Ahsoka Full Trailer Breakdown: Once a Rebel, Always a Rebel

This week, the highly-anticipated trailer for Ahsoka finally arrived after a supposed 10-day delay, and it included our best look yet at the story of the series, as well as new character details, even if we still have to fill in a lot of gaps ourselves or wait for August 23 for the narrative to do it. Let's break down everything that happened in the trailer as well as make some educated guesses as to what the show might bring us on August 23.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_1EXWNETiI



The trailer opens with Baylan Skoll (Ray Stevenson) and Shin Hati (Ivanna Sakhno) boarding a New Republic ship and leaving few survivors. This is an extended look at a sequence we already saw during the Star Wars Celebration teaser, and I'm almost ready to call that this will be the first scene with these two characters in the series. In fact, I wouldn't even be surprised if this was the first scene of the entire show (think that classic Star Wars stories always begin with the Dark Side showing off their strengths to let the audience know they are not here to mess around).



Shin Hati (Ivanna Sakhno) in Lucasfilm's STAR WARS: AHSOKA, exclusively on Disney+. ©2023 Lucasfilm Ltd. & TM. All Rights Reserved.



The two are later seen with Morgan Elsbeth (Diana Lee Inosanto), so given the events of The Mandalorian Chapter 13, where the character was first introduced and later defeated by Ahsoka, we can make the assumption that she was captured and Baylan/Shin are now trying to break her out. Why? Probably because of the same reason why Ahsoka was looking for her in the first place -- she is a direct connection to Grand Admiral Thrawn, which the dark side characters are very much interested in.



As an additional note, and before we move on from these two characters, I'll just add that I really like Baylan saying 'We are no Jedi', for a variety of reasons. First, this is obviously a callback to the much-quoted Ahsoka line from Star Wars: Rebels, but subverting it and having the bad guys say it is a very intelligent way of delivering fan service and tells us a lot about these two characters.



There is an entire essay to be written about the importance of this line at this very specific point, from the different (but perhaps not so different) interpretation of what the term Jedi means for both Baylan and Ahsoka, to why it is important for him to make this distinction to a New Republic officer -- it's clear that not many people have ever seen a Jedi, which remains a long-forgotten relic from the 'old' Republic. From what the late Ray Stevenson told Empire Magazine, we know that Baylan used to be a member of the Jedi Order and an Order 66 survivor, but not much else.



(L-R): Shin Hati (Ivanna Sakhno), Morgan Elsbeth (Diana Lee Inosanto) and Baylan Skoll (Ray Stevenson) in Lucasfilm's STAR WARS: AHSOKA, exclusively on Disney+. ©2023 Lucasfilm Ltd. & TM. All Rights Reserved.



Cut to the Lucasfilm logo and Ahsoka in yet another shot of her in the old Jedi Temple we've seen so many times in the promos. I also suspect that this is going to be the first scene with her in the series (making an even bigger leap, I'll conjecture that the Baylan/Shin assault on the New Republic ship will be the cold open of the first episode, and after the logo, we'll cut to Ahsoka arriving on the Temple). We're not sure yet what she is doing here, from looking for Huyang (David Tennant) to looking for a new object that might kick the narrative into high gear, but the position of this scene early on in the series seems like a given -- not only has it been heavily featured in the trailers so far (and Star Wars series tend to focus their trailers on the first or even second episode for the most part), but it's also Ahsoka by herself. Most of the rest of the footage we have of her is with Sabine or Hera.



To add even more weight to the theory that this scene is our first look at the character, I'll point out the following. Ahsoka started filming less than three weeks before Star Wars Celebration 2022, and during that event, we got our (convention exclusive) first minute-long teaser of the series, which saw Ahsoka walking into the Temple. Rosario Dawson also sent a video from that very set, lamenting she couldn't attend the main Thursday panel. So they filmed this pretty early, and it was part of the very first promos of the show (including the first official image of the series we got last fall); not that this means anything on its own, but I think it adds more weight to the claim.



Star Wars: Ahsoka on Disney Plus



In any case, she goes down into that Temple and finds some iconography on the wall of which we know nothing. We can speculate all week about the meaning of this, from its possible relation to Mortis to just being a cool image whose real meaning won't be explored in the show, but honestly, I don't think there's much in the trailer that points one way or another. However, it's Ahsoka's voice-over line that is most interesting to me here. She says: 'I started hearing whispers about Thrawn's return as heir to the Empire'. This is not exactly new, and this portion of the trailer is pretty much something we've seen before, but I continue to be very curious about this line, because of what it means about the entire timeline of the show, which has me very confused at this point.







If my guess about Baylan/Shin breaking Morgan Elsbeth out of prison during the opening of the series is correct, that could indicate that the main narrative kicks off after the events of The Mandalorian. By extension, one would assume so is Ahsoka's story, although I'll leave room for the possibility that the stories of the villains and the heroes run in two different timeframes similar to The Witcher season 1. However, there is enough in this trailer to suggest that there will be flashbacks involved in the series.



My guess is that Ahsoka is meeting with Sabine after her adventures at the temple (where she might fight against the Inquisitor, as we see later in the trailer), and tells either her or Hera and the new Ghost crew about Thrawn's possible return. I'm guessing Ahsoka started hearing this before her encounter with Morgan Elsbeth in The Mandalorian, which is why she went looking for her, but the main question of the series is why is Thrawn back and not Ezra? If he has indeed returned, why is it so complicated for Baylan and Shin to find him? So many questions, which is exactly what a trailer should do! While we're at this, I'll just go out on a complete limb and guess that the shot of Thrawn from behind that we've had in both trailers is how either the first or second episode will end, later cutting to a shot of him from the front.



Thrawn in Lucasfilm’s Ahsoka, exclusively on Disney+. ©2023 Lucasfilm Ltd. & TM. All Rights Reserved.



Immediately after, we cut to one of the most interesting scenes in the trailer to me. Baylan and Shin are now with Morgan Elsbeth on a rocky planet that could very well be Malachor, but I also wouldn't be surprised if it was Dathomir -- as pointed out by Star Wars Explained's Alex Damon, there seems to be some witchery going on when she pulls up the map, as hinted by the green flame that appears in the shot below. But the most interesting detail about this series is that it shoots down one of my educated guesses from the previous trailer: that the place where Baylan and Ahsoka are fighting is actually the World Between Worlds. Apparently not, and the fact that Ahsoka is seen inside this very bubble in the trailers hints that her first encounter with Baylan may be sooner than we expected. However, I still expect the World Between Worlds to play a major role in the series, as the logo itself has hinted since the first announcement in December 2020.



(L-R): Morgan Elsbeth (Diana Lee Inosanto), Shin Hati (Ivanna Sakhno) and Baylan Skoll (Ray Stevenson) in Lucasfilm's STAR WARS: AHSOKA, exclusively on Disney+. ©2023 Lucasfilm Ltd. & TM. All Rights Reserved.



After that, we're introduced to the main two characters from Rebels that appear in the show. Interestingly enough, we first meet Hera, who is trying to convince New Republic senators that the fight against the Empire is not over yet. I wouldn't be surprised if this was some trailer magic happening here, and Hera's conversation with the Senate happened much later in the series, once she's seen the real threat by herself. I think that we'll see a brand-new crew aboard the Ghost by the time she meets back with Ahsoka, and perhaps our first scene with them will be a self-contained mission they are carrying, that will either lead them to Ahsoka (and possibly Sabine) or to something that will have larger implications for the main narrative. We just learned through the announcement of a new LEGO set that her son Jacen will be a part of that crew, along with two new members named First Officer Hawkins and Lt. Beyta (I don't expect them to have a major role in the show).



However, as the trailer sort of confirms later, I think that the main character of the show besides Ahsoka will be Natasha Liu Bordizzo's Sabine Wren. We learned about Sabine's involvement in the story through a report months before the show started casting, and she was the first name to be added to the cast. The media reports were later confirmed at Star Wars Celebration 2022, when Lucasfilm officially confirmed her as the Mandalorian warrior from Rebels, which happened almost a year before they confirmed any other characters in the series. That is no coincidence and the reveal that she has a deeper connection to Ahsoka than we once thought serves as reassurance of this. So let's talk about that moment.







Just a few days ago, Bordizzo claimed that Sabine and Ahsoka are not exactly on the same page by the beginning of the series. I assumed at the time she meant that Sabine was upset about Ahsoka's long absence following Ezra and Thrawn's disappearance at the end of Rebels, but apparently, there was so much more to that. I wouldn't be surprised if Filoni told us that when the two reunited during the epilogue, it was when Ahsoka started training Sabine in lightsaber fighting. Something then went down and the two split apart... until now. There's another possibility, which plays into the whole 'two timelines' theory.



Sabine wears her long hair for a long time during the show, before she cuts it short to make it very similar to her look during the epilogue. I assume that the series will reshoot that reunion scene in live-action, and that the scenes with Sabine in her long hair in the trailers are actually flashbacks in the narrative. When we see Ahsoka and long-haired Sabine in the Lothal hangar, that could be the beginning of their relationship as master and student.



After the trailer, we can assume that part of Sabine's arc in Ahsoka will be about her reconciling with her old master, much like what the 'former' Jedi has had to do over the years with Anakin. But for that arc to land for Sabine, we actually have to see that training. Seeing her meditating is probably part of the training. We have also seen long-haired Sabine fight Shin Hati in the extended trailer at Celebration, as well as a 30-second clip that dropped in June. It's possible that, in this past timeline, the two already encountered the two dark siders, and perhaps that's what separated them. Now, it's time to reunite.



(L-R): Shin Hati (Ivanna Sakhno) and Sabine Wren (Natasha Liu Bordizzo) in Lucasfilm's STAR WARS: AHSOKA, exclusively on Disney+. ©2023 Lucasfilm Ltd. & TM. All Rights Reserved.



Sabine cuts her hair in a massive callback to what Kanan did in Rebels, as eagle-eyed Twitter users spotted after the trailer dropped. But there is still one scene that doesn't quite line up with the theory above, as Sabine delivers her line 'You never made things easy for me, master' in her long-hair look. If I were to double down on the theory, this is how I see the order of events:

• Ahsoka comes back through the World Between Worlds in Rebels
• Ezra and Thrawn disappear
• Ahsoka feels the weight of everything that has happened and decides to train Sabine in lightsaber fighting, perhaps even the Force (whether she's a Force-sensitive Mandalorian remains to be confirmed, but it would be extremely cool if done right)
• They meet in the Lothal hangar for the first time, Sabine is wearing long hair
• Sabine fights Shin Hati
• Ahsoka walks away for yet-unknown reasons
• TIME JUMP
• Ahsoka starts hearing whispers about Thrawn, looks for Morgan Elsbeth
• The Mandalorian Chapter 13
• Ahsoka finds something in the Jedi Temple that sets the adventure off, looks for Sabine
• Sabine is still wearing long hair, tells Ahsoka in their first meeting 'You never made things easy for me'
• She is eventually convinced to join the fight after re-listening to an old Ezra recording
• Cuts her hair, looks at the Rebels mural
• Turns away, Ahsoka The White is waiting for her (Rebels epilogue)
• They recruit Hera, the main series begins

Mary Elizabeth Winstead's delivery of the line 'once a rebel, always a rebel' sold me on her take on Hera more than any still image or previous footage we've seen of her. This trailer was everything I dreamed of, because it opened so many new possibilities that I'd never considered for the show, and more than anything, because it marks the return of the Star Wars I've always loved the most. The space opera filled with giant lightsaber fights, space battles, and some weird Force usage. I am very much looking forward to Lucasfilm moving on from the entire timeline between The Phantom Menace and The Rise of Skywalker, which includes shutting down the MandoVerse after Filoni's movie, but I am officially excited for Ahsoka, more than I've ever been. Now let's hope it delivers.



Ahsoka debuts its first two episodes on August 23. Check back with us regularly for updates on the show, and look forward to our episodic reviews. Star Wars is back!



Grand Admiral Thrawn (Lars Mikkelsen) in Lucasfilm's STAR WARS: AHSOKA, exclusively on Disney+. ©2023 Lucasfilm Ltd. & TM. All Rights Reserved.



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