‘Ahsoka’, Purrgils, and the ‘Star Wars’ Sense of Wonder
One of the big frustrations with Rosario Dawson’s version of Ahsoka Tano for the first couple of episodes has been her crossed-arms approach to any situation she finds herself in. Her stoicism and calmness when facing a new threat or even meeting back with her old padawan have been noticeably different from previous versions of the character — and not that the actress has any fault in this. She is following Dave Filoni’s specific directions. The writer-showrunner of Ahsoka has been very adamant about Lady Tano’s “wanderer” take in the new series. She has seen too much, lived through too many galactic shakeups, and survived way too many battles. But that façade came down in Part Three for one of the show’s most satisfying moments yet.
“Time to Fly” found Ahsoka and Sabine on a thrilling outer-space battle against Marrok, Shin, and Morgan Elsbeth, as well as several HK droids, where our heroes finally made an escape from the villains by flying into the planet Seatos’ cloudy atmosphere. And there, Ahsoka met for the first time the purrgils, a species she’d probably heard a lot about since she learned about Ezra’s heroics, but hadn’t seen in person yet. And Ahsoka’s jaw hit the floor. In all of her years navigating through the galaxy, in all of the battles she’d fought, and all of the adventures she’d embarked on, she had never seen that. It is the perfect example of the Star Wars sense of wonder, the need and thrill of discovery, which has been widely represented in our best stories from a galaxy far, far away.
The need to feel awestruck at the wonders of the galaxy and what awaits you next door is what drove Luke Skywalker to kick the Tatooine ground before looking at the binary sunset in A New Hope; it’s also the same sense of wonder that fueled Rey’s whole arc in The Force Awakens. And of course, it’s what Ahsoka felt throughout the majority of The Clone Wars. It’s a feeling that the audience can relate to because the wonders of the Star Wars galaxy are also unbeknownst to us, and a reminder that, just like Ahsoka, we still haven’t seen all that there is to see in a galaxy far, far away. It’s also a feeling George Lucas wanted to give to 13-year-old kids and one of the core ingredients of the Star Wars mix: as Nori puts it in Amazon’s The Rings of Power, “There’s wonders in this world beyond our wandering.” Different fantasy universe, same message.
While we didn’t get to spend a lot of time with her after their encounter with the purrgils, it seemed like her knit-brows attitude had softened up just slightly. Hopefully, this will be the beginning of the return of a more ecstatic version of the character, one we can actually relate to as she goes on yet another adventure. It’s no question that for now, Sabine has been the big standout of the show. The crossing of the arms is a sign of closing up to the rest of the world, which is why Ahsoka’s posture is so frustrating. We can’t really empathize with that — it’s Sabine who is more open up and who has actually started a character journey.
More of this sense of wonder feeling awaits us as we go deeper into Ahsoka, as we are poised to travel to Peridea at some point and discover a whole new galaxy with its own set of marvels and secrets to uncover. We don’t know how much time we’ll be spending there, but Filoni has now taken the genie out of the bottle and opened the door to so many other creatives to explore this new mythology. We also don’t know when we’ll be traveling out of the galaxy, but we can certainly hope it will happen sooner rather than later to maximize our time there.
Part Four of Ahsoka debuts on Disney Plus on Wednesday, September 6. Check out Sydney’s discussion on Part Three here and our live discussion on our Thursday YouTube show SWNN Live! here.
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.
