Countdown to Ahsoka: Revisiting Star Wars: Rebels Season 2

Welcome back to Star Wars News Net's 'Countdown to Ahsoka', our series of daily articles celebrating the history of the Ahsoka Tano character and looking back at several projects that could inform us how the events of the upcoming live-action show will pan out. Today, we're looking back at Star Wars: Rebels season 2, which will be pivotal as we head into the Rosario Dawson-led show.



The second season of the hit Disney XD series wasted no time in delivering upon the promise of the season 1 finale. Ahsoka Tano has teamed up with the Ghost crew and will be instrumental in several adventures the small-time cell takes on throughout the following 20 episodes. While it's easy to think of season 2 as the 'Ahsoka season' of Star Wars: Rebels, it's actually interesting to revisit it and realize she's not in it as much as I remembered.



For context, this was my first introduction to the character, as I watched the first two seasons of the show in the summer of 2016, before I dived into The Clone Wars. It was also the season of animation that made me fall in love with her -- from her character design to her actual determination and bravery, to her deep, emotional struggles (which are apparent even if you are not familiar with The Clone Wars), this was an outstanding characterization that led to probably the best two episodes of Star Wars animation in Twilight of the Apprentice. But we're getting ahead of ourselves.







With the second season of Rebels, Dave Filoni and his team really started to find their footing with what the show could potentially be. This started to become much more than the cute adventure-of-the-week type show that some season 1 episodes felt like. It built on some of the darker aspects set up by the previous season and expanded upon them. It's true that there are some weaker episodes, and a few that still feel like they are catering to the children as opposed to everyone watching, but there are not enough of them for me not to put this above any other season outside of the final one -- I still think that, while season 3 had some big moments, it also had some of the weaker episodes of the entire show.



The second season is much more consistent, and though I wish we'd had more Vader as the true antagonist of the season, like the Grand Inquisitor was in the first one, the truth is that it was all for the best, because it helped make the first 20 episodes feel like an appetizer to the main course. And even before that, we still had an episode like The Future of the Force, which not only had a poignant story that informed us about the state of the galaxy overall but also ended on the highest of high notes with the epic Ahsoka duel against the Inquisitors. A moment that Clone Wars fans had probably been waiting for a long time to see, and that felt almost as satisfying to someone who wasn't as familiar with her background.



All roads lead to Twilight of the Apprentice, though, a key episode of the series, as it was Ezra's first encounter with Maul and also features the moment where Kanan goes blind, but even beyond, an extremely important moment for Ahsoka and the whole Star Wars story, though we wouldn't learn why exactly until two seasons later -- I'm talking, of course, about the World Between Worlds and how that was used to solve the massive cliffhanger of the season 2 finale and Ahsoka's fate.







We're jumping ahead a little, but I still remember the Rebels season 4 panel at Star Wars Celebration 2017, when Dave Filoni wore a t-shirt saying 'Ahsoka Lives?', but then when the crew left the stage to play the trailer, he came back with a t-shirt that said 'Ahsoka Lives!' That's a story that captures Dave Filoni in just two sentences, and the exact reason why I'm very excited to see what he has in store for us in live-action.



Our Countdown to Ahsoka will continue tomorrow, so stay tuned for our discussion on Star Wars: Rebels season 3! Also, come back next Wednesday for our spoiler discussion of the first two episodes of Ahsoka!



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