I've never written a review before but the fact that I'm seemingly the only person kind of indifferent to this just made me have to express this. I loved Clone Wars, enjoyed some of Rebels, but this is just so bland.
You'd think since it's just a bunch of shorts maybe they're show us something about the characters that we didn't know. Not really, Dooku was evil in the prequels and CW, and here he's.. still super evil and inclined to do bad stuff and murder people. I won't even say that it shows why he leaves the Jedi order because he already is so "un-Jedi" like that you could really just have his first episode and it's pretty clear.. So what's the point of it? Just showing a bad guy be bad from the start, but just a little less? It just doesn't really do anything to develop the character. And with such a short amount of time to do it, why choose a story that would need to fleshed out much more? This could've been a really compelling story that showed more about a character but it was so predictable and just made you continue to think an evil character is evil.
There's an episode of Ahsoka as a baby which is just completely pointless. Her mother goes hunting and decides to bring a baby with her for some reason. Then she essentially tames a wolf because Dave Filoni loves wolves. And predictably they all wonder how it happens and the old villager says she's obviously a Jedi because what else could it be.
There's another episode of Anakin forcing Ahsoka to train for a scene we see in the Siege of Mandalore arc. This is something that's been bothering me with so much Star Wars content the last few years. Everything has to be explained. Instead of just having an interesting episode where you learn something new about a character (or just using this entire 6 episode budget for a complete arc), it's just used to explain why a character was able to do something difficult. As if fans complained about her being so powerful in the final Clone Wars episodes and it has to be justified or something. It was cool to see the characters because I like them, but why not use them in a more interesting way? Also what's with putting young Kanan in the beginning of the episode? Why are we just shoving random characters we know into stuff, as if that makes it better because we know who they are?
Then the last episode is just retconning the entire Ahsoka book and telling a condensed and worse version of it. It also covers such a long timespan in the weirdest way. The only way this episode makes sense is if you've read the book because the time jump on the planet she's on would make no sense without context. Don't try to condense what would probably be 4 episodes into 16 minutes, it just turns it into a mess. And of course people will only remember Ahsoka being at Padme's funeral, which just feels like it was shoved in there to draw cheap emotion.
The animation was fantastic and I was really looking forward to this show but I was just sighing or bored the entire time. This show was pretty low key and wasn't advertised that heavily so I assume they had the freedom to do whatever they wanted, so I don't understand why they decided to basically just show a bunch of characters doing stuff that didn't need to be shown or explained? I expect if they make more of these they'll make an episode with Obi Wan that explains why he hates flying. Or maybe an episode that explains why Anakin says that Obi Wan would disapprove of using the force to cut fruit. Or some other pointless thing that doesn't need to be shown or explained. Not everything has to be hardcore plot to be good (aka most of the Clone Wars show which was random adventures/stories) but this was just so disappointing and didn't do anything for any of the characters. It seems like everybody is loving this, maybe I'm crazy but it felt so pointless and not to the quality I'd expect when it's made by Dave Filoni who has created some fantastic stories and arcs in the past.
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