Star Wars: Ahsoka Part 7: 'Dreams and Madness'

© Lucasfilm

‘Ahsoka’ sets up a finale that couldn’t pay everything off.
by Jeremy Fogelman

The penultimate episode of Season 1 of Ahsoka is called “Dreams and Madness” and it barely seems to touch on either of those things. The episode starts back on Coruscant with Hera at her kangaroo court hearing with the clearly sinister Senator Xiono again grilling her and claiming all her stories are nonsense -- but there were multiple ships that saw the space whales at the least, so the logic here is a little ridiculous.

The deus ex machina to solve this problem is C-3PO making a cameo (Anthony Daniels, who simply always reprises this role regardless of the format) and dropping Senator Leia’s name -- thankfully they don’t do any ghoulish CGI stuff here, but it’s an awkward situation because they can only have her be off camera. At this point I’m not sure what the point of all this stuff is -- Hera hasn’t really been such a compelling character this season.

The show drops some more crumbs for Clone Wars fans by having Ahsoka battling with the hologram of Anakin that left 20 recordings to help train her in his absence, leaving with her saying, “He was a good master” -- until he wasn’t, I suppose, although she doesn’t bother to mention that part. Their arrival with the whales leads into an expected situation where Thrawn has set up space mines to attack the space whales -- they flee before getting too hurt, which is a pretty reasonable way to go.

On the ground, Thrawn is taken aback when he finds out Ahsoka was Anakin’s Padawan and adjusts his strategy accordingly -- he certainly talks in a way that’s supposed to make him seem super strategic, but I can’t say any particular decision he made this episode blew me away one way or another.

Ahsoka seems to understand she can really connect to Sabine, who continues to not tell Ezra the full details of her poor decision-making while I guess also filling him in on the original Star Wars plotlines -- there’s a little joke about most people thinking that the Emperor was dead, referencing the much-derided “somehow Palpatine returned” line from Rise of Skywalker, but I don’t love the meta stuff in Star Wars for the most part.

© Lucasfilm

Thankfully the action here is still fun, with a chase with the Noti puppet aliens and Ezra/Sabine fighting off foes with her lightsaber and tricks, while he simply uses the Force to knock people around -- a fun approach. And we also get the sequel to Ahsoka versus Baylan, which again is fun, but also a huge tease -- as the dude also basically fires Shin Hati without fully explaining anything.

So the episode ends with Thrawn ready to leave and the heroes having a poorly timed reunion while Shin is running off by herself and Baylan is still doing who knows what. It’s a lot of threads to wrap up in the finale and I know there’s no way they even planned to do so -- I envision an intentional cliffhanger, although sadly there’s no way Ray Stevenson could return (and I absolutely would hate seeing a CGI facsimile of him).

Meaning at this point I like the show but really don’t love it -- one strong episode and the rest decent to average, so I guess we’ll see how well the finale really ends things off. Sometimes those finales can make or break a season after all.

Note: This piece was written during the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike. We support the strike and emphasize the importance of actors and writers, and ensuring they and fellow creatives are compensated and treated fairly for their work. Without the labor of the actors currently on strike, the series being covered here wouldn't exist.