Fridge / Ahsoka

As a Fridge subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.

Fridge Brilliance

• The Reveal that Sabine used to be Ahsoka's apprentice puts the latter's actions in The Mandalorian in a whole new light:
  • Why wouldn't Ahsoka take Grogu in as her new apprentice? It wasn't just because she feared she'd create the next Vader; she already had an apprentice, and it didn't work out so well (through what seems to be a mix between Ahsoka's own reluctance to teach and Sabine's own emotional instability). Even then, it seems Ahsoka was willing to hold out for Sabine to come back when she's ready, if only a little, seeing as she takes her back with no fuss at the end of "Toil and Trouble" despite her earlier protests.
  • Ahsoka's interactions with Din in both "The Jedi" and on The Book of Boba Fett make it clear she's had experience in trying to teach a Mandalorian, though Din is much more receptive than Sabine given he's a lot more open-minded and less stubborn than she is. Also, Din was willing, however reluctantly, to let Grogu go, but Sabine is still carrying a torch for Ezra.
  • Not only that, Ahsoka seemed a bit more easy-going around Din because his maturity and more staunchly held stances to Mandalore's traditions made him much easier to deal with, unlike the more rebellious and stubborn Sabine who was less steadfast in "The Way".
• That Baylan is an ex-Jedi is apparent right in the beginning as soon as you look at his apprentice Shin, who wears the traditional Jedi Padawan braid in her hair. While obviously no longer devoted to the Order, the Republic, or the Light Side, the two of them still behave very much like a Jedi Master and Padawan, with Marrok being the odd man out as he is visibly an Inquisitor.
• With the confirmation that Ahsoka is aware of Sabine's low potential in the Force, why would she be willing to train her, but not Grogu, who is far stronger than Sabine is? It's exactly because of Sabine's weak Force potential that Ahsoka feels safe training her, as in the possible event that she screws up with teaching Sabine, the risk of her falling to the Dark Side and becoming the next Vader is negligible.
  • This was also confirmed in episode 8 by Huyang.
• Back in Rebels and again in The Book of Boba Fett, it's shown that if someone who's not attuned or familiar with a lightsaber tries to wield it, they have a hard time just swinging it. While Sabine has many problems with her Jedi training, holding the lightsaber clearly isn't one of them. Huyang is right; much as she denies it, it is her lightsaber now.
• Marrok's reveal in "Fallen Jedi" reveals why Baylan was fine with working with him, despite the former apparently being an ex-Inquisitor - a fallen Jedi in service to the Empire hunting down survivors of Order 66, as Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader did. Whether Marrok was a reanimated corpse or enhanced with Nightsister magic a la Savage Oppress is irrelevant because regardless of the answer, Marrok would not be the person he used to be, so it would be pointless for the stoic and reserved Baylan to antagonise him.
• Anakin's spirit taking the visage of Darth Vader during his final lesson to Ahsoka in "Shadow Warrior", at first, may have you think that Anakin strikes a balance between the Light and Dark Sides of the Force. But on review, this flies in the face of the classic take on the Force (that the "Light" is the Force in its natural state and the Dark Side is a perversion in any form). But right before he does, Ahsoka has done nothing but remark on her failures and her fears despite everything else she's learned, and despite Anakin spelling out for her that surviving and leading means that she has to fight on, not just past her enemies but past her mistakes. This is why he takes on his Sith form and lightsaber; to demonstrate exactly what not moving past your failures looks like.
  • Alternately, in the view of this being a balanced Anakin, it's a sign that he has accepted that he is Vader, just as Vader was always Anakin no matter how much he tried to deny it. They are different parts of the same person, and like Yoda did in The Clone Wars, he has stopped trying to deny either part of it, accepting it and allowing it no power over him - which in turn allows him to switch it on and off. Notably, he uses the darker side of himself when teaching the harsher lessons, forcing Ahsoka to confront her guilt, because the Dark Side is not nice, and nice is not what Ahsoka needs - what she needs is to front up to her past, accept it, and move past it.
    • This also explains the lead-up to him taking on the Vader persona. What triggers it, essentially, is Ahsoka invoking his evils as Vader as he speaks about Ahsoka's lineage and legacy ("you're more than that, because I'm more than that"). While it may seem flippant for Anakin to sound outwardly dismissive about his laundry list of crimes, he recognizes Ahsoka is shouldering a lot of self-blame for his Face–Heel Turn ("Is that what this is about?")—the same way we saw Obi-Wan Kenobi was haunted by it when he discovered Vader's survival in his own series. In their last battle in that miniseries, Vader can be read as absolving Obi-Wan of it, taking responsibility for his own fall ("I am not your failure"). Here, as a redeemed Force Ghost, he does it a bit more explicitly for Ahsoka—taking on the visage of Vader to hammer home that she is not, and will never be, like him.
    • There's also a component of something Jack Sparrow once said: "There's only two things that matter: what man can't do, and what a man can do. You can either accept that your father was a pirate and a good man, or you cannot." Ahsoka knows Anakin as a mentor, a friend, and a good man. Everyone else knows him as Darth Vader, the scourge of the Galactic Empire and the most feared and hated being in recent memory. Most of the few who know him as both see him as Baylan does. . . an utter failure of the Jedi, the stain that brings them all low. Ahsoka has to find some way to reconcile the Master and friend she respected and loved with the monster he ultimately became. Either she can accept that her Master was a good mentor and friend and the penultimate evil of the galaxy, or she cannot.
• Anakin's response that "one is never too old to learn" after Ahsoka tells him that it's too late for him to complete her training makes sense when one remembers that Anakin was initially considered too old to be trained as a Jedi by the Council yet he still grew up to become a great Jedi when they (if reluctantly) accepted him into the Order following Qui-Gon's death. Additionally, Yoda also said Anakin's son Luke was too old as well and he became an even greater Jedi than Anakin.
  • There's also an even deeper meaning to this line. Anakin is talking about himself being turned back from the dark side with Luke's help, something that took at least half of his life to happen. Adding to this, the lesson he has for Ahsoka is finished when she does exactly what Luke did in Return of the Jedi, throwing away her weapon. The master (Vader) became the student (Luke).
• Ahsoka makes a meta remark on the quality of Huyang's "History of the Galaxy" stories, where she considers Part One better than the other two. While this is easy to read as a remark about the traditional fan belief that the Original Trilogy are the best Star Wars movies, it could also be seen as a nod to the Prequel Trilogy (the chronologically first of the three trilogies), as Ahsoka herself originates from a series set in that era.
• Ezra's new appearance, where he sports shaggier hair and a beard, could easily be because he's been on the run from Thrawn and the Nightsisters and hasn't had time for grooming, but the new look also gives him a strong resemblance to his father, Ephraim Bridger; Ezra may have grown out his hair and beard as a tribute to his late father.
• In hindsight, Thrawn's course of action against Ezra was fundamentally the same as that against Ahsoka. Thrawn's decision to let Sabine search for Ezra while being fully equipped with her armor, blasters and lightsaber was not about honoring Baylan Skoll's agreement with her, and neither was sending Baylan and Shin to kill her and Ezra after they met a violation of the agreement in spirit. Thrawn wanted Sabine to survive long enough to find Ezra and distract him (and possibly demoralize him with the knowledge that his sacrifice had been in vain) before leaving Ezra to fight for survival when faced with the two darksiders. These were pragmatic moves to keep Ezra, an incredibly resourceful and unpredictable enemy, out of the way of disrupting Thrawn's cargo transfer. Likewise, sending only two squads of Night Troopers and two gunships to assist Baylan and Shin was because sending more would reduce the numbers available for the cargo transfer and slow it down. As long as he kept his agreement with the Great Mothers and left Peridea before his enemies could stop him, destroying them was entirely unnecessary.
• Baylan's advice to Shin, "Impatience for Victory leads to Defeat" summarizes the fatal flaws of Anakin (and the Sith as a whole) as well as Ahsoka and Sabine. Sabine's impatience to decipher the map led to it being stolen by Shin, Ahsoka's impatience led to her separating from Sabine while she was still in battle with Shin - and leading to her own defeat by Baylan. Baylan's thinking also mirrors Thrawn's, since the latter is patiently focused on making his enemies waste their time rather than impatiently seeking a full-on confrontation - all Thrawn needs to do to win is to complete his cargo transfer and leave Peridea.
• Sabine's off-handed comment about Palpatine maybe not being dead isn't just a jab at how he suddenly came back in The Rise of Skywalker — it's also a hint that Thrawn himself is another of Palpatine's Xanatos Gambits. The New Republic is already being smug, overconfident, and no less corrupt than the Old Republic it succeeded. Now Thrawn is back, ready to bring it to its knees in the name of The Empire. While Palpatine is recuperating on Exegol, either: Thrawn succeeds in destroying the New Republic and then he can step back in when he's ready (assuming Thrawn knows about Palpatine's cloning plans, which, being Thrawn, he likely does), or (which is what likely happens barring a Cosmic Retcon) the heroes manage to take Thrawn down for good, and makes the New Republic even more smug and overconfident that the Empire is truly gone and can never rebuild, allowing for Palpatine to build a stronger New Order in the Unknown Regions. Either way, Palpatine still wins.
• The statues of The Ones on Peridea at first glance appear to be missing The Daughter, which is heavily implied to be the statue to The Father's right that is headless. It makes perfect sense however, as the planet was under the control of the Dark-side related Nightsisters, whom would naturally want to remove traces of the light side, and whom were hostile to the Jedi Order. It would thus be reasonable for them to literally deface the statue of the being that represents the ultimate antithesis to their magicks.

Fridge Horror

• "Toil and Trouble" reveals an entire shipyard was still under Imperial pay, meaning the New Republic is still turning a blind eye towards obvious Imperial activity. And we all know where that's gonna lead... Even then, just how many more of Corellia, if not the entire galaxy at large, are willing to sell themselves out to the Empire for a quick payday?
  • This also foreshadows how, two decades later, Corellia won't so much surrender to the First Order as just plain welcome it.
• The fact that Thrawn has been hurled into another galaxy, and the fact the the structure Morgan uses to activate the star map is one that Baylan doesn't recognize. Morgan states it was built by an ancient unknown race, capable of travelling between galaxies. One wonders if Star Wars fans might be familiar with this people, especially with Luke building a New Jedi Order. . .
  • Given the temple on Peridea (which is similar in design to the star map structure on Seatos and the temple on Arcana) has Zeffo writing upon its walls, (with concept art for it mentioning Kujet, the dark side Zeffo ruler from the Jedi: Fallen Order game) its implied the ancient species who built the Seatos structure were the Zeffonians).
• Much of Sabine's arc in Rebels surrounded her relationship with her family, as she was devastated when they abandoned her in her hour of need, and it took a lot for her to reconnect with them, with her even (however briefly) believing that her mother and brother had been killed and that her weapon was responsible for it; now, it's been revealed that in the time between the end of Rebels and the beginning of the series, they'd been killed, presumably in the Purge of Mandalore. For Sabine to have spent so long being hurt by her family's rejection and absence and trying so hard to reconnect with them only for them to be killed shortly thereafter must have been horrible, especially with her losing Kanan and Ezra in short order at roughly the same time; no wonder she's so jaded at the start of this series.
  • The lines from the first episode that Ahsoka goes where she is needed and Sabine telling her that isn't always the case carry new weight with the reveal on what happened to Sabine's family.
• While the visual of Darth Vader at his full potential is scary enough, remember that Darth Sidious intended to take over his granddaughter's body once she cut him down via essence transfer. Given his choice of words, it's not too far a stretch to say this was his plan for Luke Skywalker as well, which may have been why Vader parried Luke's blade. And from there, it's but a small hop to realize that immortality via body-hopping may have been his plan all along when the time came. Anakin isn't showing Ahsoka just a fully realized Darth Vader in their duel, he is also showing us a completely unstoppable Darth Sidious.
• Baylan's final scene in the series shows him at statues of The Ones from the Mortis arc on The Clone Wars. But last the audience saw, The Ones are dead; at least, the ones we know to remain canon, as the one aspect from Legends that hasn't been introduced yet is the Eldritch Abomination known as Abeloth, aka "The Mother". And if Ezra's comments about Thrawn having to wake the Nightsisters up is any indication, there's a good chance that the galaxy may be facing a greater evil than Thrawn...
  • At odds with this theory is the Father statue pointing the way to the potential prison of Abeloth. Since he and his children opposed her in Legends and would presumably do so in canon if she were to appear, its unlikely a statue of the three pointing the way to her location would be built by them or any who know their shared history. But it's possible a species would if they worship her (or just know her as the Mother) without knowing the full history between them.