, gifted with unique talents or powers, liked or respected by most other characters, unrealistically free of weaknesses, extremely attractive, innately virtuous, and/or generally lacking meaningful character flaws.” Big Yawn.

Rating: 0

Featuring some form of spiritual mysticism or unique religious creed. So far, we have a slight variation on this in two areas - first, we have Dark Jedi. Not Siths, per se — just Dark Jedi who seem to be fallen from their original creed. Even their light sabers are an in-between color (orange) and strike a balance between evil dark red and righteous Ahsoka white. I guess this is new and different enough. I do like the character of Baylan Skoll (RIP actor Ray Stephenson), and the introduction of the Witches of Dathomir add a new flavor and give us a new space-mysticism with which to explore and find intriguing. All the religious ruins and runes we’ve seen have been from the Witches, not the Jedi — so that’s totally new. I guess on this score I give things a muted but hopeful ranking:

Rating: 6

Offering cool SFX imagery and engaging looks at future technology. Nothing much to see here. Usual droids and familiar doodads. We had a viewing of our first droid-on-droid fist fight, but other than that, the introduction of variations of C3-PO and R2D2 continue — in this series, it’s Huyang and Chopper — and it seems to be wearing thin. We’ve met K2SO in Rogue One, and we’re familiar with BB8 and similar clones of these iconic (but tired) characters. Technology seems to be on the back burner for the most part, and I guess that’s OK — but the familiar just seems too … well … familiar.

Rating: 4

Using a familiar cinematic look-and-feel to Lucas’s original movie. Not really sure this category’s a good thing at this point. There are images of pilots in cockpits that call back to Lucas’s filmmaking, but so far, the template for this series seems to be replicating animated stills from both REBELS and THE CLONE WARS. Almost all these characters come from either Dave Filoni’s animation projects or from the short-lived series REBELS. Woe to the casual viewer that doesn’t seem to be familiar with any of these people.

Rating: 3

Doing grand storytelling with an overarching vision. I do get the sense this is building towards something big for the franchise. The return of Admiral Thrawn (“as Heir to the Empire”) ties into both Star Wars novelizations and other Disney+ series like the Manadlorian and Book of Boba Fett. I’ve read that one of the upcoming new Star Wars feature films will be an AVENGERS-like menagerie of all these characters from Disney+ and will showcase a grand mishmash of books, comic books, TV shows, and past movies. I guess this rewards the faithful and ties-things together across the brand, but I’m not sure — being in my 50’s — I have the stamina for any of this.

Rating: 7

"Intangible Greatness”. I think this show is pretty flat. I’m too familiar with Anakin Skywalker and I think the crappy de-aging SFX on actor Hayden Christiansen’s face is abjectly terrible. To paraphrase Darth Vader, I’ve searched my feelings and I know it to be true — the show feels like recycled pablum.

Rating: 3

Composite score: 3.8/10

Did I get it right? Am I way off base? I’m not trying to trigger anyone and I again state that this is all just my subjective opinion — be respectful in the comments, please, and keep your replies benign.