At long last, today is the day the new series from Dave Filoni launches: Ahsoka, the coolest Jedi ever.
(Don’t come at me with the technicality that she’s not a jedi proper. She’s the most Jedi Jedi ever.)
I know that may be an overstatement. People do love Obi-Wan. Or, they did before he had his own show, anyway. But here’s the thing: once upon a time, the power of the force waned, and it was a plucky young padawan and her relationship with a hard-assed but relatable master that unlocked Star Wars 2.0.
I remember being in the theater opening night when the world finally got what it asked for: MORE STAR WARS. There was the original series of Star Wars (now called “A New Hope”), The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi, and then for 16 years there was nothing but the unrelenting hope that one day, Star Wars would return to the big screen.
So when it did that fateful Thursday in 1999, we all cheered as the LucasFilm logo flashed up on the screen.
We cheered. For a LOGO.
Then we met Jar-Jar…and…y’know. The rest is history.
The hype leading up to The Phantom Menace was real because the show Star Wars: The Clone Wars had premiered in 2008 and began to fill in many of the gaps in our understanding around and about how the mighty Anakin Skywalker, the chosen one, could be seduced by the Dark Side. What helped clarify the story was the performance of Matt Lanter as Anakin and the relationship with his padawan, a new character called Ahsoka Tano, played by Ashley Eckstein.
Through these characters, Star Wars fans everywhere began to see how it all went down. The slow burn of it all. We saw how Anakin bristled against the rules of the Jedi Order, which he found arcane and restrictive. We saw how tough he was on Ahsoka, much the way his master, Obi-Wan Kenobi was tough on him. We saw, for the first time, a female Jedi-in-training, as well as female Sith (Asaaj Ventress, voiced by Nika Futterman) and we saw that in the Jedi Order, women were held to the same standards as men, and held in the same regard.
Thanks to the ability to roll out longer-term character development that a television series offers, we experienced Anakin’s sense of humor. We watched him joking and being playful, poking fun at his master while he tormented his padawan. He gave her a nickname: Snips, and got one from her in return: SkyGuy.
Edgelords hated it. Of course.
I was at the Boston Fan Expo three weeks ago and had the pleasure of seeing Ashley Eckstein (Ahsoka), Matt Lanter (Anakin) and James Arnold Taylor (Obi-Wan) hold a panel to discuss their time playing the legendary characters and one of the big things that jumped out at me was how hard it was for Ahsoka in the beginning. Eckstein, who is one of the most engaging, authentic people you could ever meet, recalled how brutal her early reviews were, how vicious the attacks were, and how disheartened she was to read them.
“Never read the reviews.” Matt Lanter joked. “That’s what they tell you… but then you do anyway.”
Is it a shock that the same group of people who rail against a black Little Mermaid might also complain about a female Jedi? No. No, it isn’t. But those trolls can be vocal and can cause an unfounded and illegitimate disturbance in the Force.
In the end, the writing and the performance gained steam until Eckstein’s Ahsoka, now also part of Star Wars: Rebels, became more than just canon: Ahsoka Tano represented an entire generation of forward-thinking aspiring Jedis among us. We watched her try to navigate the Jedi Order with integrity and grace, and when they turned their back on her, albeit mistakenly, we watched as that same integrity motivated her to walk away from her official training.
And we saw, in horror, as Darth Vader arose from the ashes of a hero that Ahsoka used to call SkyGuy.
Rosario Dawson was cast in the role of Ahsoka and has done an impressive job embodying the older, more wizened version of the Jedi. Gone is her playful, almost troublemaking side. What replaces it is wisdom, experience and one of the most badass dual-wielding force users in all of the Star Wars lore.
Tonight, when Ahsoka airs at 9pm EST on Disney+, we’ll be able to see the culmination of more than a decade of powerful, important character-building from Dave Filoni and crew, voiced to perfection by Ashley Eckstein. Without them, without the fabric that helped sustain Star Wars fans in the off-years, the live action version of Ahsoka would never have come to pass.
Let’s celebrate that. Let’s celebrate that, all deference to Shaak Ti, that from a bible that features dozens if not hundreds of compelling characters, one unlikely female Jedi stood tall in the face of adversity and mouthbreathers and gave us one of our favorite characters ever.
