The Fantasy Review‘s Review of Ahsoka, Season 1, Episode 3.
After the fantastic introduction to this series from episodes 1 and 2, I thought things could only continue to be great. The cast is fantastic, the tone and atmosphere continue to make Ahsoka unique to The Mandalorian and other Star Wars series, but the pacing fell off a cliff this episode.
To begin with the positives, the time spent on character work was nice. We got to watch Sabine struggle at the start of a journey I hope we see develop naturally as the series progresses. Despite being the only thing that happened this episode, the ambush and fight for survival in space looked incredible and was entertaining to watch.
The issue with this episode is that it is too short compared to previous episodes, so they don’t have enough time to have an interesting plot and develop the characters and throw in some political stuff in there too. Episode three was only about thirty minutes, while episodes one and two were fifty and forty minutes, giving previous episodes far more time to play with.
You can do a lot with ten minutes in a TV episode, and I think that’s all episode three of Ahsoka needed to give it a more natural and satisfying narrative arc.
The truth is, if the whole series was released at the same time, this wouldn’t have been much of an issue as we would jump straight into the next episode. However, Disney have decided to make this a weekly, evening event, which is fine and an enjoyable way to watch a show – if only the structure of the episodes suited these intentions.
Hopefully we get more of what made the first two episodes great over the next few weeks, otherwise Disney will have squandered what might have been a show even better than The Mandalorian.
