‘Ahsoka’ Review: Rosario Dawson Finds the Force

The first episode of “Ahsoka,” the new “Star Wars” mini-series on Disney+, is titled “Master and Apprentice,” because of course it is. Obi-Wan and Luke, Yoda and Luke, Obi-Wan and Anakin, Anakin and Ahsoka, the Mandalorian and the floating baby. “Star Wars” has one story and it’s sticking to it.

“Ahsoka,” two of whose eight episodes were available for review (they premiere on Tuesday night), is particularly true to the time-tested narrative of fractious mentorship and surrogate parenthood. It pits against each other two master-apprentice pairs, the lapsed Jedi Ahsoka Tano (Rosario Dawson) and her young Mandalorian protégé, Sabine Wren (Natasha Liu Bordizzo), on the side of good and the former Jedi Baylan Skoll (Ray Stevenson) and his grim sidekick, Shin Hati (Ivanna Sakhno), on the side of not good.

These four jump through space, clown around with droids (cute when they’re on the side of good, clanky and forbidding when they’re not), duke it out with lightsabers and summon the force with varying degrees of effectiveness while they search for Thrawn, an officer of the evil Empire. If found, he could be a danger to the nascent New Republic, which is in power after the events of the original “Star Wars” trilogy but not yet facing the existential threats it encounters in the most recent movies.

That will be important to “Star Wars” devotees and background noise to the rest of us — the overwhelming scale of the franchise, across every type of commercial medium, and the profusion of winding alleys down which its story lines run make it difficult for the casual fan to work up much interest in the world-building ramifications of any given installment.
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