In the series premiere of Ahsoka, we’re following up on two story threads from two different Star Wars TV shows. The more obvious of the two threads comes from Star Wars: Rebels, which ended on a cliffhanger that sent the Imperial Grand Admiral Thrawn and series protagonist Ezra Bridger off into hyperspace toward a still-unknown fate. Our main protagonists here are Ahsoka Tano, Sabine Wren, and Hera Syndulla–all major Rebels characters.
Warning: The following contains spoilers for the first two episodes of Star Wars: Ahsoka on Disney+. If you have yet to watch the show, stop reading now.
The second thread is a bit more fresh. In the opening scene of the series we see a pair of Force-using, lightsaber-wielding baddies (named Baylan Skoll and Shin Hati) invade a New Republic cruiser and free a prisoner we’ve met before: a disciple of Thrawn named Morgan Elsbeth, who served as a one-off villain in Season 2 of The Mandalorian. These Force users don’t belong to any existing Order that we know about–they seem to be mercenaries, for now.
All of these characters want one thing: to go to wherever Thrawn and Ezra ended up, which may or may not be in a different galaxy, and rescue the one that’s on their side. So they spend much of these two episodes fighting over some kind of star map that allegedly leads to that location. By the end of the two-episode premiere, the map is in the hands of the bad guys, but our heroes are right on their tails.
Given that Ahsoka almost functions as a new live-action season of Rebels, most of the references to that animated series serve more as “previously on Star Wars: Rebels” sort of reminders than as true Easter eggs. But this is Star Wars–there are still plenty of real Easter eggs anyway. Let’s dig in.
