A Vision for the Jedi

Over the weekend during D23, Lucasfilm released the first trailer for Ahsoka's second season, debuting early next year. It looks like, well, more Ahsoka: everything's bigger and splashier, and there's clearly more Hayden Christensen in it this time, because they know you like that.

I was very mixed on the first season, and visually at least, this trailer seemed like they might be going some way to turning me around a little (I appreciate more space battles; I do not appreciate putting my boy Ezra Bridger in the worst starfighter known to the galaxy, the A-wing). But the trailer has one line of dialogue in it, right at the end, that is probably going to keep giving me pause from now all the way through to the season's airing.

"This is your trial, Ahsoka," Anakin tells his former padawan. "It might be time to decide. Are you a Jedi... or not?"

While I don't think Star Wars has done a great job with her since Rebels, Ahsoka Tano has always been one of my favorite lenses on the Jedi as a concept in the contemporary iteration of the franchise. She became someone who could synthesize the tutelage of a rebellious master in Anakin and the companionship of a paragon of the Order in Obi-Wan Kenobi, and ultimately make the decision to cut herself off from it after the council did wrong by her—a decision that let her survive the machinations of Order 66 and continue to fight for peace and justice on her own terms. Ahsoka has, in some ways, always reflected a Star Wars ideal I've had as a child who grew up on the prequels and copious amounts of Knights of the Old Republic II: a love of the Jedi as an individual, and a distrust in the Jedi as an organizational structure that spent thousands of years growing recalcitrant and dogmatic.

It makes me wary, then, to ask Ahsoka if she is a Jedi or not after all this time again—a generation after she took up arms against her former master with the determined cry of "I am no Jedi." Of course, we don't know the full context of this exchange in season two yet. And to be fair to Ahsoka as a show, I admired its slow democratization of what using the Force and being a Jedi could mean through its examination of Sabine Wren and her own path to becoming Ahsoka's apprentice, so it's not like the show and I aren't operating on some similar wavelengths already.

But the trailer has released at a fascinating time, just weeks after the debut of Star Wars Visions Presents: The Ninth Jedi—a non-canonical interpretation of the galaxy far, far away that just so happens to have my all-time favorite vision of what being a Jedi can be in it, which Ahsoka should absolutely take notes from.