Ahsoka’s aftermath

After Ahsoka’s first season came to an end with our title character and her companions stranded far, far away from the galaxy where the action is in the Star Wars universe I did like part of the reaction of Mefi user The Tensor, who cares far more about the Star Wars universe than I ever did:

[While I’m grousing…] here’s a scene that was SORELY missing:

Force Ghost Anakin: …As your master, it is my responsibility to prepare you. I won’t always be there to look out for you. Don’t be afraid. Trust your instincts. I know you can do this, Ahsoka. Ahsoka: Bullshit. Anakin: …wait what? […]

posted by The Tensor at 11:44 PM on October 6

We all get that (whatever has been officially announced at this point) Dave Filoni is determined to continue to fill in the gaps in the backstory of the franchise even though the on-screen film canon seems to indicate that by the time Rey Palatine and Kylo Ren are doing their thing Grand Admiral Thrawn’s return was at best a footnote in the fall of the New Republic.

Unless Disney plan to reveal that the events of Ahsoka took place in a multiverse¹ where Thrawn’s return was a much bigger deal than it looks to be in the big-screen canon of Star Wars, all this seems like a lot of fuss over not that much. Disney shareholders will hope it proves to be a profitable fuss, but no matter how much fun is to be had filling in backstories it’s not a sign of a healthy franchise.

Put it another way. George Lucas and his collaborators and successors (and 20th Century Fox) have done pretty well out of Lucas’ third full-length feature film and what came after that. If George Lucas had been an upcoming speculative fiction novelist, author of a mid-1970s space opera called Star Wars that he followed with a couple of sequels that were on a par with the works of Harry Harrison or Larry Niven or Carolyn Cherryh, by the mid-1980s he’d have moved on to his next project and his Star Wars series would perhaps be fondly looked back on by fans of my age, one more tribute to the strand of SF adventure stories that started with Burroughs’ series about the adventures of John Carter on Mars.² Instead, thanks to Star Wars having been so profitable for so long, ownership of the saga has passed to an artificial life form, a much longer-lived entity called a corporation, that has very different priorities and goals for Star Wars.

It’d be funny if - after all this effort to promote Grand Admiral Thrawn and Ashoka Tano to the big leagues - Disney decided that the returns from this Disney+ series were a disappointment so they’d leave Ashoka and Baylan Skoll where they are and not revisit this corner of the Star Wars universe.

It’s sad, really. Someone should write a novel about it. (Someone probably has, but I’d imagine clearing the intellectual property rights is hellish difficult.)³