Well, this was pretty damned awesome. For the season finale of Ahsoka Season 1 we had almost nonstop action as Ezra, Ahsoka, and Sabine commence their attack on Thrawn. There is a bit of character buildup between the trio, and we get to see Morgan Elsbeth get a dark magic upgrade, but otherwise the episode is heavy on the combat, but still getting some character and world development in there.
That isn’t to say the episode was flawless — it was pretty great, sure, but there were some annoyances I had. Namely, early in the assault Ahsoka’s lightsaber movements just felt a little poor. This improves in her later duel with a certain recent inductee into the Witches of Dathomir, and improves somewhat following that fight, but initially just looks a bit forced (pun not intended.)
Seeing Thrawn get obviously upset (albeit still maintaining his composure) was fucking awesome, I’ll fully admit — while some have criticized his portrayal in this series I like his characterization here and find him to be quite, well, menacing, in his calm nature.
There was, of course, the force jumping which initially feels a bit off, but when you think about how many characters have used that very power in one form or another in the core films alone, it doesn’t seem unreasonable for Ezra and Sabine to be able to do some kind of double-jump, in effect. Crazy, sure, but I could imagine Jedi 5000 years ago doing the same thing.
Overall though, yeah, the episode hit the proper mark for me. It ends with a hell of a setup for the story to continue from and I do quite hate that it was only 8 episodes. Seemed to go by a bit quick for me but, well, that’s just how it is.
I’ll collect my thoughts and write a full series retrospective down the line. I feel like I won’t cover the next Star Wars series in this way — I really only did this because I was expecting to hate this series and I wound up generally enjoying it. I guess I just wanted to capture the feelings in words in as best a method as I could and share that with you, the reader.
With that said, more to come, as always.