‘Ahsoka’ Part Seven “Dreams and Madness” Review: An Editing Mess That Begs the Question, What Was the Point?
One of the first things that immediately caught my attention watching the first two episodes of Ahsoka in August was how well structured the first episode was. I brought it up in my review of those first two episodes, and I still stand by it. It was a nice change of pace after the messy third season of The Mandalorian, and I appreciated it. I don’t know what happened since then, because everything that was applied to that episode in terms of structure and pace was completely thrown out the window in Part Seven, titled “Dreams and Madness”.
I don’t know if it was the director (Geeta Vasant Patel steps in to helm the latest episode, while showrunner Dave Filoni did the first one), the editor (Rosanne Tan took over this week, Dana E. Glauberman worked on the premiere), or that the writing was already thin on paper (which it was; Dave Filoni wrote both episodes). But Part Seven is completely disorganized and has a hard time keeping up with all of the storylines and different points of view it has to keep track of, to the point that whenever it feels like a scene has moved an inch forward in the runtime (namely when an action set piece starts), it cuts away to a completely different location, as if saying: “Good, that’s now been taken care of. Let’s focus on something else for a couple of minutes.”
As teased by the end of the last episode, Ahsoka is now approaching Peridea inside the purrgil, Thrawn and his gang are getting ready to depart, Shin and Baylan have made new friends, and Ahsoka and Sabine are reunited. Oh, and let’s not forget about Hera, Carson Teva, and Chopper back in our regular galaxy. It’s a lot. I don’t often like to engage in discussions about the length of the episode and whether or not it should have been longer; an episode is as long as the director and/or showrunner feels is necessary. This is particularly fruitless to debate before seeing the actual episode. But Part Seven should have been longer.
The episode needed more time to breathe and focus on some of the storylines as opposed to rushing between them, and it suffered greatly for it. And what makes it all the more frustrating is that there is a lot of cool stuff going on, things we’ve been wondering and speculating on for weeks, if not years, yet we’re rushing to move the “plot” forward — or, in this case, let us know they’ve not forgotten about each of the characters.
What do I mean by “plot”? My second biggest issue with this episode is how little it accomplished in terms of overall narrative. It doesn’t follow the traditional definition of a filler episode, whatever that really means, but there’s so much fat that could have been cut out in favor of actual character development and moving the story forward. We won’t get more specific before raising a spoiler warning, just in case people haven’t seen it yet and decided to test the waters by reading this before watching the episode. It’s not the first time the series has suffered from this, as there have been subplots that benefit from the TV formatting of the episode and should have been cut out if it was a more focused story — yet, with one more episode to go, I suspect we’ll be looking back at those and asking what purpose they served in a story that ultimately feels kind of thin.
WARNING: Spoilers ahead for Ahsoka Part Seven “Dreams and Madness”
Let’s start from the beginning. We see Hera is trying to defend her case against the Senators she was Zooming in with just a couple of weeks ago, with Senator Xiono of Hosnian Prime being the literal representation of an Earthling politician, blind to actual evidence, deaf to counterarguments, and overall contrary to actual collaboration. I appreciate the political commentary here, and how Xiono’s incompetence is a tease of why the New Republic ultimately failed, but this is also an example of poor writing. There’s more than enough evidence here to suspect that there is some obvious suspicious activity worth investigating — if nothing else, there are actual recordings of two orange-lightsaber wielders wrecking a New Republic ship in half, killing everyone on board, and retrieving a dangerous prisoner, whose followers still worked undercover for the Empire in Corellian factories. Yet no one, not the senators or even Hera, brought any of this up or made a compelling case arguing it.
A C-3PO cameo later to remind us it’s still cheaper to pay Anthony Daniels than to recreate a young Leia Organa (though I suspect we might see her next week, or at the very least before Filoni’s theatrical film), we cut to Ahsoka training with an Anakin recording, probably one of the best scenes in the episode for me — not just because we get to see Hayden Christensen again, but because, even at her age and after seeing everything she’s seen and fighting everyone she’s fought, Ahsoka still needs training. A cute call back to one of my favorite episodes of Tales of the Jedi that reminds us we’re never fully ready for anything in life.
But oh wait, because my actual favorite part of the episode is up next. One of the biggest mysteries in Star Wars since its inception to me has always been how people always seem to land on a planet exactly where they are supposed to go. Imagine driving to a city and finding the person you’re looking for right where you park the car — well, now imagine doing the same but instead driving a spaceship and landing on a planet just where you’re supposed to. It’s a logic-defying issue that we overlook for the sake of moving the plot along and honestly, because it’s quite funny. But this is exactly why I don’t understand Filoni making a point out of this, on the second-to-last episode of the show that has a lot of plot points left in the air. Instead of spending time with Sabine reconnecting with Ezra and seeing his reaction when she tells her about so many of the things that have happened since he left, we have Huyang telling us the astronomically low probabilities that they’ll find who they are looking for. It’s a perfect example of adding complications just for the sake of it.
The real question Filoni was trying to answer here is where does Ahsoka go? Finding Thrawn should be relatively easier for her, since the Star Destroyer should be easy enough to spot, but Filoni wanted her to be reunited with Ezra and Sabine first. Using the Force-Skype technique from The Last Jedi was of the biggest satisfying moments of the entire show to me, as I’ve been arguing for years that Filoni is not the hater of that movie most people think he is. (There’s actually enough evidence that he is a fan of it, if you know where to look.) So yeah, another great moment in an overall lacking episode. Yet they could have accomplished the same thing without the surrounding theatrics — a more compelling action sequence would have been Ahsoka trying to connect with Sabine while Huyang is navigating through the mine field and maybe even Enoch is also going after them. But that’d require a very competent director at the helm and really good editing — something the show has proven it could potentially achieve.
There’s a lot going on in this episode, more than I can discuss in full detail in a single review: What is Baylan up to? He fights Ahsoka again (after a laughable jump from the ship, let’s be clear), and that was so interesting, but the episode didn’t have time to explore it further. Two lightsaber moves later, and even a winning one for Ahsoka (her left blade was stopped by Baylan’s saber, while Baylan’s left hand stopped Ahsoka’s right blade from chopping his head off, but if Ahsoka is able to open his right hand and drop the lightsaber, she cuts Baylan’s arm off, which immediately liberates the orange blade and gives Ahsoka the definitive edge), she uses dust and smoke to escape.
Elsewhere, Sabine and Ezra are forced to stop flirting when Shin catches up to them. Sabine offers Ezra his lightsaber, but in a boss-like move, he refuses it. He has the Force. He’s now a true Jedi — another big moment of the episode for me was his fight against Shin, in which he proved who was the master and who the apprentice by dodging the blade predicting Shin’s move with the Force. That was amazing. If only we hadn’t cut away from it and then cut back when the scene was finished. Ezra rejecting the lightsaber was a very significant moment too, and something I’m eager to explore further in the inevitable second season — we all know he’s essentially going to train his future wife, right?
That leads us to Ahsoka vs. Shin at the end. I was expecting this fight to be wrapped up in two moves, and it kind of was, but Shin wasn’t definitively defeated like I thought she’d be. Instead, we see her doubt her position for the first time. Thrawn has called everyone back, but not her; she’s alone, and the people who her master told her she should follow are not really that interested in her. Will Ahsoka change her mind and bring her to the light? It’s possible. Part of me is tired of this arc in Star Wars and would like Shin to stay orange-bladed, yet I also understand that Filoni follows a lot of the Star Wars traditions and its regular themes, one of them being redemption. It’s a powerful arc, even if overdone, so I’m on the fence about this.
The bottom line for me, though, is that with choppy editing, all this episode accomplished was to reunite Sabine, Ezra, and Ahsoka. Yes, Baylan and Shin’s relationship also took a turn, but that was extremely quick and sort of out of nowhere — not exactly, of course, but I feel like we deserve a bit more explaining now that we’ve invested enough time with them. Had this been episode 4 maybe I would have given that a pass, but we have one more episode to go, and it’s not like we should be wasting screen time with non-essential subplots. But I reserve the right to revisit this take once the final episode airs.
That will happen next week, so stay tuned for our discussion on that. I can already feel there’s going to be a lot of discourse around this — even among our staff there are people who loved it and people who weren’t on board with it. Let’s keep the conversation going in the comments!
For more on Ahsoka Part Seven, stay tuned for SWNN Live! on Thursday night on our YouTube channel.
Note: A previous version of this review mistakenly swapped the editors of the Part One and Part Seven.
Miguel Fernández is a Spanish student that has movies as his second passion in life. His favorite movie of all time is The Lord of the Rings, but he is also a huge Star Wars fan. However, fantasy movies are not his only cup of tea, as movies from Scorsese, Fincher, Kubrick or Hitchcock have been an obsession for him since he started to understand the language of filmmaking. He is that guy who will watch a black and white movie, just because it is in black and white.
