Welcome back to the blog readers. As you have been seeing, I am getting more and more on board with Ahsoka as the weeks progress. Rosario Dawson is defiantly owning the role of Ahsoka Tano, I am falling more and more in love with Natasha Liu Bordizzo's portrayal of Sabine Wren, and the charm and wit are off the chains. My only hope is that we continue to move in an upwards trajectory in terms of quality. Would this episode, titled "Part Four: Fallen Jedi," directed by Peter Ramsey and written by Dave Filoni, be any implication of that hypothesis? Stick around to find out.
NOTE: I will be using spoilers for my thoughts, so DO NOT read ahead if you have not seen the episode.
Like I said, this series is continuing to win me over with every episode. From what I have seen so far, Dave Filoni has struck magic again. And now circling back to this week, I am pretty confident in saying that this fourth episode is the best episode of the series so far. No hyperbole, no cap (as the kids say nowadays). Between a brilliant performance by Natasha Liu Bordizzo, thrilling action and a finale shock, this was a near-perfect episode of Star Wars television.
I have been doing nothing but gushing over the performance of Natasha Liu Bordizzo so far, but this episode proved to me that she can seriously act. No scene demonstrated that more than her scene with Ray Stevenson's Baylan Skoll (who I will jointly talk about in this paragraph). Bordizzo completely knocked it out of the park, with an incredible range of emotions to match buyable facial expressions. Bordizzo was the clear highlight of an episode full of them. And to connect to her, Ray Stevenson was just as brilliant in this episode. He does a fantastic job of making Skoll feel larger than life without raising his voice once. His calm, cool, collectiveness made him just as sinister as any of the louder villains like Hux. It truly is unfortunate that he is no longer with us, because I would have been looking forward to seeing what else he could have done.
This episode of Ahsoka is definitely the most action-packed episode so far, and I love all of it. From the initial skirmish with Ahsoka and Sabine outside the ship where we got to see Huyang jump into action (and kill it in the process) to the lightsaber battles, the action was non-stop. Damn I love a good lightsaber battle. Ahsoka faced off against and killed the final Inquisitor Marrok, ending that group. And in the process, Sabine battled Shin Hati, Skoll's apprentice, to a draw. Then, later on, Ahsoka would do battle with Skoll in a more cat-and-mouse like battle. This battle would lead to Ahsoka being killed (shocker), so we can get to where we are supposed to go. My one gripe about the episode is that Hera really did not have that much to do this time around.
Before I go into the ending of the episode, I want to circle back to what happened between Skoll and Sabine. In between all the brilliant acting, Skoll was successfully able to convince Sabine to give him back the star map he was fighting Ahsoka over. The villains then take her hostage aboard their ship and complete the hyperspace jump. And now the ramifications for this are major. This means that they were successfully able to jump to Grand Admiral Thrawn's location, and that they will most likely bring him back. Although it will be nice to see Thrawn again, this, in my opinion, will likely begin the rise of the First Order. It has to be. Thrawn is the kind of guy that scattered Imperial remnants would get behind. As we saw in Star Wars Rebels (2014-18), he was a very cold and calculated individual, and I am looking forward to seeing if spending over a decade in another galaxy did anything to make him more ruthless.
Now we gotta talk about that ending. I had previously mentioned that Skoll's encounter with Ahsoka led to her death. At the end of the episode we actually see her wake up somewhere familiar to both her and us: the World Between Worlds. In Rebels, she was taken from her battle with Darth Vader on Malachor (where she previously died), and was brought back to continue on. Now back, she sees a familiar face that left a big, sloppy smile on my face: her master Anakin Skywalker. Hayden Christensen returns to the role of Anakin after previously portraying him in flashbacks and Vader in the present in Obi-Wan Kenobi (2022). This is the first time that Anakin and Ahsoka have been together in live action, and the kid that watched Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008-14; 20) every Saturday morning on Cartoon Network was left extremely satisfied. If I had to speculate, I believe that the fifth episode will be the official reunion of Anakin and Ahsoka as they travel the World Between Worlds together and reminisce about the past. I also believe we will get our first glimpse of Thrawn in this episode. Tuesday/Wednesday seriously cannot come soon enough.
Thank you all for reading this review, and I will see you for my review of the fifth episode.
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