This entry was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, this television series wouldn’t exist. To learn more, visit the WGA strike hub and the SAG-AFTRA strike site.
Ahoska, the new Disney+ series from Clone Wars co-creator and Rebels co-showrunner Dave Filoni, does a lot of things poorly; and even at its best, the things it does well feel compromised. Nonetheless, I came out of episode 5 of the series — “Shadow Warrior,” a title nod to a Kurosawa film that otherwise has no connection to the plot — with my hair blown back by the extraordinary thematic ambition of the story, and the degree to which, even if compromised, the episode succeeded at its aims. “Shadow Warrior” is attempting to create narrative around something deeply ephemeral. I’m not sure there would have been a way to do it perfectly; but it accomplishes its goals, regardless.
Backstory (and lordy, few television series have been as preoccupied with backstory as Ahsoka): Ahsoka Tano was Anakin Skywalker’s padawan, his apprentice in the ways of the Jedi. In “Shadow Warrior,” we see flashbacks of her, aged approximately 13, joining Anakin on the battlefield at the start of the Clone Wars (a storyline previously rendered almost entirely in animation, on the series of the same name). The age-appropriate casting forcibly underlines something that was always implicit in the text of the animated Clone Wars series, but blunted by its format: the Jedi apprentices, children between the ages of 12 and 18, were underage soldiers, conscripted into the Jedi war effort in a 3-year conflict that all but destroyed the galaxy. Young Ahsoka, played by Ariana Greenblatt (who’s having a superlative year, having co-starred in the highest-grossing film of 2023), is almost frighteningly small next to Anakin, who is portrayed here at the apex of his “cunning warrior, good friend” era (to paraphrase Obi-Wan Kenobi). Anakin is powerful, and charming, and he tells jokes on the battlefield as he leads clone troopers to their deaths; and Ahsoka watches his silhouette flicker from Anakin’s to Darth Vader’s and back again, as he marches away from her into the smoke.
More backstory: Anakin, of course, falls to the Dark Side at the end of the Clone Wars, and becomes Darth Vader. Ahsoka learned of his fate in an episode of another animated series, Star Wars: Rebels, in which she confronted her former master in his new, twisted shape. Ahsoka never completed her Jedi training under Anakin’s tutelage; she walked away from the Jedi Order before Anakin’s fall, and now blames herself, at least in part, for not being there for him when confronted with his dark fate. In the time since learning that Anakin and Vader are one, Ahsoka has tried and failed to take on an apprentice of her own; she has tried and failed to live as a not-officially-a-Jedi who still “goes where she’s needed,” trying to do good in a chaotic galaxy. Before “Shadow Warrior” begins, she is struck down by another not-officially-a-Jedi who tilts evilward, Baylan Skoll. She spends most of “Shadow Warrior” in a kind of ghostly purgatory, revisiting her own past with the shadow of Anakin Skywalker.
Many stories tackle the premise of letting go of the past in order to move forward. Few that I can recall do it with such an exquisite sense of the burden of that idea. Catharsis, in movies and television, is often treated as a one-way door, an all-in net positive that heals and rejuvenates the relevant character (and to be sure, the second half of “Shadow Warrior” presents an Ahsoka that seems to have completely refreshed her sense of identity, along with her wardrobe, to suggest that her troubles are now completely behind her).
But I return again to the critical moments of Ahsoka’s confrontation with Anakin in “Shadow Warrior,” which positions its points in so few lines of dialogue and supporting images that its thematic outline seems to be rendered in staccato. Anakin says that his lesson for Ahsoka is simply “live, or die.” There is no emotional argument between the two former Jedi about the moral abhorence of Anakin training his pupil to be a child soldier. There is no angsty conflagration about the burden of Anakin having turned to the Dark Side, and how that equates to post-traumatic terror for Ahsoka, who was trained by a man who became a generation-defining monster. There is, instead, a (relatively) brief tour of Ahsoka’s arc across the Clone Wars, from frightened apprentice thrust into the horrors (and literal, visual fog) of war, to capable warrior who has become a master of the battlefield before her eighteenth birthday. There are two lightsabre duels with Anakin in the episode, one before this “Ghost of Christmas Past” tour of the Clone Wars, and one after it. At the end of the second, with “live, or die” still on the table as Anakin’s sole focusing “lesson” for Ahsoka, Ahsoka overmans her master and is given an opportunity to deal the ghost of Anakin a killing blow. Anakin’s eyes now glow ferociously Sith-yellow (and his lightsabre has turned from Jedi blue to Sith red). Holding the red blade she has turned back on Anakin, Ahsoka’s eyes glow Sith-yellow as well, as she contemplates killing him: effectively, cutting down this avatar of her own trauma, a person who steered her so wrong, whose fate haunts every decision she makes for herself; and who, of course, she loved deeply as a mentor and as a friend.
This is Star Wars, so of course, Ahsoka throws the lightsabre away and says she chooses to live. Anakin retreats from her, and his yellow eyes fade, and he cracks a relieved smile. It’s an extraordinary performance beat from, of all people, Hayden Christensen, an actor whose toolkit was perhaps not as developed as it needed to be when he was given the notoriously thankless task of working out how to play a character in a George Lucas movie at the turn of this century. No matter: he offers the very definition of an exemplary supporting turn in this episode, and this final, on-camera metamorphosis from Ahsoka’s nightmare to the memory of her dear friend is its masterful grace note.
This treatment of Ahsoka’s choice in this episode has been criticized for being muddy or incomplete, and perhaps in some ways, it is. To me, it rings deeply true to an uncomfortable reality of the “letting go” trope: that what has been presented in fiction as a lessening or removal of burden is, in many ways, the exact opposite. “Letting go” is easy (or easy-ish) when you no longer want the thing you are letting go of; far less so when you are conflicted about it, powerless over it, traumatized by it, or any of the other more nuanced experiences that are part of real life. “Shadow Warrior” gets at the actual emotional weight of “letting go,” and the seeming Zen paradox at the heart of it. The things that happened to Ahsoka, which pushed her into the state in which we find her in this series — paralyzed; inert — did happen. They are not what she would have chosen for herself, and do not connect to what she thinks of as the purpose of being a Jedi. “This is not what I was trained for!” she pleads, facing the battlefield; Anakin agrees with her sense of the ostensible purpose of being a Jedi, but then instructs her that one must adapt to the times one finds oneself in. This is the paradox, or a shade of it, because he is both absolutely right, and horribly wrong, using his statement to justify perverting Ahsoka’s sense of the meaning of her life, to turn her into a warrior. He is both teaching her what she needs to know to stay alive in the circumstances in which she finds herself — a war — and giving her all of the tools that could lead her to the same fate as him — becoming a monster. What happens to Ahsoka during the Clone Wars is unfair, and the hardest thing to do with such awareness is to understand that fairness does not actually matter. What happened to Ahsoka is what happened to Ahsoka. She can accept those events, those choices, as the course of her life and live on, or stay in battle with those things and stay stuck. “Letting go” is less about putting the emotional burden of her life behind her, than it is about accepting everything that took place and holding space for that burden within her whole, integrated self. “Move forward,” as the droid Huyang intones, earlier in the series.
This is the choice Ahsoka is making when she has the red blade to Anakin’s throat. She can kill the past, kill her trauma (or can she? what would have happened if she had beheaded the image of Anakin?) or she can let go. In like kind, she can see Anakin only through the eyes of hate — he was a genocidal mass-murderer of children, after all — or she can accept that he was absolutely all of those things, and that she also loved him, and also learned from him so many of the things that have served her throughout her life. All of these complicated, seemingly contradictory things can be true, can co-exist. They do not negate each other. Anakin, earlier, pushed back on Ahsoka saying that all she would ever have to offer her own student was lessons on how to be a killer. He tells Ahsoka that she is more than that, because he is more than that. And so are all beings, from the most noble to the most vile. (Yes: that person you immediately thought of when you read “the most vile” just then, is more than that. I think of that person often, when practicing loving-kindness meditation.) The great burden of “letting go” is in fact the greater burden of what acceptance actually asks us to do: to integrate all the pieces. To make space for them all. To feel all of the feelings, and drop the stories.
In our meditation sangha we talk often about the fierceness of compassion. We spike this word out against how the concept of “compassion” is more commonly understood in our culture (i.e., as a softness, a being-nice-ness; as sympathy, rather than empathy). Empathy is not soft. It is extremely, wildly sharp; compassion, too, for both others and (in Ahsoka’s case, in “Shadow Warrior”) for the self, feels to me less like a gentle smile, and more like a bolt of lightning. It has a brightness; a searing edge. I am beginning to think of radical acceptance in the same way, as being less an act of grace than an act of warriorship. Perhaps this is only because of what I now rate as its “difficulty class” (to borrow a Dungeons & Dragons term): acceptance is so very, very hard. Once you’ve done it, you need to do it again, and again and again and again. “Letting go” does not happen once. It is the ceaseless practice of being alive, like breathing; and you can be pulled away from it (acceptance and letting go; hopefully not breathing) for days, or months, or years. Those of us who are lucky (or incarnations of the Buddha) might remember to keep coming back to it, and to keep doing it again, and again, and again. “There’s hope for you yet,” Anakin says to Ahsoka, his final line after she has made her choice. “Hope” is a freighted word, in the Star Wars canon. Here, I think, Anakin using it in its purest form. No promises. Just possibilities.
All of this is, I will say in closing, very lightly sketched in “Shadow Warrior.” This is a family show about space wizards, after all. Much of this is communicated impressionistically, through images and performance, not underlined in spoken words. But in considering each of these pieces I do seem to find the very essence of the moral lesson of the episode, which gets more right than wrong about the mind-bending paradox of letting go, when held against the context of what one must let go of. Life is long, and time only moves in one direction. Ahsoka cannot change her past. She can battle her demons forever, or she can accept herself and keep going. Live, or die.