This week, Ahsoka tried to do the hardest thing Star Wars has ever done
This week’s episode of Disney Plus’ Ahsoka threw out a big bone to any viewers unfamiliar with Star Wars: The Clone Wars, the animated series it continues from — but unless you are familiar with the show, you might not have realized it.
Call it a flashback, call it a Force vision — Ahsoka’s “Part Five” is a quick and compelling demonstration of everything you really need to know about Clone Wars, as Clone Wars creator and Ahsoka showrunner Dave Filoni takes another swing at expressing the thing the Star Wars prequels were trying to say all along.
The supernatural sequence in “Part Five” offers a glimpse at the best parts of an imperfect show that was trying to do something very, very difficult: Take the franchise named “Cool Wars, Huh” and use it to say “War is bad.”
[Ed. note: This piece contains spoilers for Star Wars: Ahsoka episode 5.]
“Part 5” has loose ends to tie up before the show hitches a ride to another galaxy, among them Ahsoka’s lingering internal conflict over what Anakin’s turn to the Dark Side means for her. It does this by reminding us that her training was… kind of a nightmare.
The ghost of Anakin Skywalker appears to Ahsoka to walk her through shared memories, beginning in the place they met: the middle of a pitched battlefield in the earliest days of the Clone War. They press on through smoke and sand, laser blasts wiping out trooper after trooper, massive troop transports appearing and disappearing all around.
Ahsoka and Anakin talk about her education: “What about my training?” “This is your training.”
They talk about the body count they’re leaving behind them: “They were following my orders,” Ahsoka says, just after holding a clone’s hand as he died. “I got them killed.”
Anakin tells her
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