When The Mandalorian walked onto Disney+, Star Wars fans knew nothing about him. When Cassian Andor showed up on the streamer, most knew where he ended up, but no one knew how he got there. Both shows had a blank slate quality that, at least at the start, made them accessible to Star Wars fans of any kind. The next show, however, is quite different.
That show is Ahsoka, which debuts August 23, and the biggest challenge it’s facing is that it comes with a lot of baggage. Fifteen years of it to be exact, chock full of ongoing stories, well-established characters, mysteries, and more. The only way it can achieve the success of those other Disney+ shows is if it’s both exciting and rewarding to fans who know all about that, but also something anyone who has Disney+ can watch and enjoy. And, according to a new interview, that’s the plan.
“That’s been the challenge of the series,” Ahsoka producer Carrie Beck said to Entertainment Weekly in a long story about the show. “But [series creator] Dave [Filoni] was very thoughtful about crafting the narrative in a way that could invite people in. The show tells them everything they need to know along the way.”
Which is a nice thought but, well, there’s a lot you might need to know. Ahsoka is basically the fifth season of Star Wars Rebels, an animated show that ran primarily on Disney XD from 2014-2018 and featured Ahsoka—a character who debuted in a 2008 animated Clone Wars movie and continued through that animated series, which itself ran sporadically from 2008-2020. If you haven’t watched any of that, Ahsoka sure has a lot of connections to the Star Wars you do know; she was the apprentice of Anakin Skywalker and friend to Obi-Wan Kenobi and Yoda, as well as an adversary of Darth Maul and Darth Vader, and, more recently, she became an adviser to Grogu and the Mandalorian. Ahsoka has now even met her former apprentice’s son, Luke Skywalker, which is a whole other can of worms.
Will Ahsoka work if you don’t know all that? How much better will it work if you do? We won’t have to wait long to find out. The show debuts in three weeks on August 23.
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