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00:00 Alright, the Ahsoka series is half over now. Episodes 1 through 4 have aired.
00:04 Season 1, or the entire series if it's a limited series of Ahsoka,
00:09 Season 5 of Rebels is half over.
00:11 I was gonna do a video on the first two episodes, 'cause that's what aired, and I was like,
00:14 "But I just don't care."
00:16 Then after the last week, I was like, "Alright, episodes 1 through 3, gonna do it, still don't care."
00:20 But this is a day wedged between a couple of weeks in which there wasn't a lot to do a video on,
00:24 gotta feed the YouTube algorithm god, so here we are!
00:27 And for my part, the first half of Ahsoka...
00:30 It's meh.
00:35 But it is Star Wars meh.
00:37 It always feels a bit worse.
00:38 First of all, spoilers for Ahsoka, episodes 1 through 4, not gonna be a play-by-play.
00:42 In fact, there are a lot of play-by-plays on the internet.
00:45 I don't wanna redundantly regurgitate what they've already said.
00:50 Just gonna give you my thoughts.
00:51 I'll actually have more thoughts than I put in this video.
00:54 Happens every video. I'll be in bed the next night and be like,
00:57 "Ah! Forgot to say that."
00:59 But it is what it is, spoiler warning, you've been warned.
01:01 Gonna get this out of the way right now.
01:03 Yes, the end of episode 4 did have some...
01:06 really fun member berry soup.
01:09 That's nice.
01:11 But this stuff doesn't work on me as well as it used to.
01:13 Something about this elixir I found that negates the effects.
01:16 First of all, speaking of the meh, why is it meh?
01:18 Because the characters in this show just seem bored.
01:22 I mean, you're springboarding off of the animated series Rebels,
01:25 and the animated counterparts are far more lively,
01:28 lifelike, and interesting than the live-action counterpart.
01:32 Everyone stands with their arms folded.
01:34 Ahsoka's always like...
01:35 Just looks like her contact lenses hurt.
01:38 Like, she's like,
01:39 "Oh, God, fuck, I need these contact lenses. They hurt my eyes."
01:42 Funny enough, Rosario Dawson in Daredevil is a better Ahsoka
01:46 than she is in Ahsoka.
01:47 Which means she was a good pick,
01:49 but someone out there was like, "Hey, can you just not be the reason you were cast?"
01:54 I mean, it feels like they're trying to make Ahsoka this...
01:57 wiser, seasoned Jedi Master version of Ahsoka,
02:01 but it feels like it was written by an AI algorithm that assessed a Jedi Council meeting.
02:05 It was like, "That's how Jedi Masters act and talk.
02:08 Ahsoka's kind of like a Jedi Master.
02:10 That's how Ahsoka Tano acts and talks."
02:12 Doesn't make sense for her character, and she comes across as boring.
02:15 Not just her, though.
02:15 There are a few elements of this show that feels like it was written by AI.
02:18 I mean, right from the opening crawl of Ahsoka,
02:21 which isn't really a Star Wars opening crawl.
02:23 It feels like an AI algorithm assessed that Star Wars has an opening crawl,
02:28 but it doesn't know the difference between a Star Wars opening crawl and a conventional opening crawl.
02:33 There's a map leading to Thrawn, another map leading to a person.
02:37 It's like Disney Star Wars isn't even stealing from other Star Wars.
02:40 It's stealing from itself now.
02:42 Disney Star Wars is redoing Disney Star Wars.
02:45 It's a snake eating its own tail.
02:47 The coolest characters for me are Ray Stevenson and his little apprentice
02:50 who looks like she cuts her own hair with a flowbee.
02:52 Kind of has crazy eyes, never blinks like she's Christopher Lloyd from Who Framed Roger Rabbit or something.
02:58 She just looks like an apprentice who's been an apprentice for 20 years and never been promoted.
03:03 But I thought they were great.
03:04 There are conveniences wrapped into them, like people just shooting at Ray Stevenson's lightsaber, specifically.
03:10 The game is to shoot the lightsaber, not the person, right?
03:12 It was not all "fuck."
03:13 There's something about his character.
03:15 Like, he's not a Sith, he's not a Jedi.
03:17 He's just... he's kind of an asshole.
03:20 But he makes remarks like there's so few Jedi left.
03:23 You know, it's almost like he's lamenting the Jedi.
03:26 And I really love that scene where he's like, "Sabine, give me the sphere and I will fuck the galaxy."
03:32 "But you might have a possibility of seeing your friend again."
03:35 "Really? Thank you. Glad you did that."
03:37 Then his apprentice was force-holding Sabine and he was like, "Let her go. I gave her my word."
03:41 That's amazing.
03:42 Antagonist? Yes, he is. But he's an antagonist with integrity.
03:46 I appreciate characters who operate within a code.
03:49 The guy's word is his bond. I respect that.
03:52 Are he and his apprentice the two most interesting characters in this entire thing?
03:56 Yes.
03:58 It's not even close.
03:59 Should the show have been about them?
04:01 Mm-hmm.
04:02 But it's not. It's Rebels Season 5.
04:03 That's also another problem.
04:05 This show is Rebels Season 5, but it's called Ahsoka.
04:09 It operates as though you know the characters from Rebels,
04:13 and it's just picking up where Rebels left off and we're going forward.
04:16 We don't need a reintroduction of the characters, but you do.
04:20 We've been told how scary Thrawn is and how important it is he doesn't come back,
04:24 but if you haven't seen Rebels, you don't know.
04:27 'Cause I was watching this show and I was like, "I'll be honest, I have no memory of that."
04:31 I watched the whole... I watched Rebels, right?
04:34 When the fuck did Ahsoka train Sabine as a jet?
04:36 When did that happen?
04:38 I had to do a Google search, like, "Did I sleep through the last..."
04:41 Oh, no, that just never happened.
04:42 They just made it up.
04:43 'Cause the AI algorithm that wrote this show was like,
04:46 "Jedi have an apprentice, always two there are."
04:48 Obviously...
04:50 Sabine does the apprentice.
04:51 It really is kind of a no-win scenario.
04:54 Either you're gonna have Sabine have the Force,
04:56 which just feels like you're rewriting her character,
04:59 or you're gonna have Sabine not have the Force and be like,
05:01 "I'm a Mandalorian, I don't have the Force,"
05:02 in which case, what was the point of Ahsoka training her in the first place?
05:06 Training her twice?
05:08 We're picking up on the second time?
05:10 Feels like a massive waste of time.
05:11 Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
05:13 That's just on the writing.
05:14 I mean, it looks like she kind of Force-slapped for a second.
05:18 It was kind of funny when they were training,
05:19 and I was like, "I see what you're doing,"
05:20 pulling from 1977.
05:22 It was cool in 1977 also.
05:24 "The blast shield down, I can't even see."
05:25 "I can't see, how am I supposed to fight?"
05:27 However, I give Luke that pass,
05:29 because Luke, 30 minutes ago, learned about the Force.
05:33 His entire world perspective about life, death, God, the devil,
05:38 hell, heaven, his father, was flipped on its head.
05:42 He just learned about the Force.
05:44 With Sabine, the answer would be very simple.
05:46 "Well, you remember your friend, the blind Jedi?"
05:50 "You know that shit can work."
05:52 She knows the Force can work like that.
05:53 I was just baffled.
05:54 Nobody brought up Kanan as a rebuttal.
05:56 That's when Ahsoka should have called.
05:57 She should have been like, "Look, this is the second time I've tried to train you,"
06:00 apparently, so the audience hears about it,
06:02 once they've actually seen.
06:03 And I'm just saying,
06:04 you're not gonna learn through the experience of your life.
06:08 This is not gonna work.
06:09 Look, here's a real question.
06:11 How does Ray Stevenson's character know Anakin Skywalker was Darth Vader?
06:14 Because he clearly knows, per what he was saying to Ahsoka in episode four.
06:19 That's one of the problems you run into when you expand Star Wars lore,
06:22 you expand the storytelling,
06:24 you do it among many different writers,
06:26 but there's no real guardrail.
06:27 Everyone has their own vision as to what the future's supposed to be,
06:30 and who's supposed to know what,
06:32 and what was supposed to happen after the Empire fell,
06:34 and the right hand doesn't know what the left is doing.
06:37 So you just have conflicting lore.
06:39 That Snake Eyes Inquisitor character from G.I. Joe, he was kind of cool.
06:42 That was the character that was getting everybody to theorize,
06:45 like, "Oh, who is it? Is it Starkiller?"
06:47 But we all knew satisfaction is the death of desire.
06:51 The reality is never gonna be as cool as the theories.
06:54 Sure enough, he got slashed, turned into smoke,
06:57 and that was that.
06:59 I don't know if Disney Star Wars meant to create a perfect Disney Star Wars allegory,
07:04 but there it was.
07:05 Really cool-looking, fun to theorize about,
07:07 but in the end, it was just smoke and nothingness to its core.
07:11 And I won't lie, I was thinking, "Okay, Ahsoka was trained in Clone Wars time, prequel time.
07:15 The prequels had the S-tier, the God-tier lightsaber battles.
07:19 Maybe we'll get a bit of that here. Nope, not really."
07:21 Ahsoka episode four did have the better of the lightsaber battles in the Ahsoka series,
07:25 but still, it was nowhere near Phantom Menace or Revenge of the Sith,
07:29 which is another problem.
07:30 When you're dealing with one movie in a trilogy and there's no other Star Wars out there,
07:34 you can have the actors commit a lot more time to lightsaber fights.
07:39 And yeah, the New Republic just looked like a bunch of dipshits.
07:43 Episode three, they just looked like a bunch of pompous dicks.
07:46 I guess they're trying to show, like,
07:47 "Yeah, that kind of hubris is what made the New Republic fail."
07:52 I didn't know this why they failed.
07:53 I just thought some years after the Rebellion took out the space Nazis,
07:56 space ISIS shot a hyperspace cannon at all the New Republic worlds, wiping it all out.
08:01 And that's how it fell, not because they're pompous dicks.
08:03 Another problem with what I was talking about earlier,
08:05 the right hand not knowing what the left is doing.
08:08 You had multiple writers being like, "Okay, this is what was happening after the Empire fell."
08:12 It really feels like the world of Rebels is so disconnected from the characters from the original trilogy,
08:18 and they're both existing in tandem.
08:20 The crew of the original trilogy isn't around when the biggest threat to the galaxy is apparently about to happen,
08:26 which is Grand Admiral Thrawn coming back.
08:29 So at the end of all this, Sabine gives the MacGuffin to the baddies,
08:33 and it's like, "I really want to see my friend."
08:35 "I might have fucked the galaxy, but I really want to see my friend."
08:39 Ahsoka gets thrown over a cliff, something that has happened to her a million times.
08:43 I wasn't even worried about it.
08:44 Point is, she wakes up in this space from Rebels,
08:47 and you hear Anakin.
08:48 And I hope she has questions for him that I have,
08:51 and I hope he has questions for her that I also have.
08:54 I hope she looks right at him and is like,
08:56 "Master, why does your Force ghost have a robot arm?"
09:00 You see, as much as I have wanted to see Anakin Skywalker come to Ahsoka Tano and Luke Skywalker,
09:05 I mean, we saw that at the end of Return of the Jedi a bit,
09:09 but I mean, in a larger capacity of conversation.
09:13 As much as we've wanted to see that, again, the AI that wrote it's like, "Fans want that here."
09:17 But no, it needs to be in a world of consistency,
09:20 because a world of consistency is a sane world.
09:24 It's a world that makes sense.
09:25 And with Force ghosts, nothing is consistent.
09:29 By God, I wish it was.
09:31 Assuming, of course, this was an Anakin Skywalker Force ghost.
09:34 I mean, he's not glowing or anything.
09:36 It could be a hallucination for all I know.
09:38 If you're Ahsoka Tano, you can see your former master of many years
09:42 once in the world in between worlds during a near-death experience.
09:46 For a much greener Luke Skywalker, you can see Obi-Wan Kenobi, who you knew for about a day.
09:50 In fact, anyone could just show up and drop nuggets at any time.
09:53 But if you're Obi-Wan Kenobi, the Force ghost of your master can only come to you
09:56 after you face the cyborg asshole version of your former apprentice and best friend.
10:00 But he was always there, 'cause he'll tell you that.
10:02 So there's no real consistency with Force ghosts.
10:04 There's no set of rules that we can look at and be like, "That's how Force ghosts operate."
10:09 But I do hope Anakin Skywalker has the question for Ahsoka that I have,
10:13 which is, "Hey Snips, when you learned this great threat to the galaxy existed,
10:18 which was the possible return of Grand Admiral Thrawn,
10:23 thus the possible return of the Galactic Empire,
10:27 why did you not seek the aid of my son, Luke Skywalker,
10:31 who, you know, helped defeat the Empire?"
10:34 "He helped turn me good. I threw the Emperor down a shaft. He exploded.
10:39 He's never coming back. Trust that."
10:42 *clears throat* Trust it. It's just, it's only fucking logical.
10:45 I know you've hung out with him.
10:47 If Qui-Gon was watching Obi-Wan, I was watching that shit.
10:50 But in the end, you thought to yourself, "Yep, that would be a smart thing to do.
10:56 Two Jedi are better than one.
10:58 But how about one Jedi and one young Mandalorian trying to move cups with the Force?"
11:05 I mean, the show's called Ahsoka in that you gotta take the story where Ahsoka would be.
11:10 I don't know that she would be hanging out with the Rebels crew at this point.
11:14 I feel like it's more likely she'd be hanging out with Luke Skywalker,
11:18 helping to re-establish a new Jedi Order.
11:20 The show Ahsoka should be Luke and Ahsoka out there on an adventure.
11:24 That means, yes, you gotta recast original trilogy characters.
11:29 You gotta have a new person play Luke.
11:31 So be it!
11:32 Better than hanging out with a half-asleep, half-bored Rebels crew being like,
11:36 "Why are we all here?"
11:37 Man, I haven't even touched on the fact that Sabine gets scared by a lightsaber and is fine.
11:41 Lining up the time stamp right about there, her inside should look like that.
11:45 What are the odds?
11:46 What's the over/under?
11:47 Thrawn comes back and these Imperial loyalists are like,
11:49 "Alright, we gotta re-brand the Empire because it kinda leaves a bad taste in people's mouths.
11:55 So, uh, renaming this new Empire is your first order."
12:01 Not bad.
12:04 What are the odds that's how it goes down?
12:05 God, that's possible.
12:07 Oh, God.
12:08 You know when you say something as a joke, then you realize how possible it actually is?
12:13 So that's my thoughts on Ahsoka.
12:14 It's meh.
12:15 Star Wars, meh.
12:16 Hurts a little worse, but meh nonetheless.
12:18 Ray Stevenson and his apprentice, those characters are the best ones in the series.
12:22 Also, Ray Stevenson.
12:24 Dude, gone too soon.
12:25 First time I saw him was a Titus Pullo in Rome.
12:29 He was so good.
12:30 But a lot of the rest of the characters, yeah, they generally look bored.
12:34 Yeah, unless this looks interested and it doesn't.
12:37 If it did, I would cross my arms when I talk about movies on YouTube.
12:41 I don't because it looks and makes me feel like I'm uninterested.
12:46 So the first half of Ahsoka, episodes 1 through 4.
12:48 Have you seen it?
12:49 What? Did you think about it?
12:50 Whatever you thought, comment below, let me know.
12:52 And as always, if you like what you've seen here and you want to see more, click right here to see more.
12:55 [Music]