Punished_Blinx posted... The biggest strength of this show is how much it's like the cartoons. It's a trip seeing all of these designs and even the same voice actors in some instances translate directly to live action. Seeing Hayden get to play Clone Wars Anakin especially was a lot of fun.
The biggest weakness of this show is how much it's like the cartoons. The motivations of these characters are paper thin and it doesn't have the breathing room of the cartoons to get you invested in any of these relationships with the content provided.
It's a fun experiment seeing someone who handled the cartoons transition to live action but I don't think it was a big success personally. Filoni is clearly a Star Wars fan and is passionate about the property. He's good with the big picture stuff and connecting pre-existing stuff in interesting ways. But to be frank he's good at iterating on foundations that others have already built and established. He's good at positioning the important things and utilizing them but he seems to have an issue making a story that's about why these things are important outside of fan service when given a more limited run time of a live action show.
The show is called Ahsoka and yet most of her character development happens when she fell into a magic doorway puddle to talk to Anakin. Why does she want an apprentice after she left the Jedi? What does she want Sabine to be? What does this journey actually mean to her as a character? What is her goal outside of stopping a bad guy?
Thrawn isn't exactly immune to this either. Why do the Empire remnants want to follow him? Ahsoka says early on they're loyal to the empire because of money. In that same episode people willingly give their lives to stop her from stopping the search for Thrawn. That doesn't seem to really be an accurate reasoning?
We get a little bit about how Thrawn likes authority. But what does that look like to him? Throughout Rebels he didn't seem to care much about anything other than besting his opponents in warfare. We didn't even really see his relation to the Emperor. What is his Empire supposed to even look or be like. Why should we the audience consider him to be some scary threat that's potentially worth stranding a hero over?
It's just all over the show. Sabine was willing to sacrifice everything to see Ezra. Why? I suppose it's because she lost her family and she made a promise to Ezra to find her. But again despite this being a 7ish hour show this is all just sorta skimmed over. We just have to roll with it and accept that this now means everything to her.
All of this is fine in a fun little cartoon. But it just feels pretty lacking when brought into a medium that's presumably supposed to be more adult. Especially when we're coming off Andor which is all about the why people do what they do.
Like I recognize that Andor is a high bar but this is pretty basic storytelling 101. Even Rey has a rather basic motivation of wanting to belong to something after being abandoned by her parents. It doesn't take much to give a human motivation to these characters outside of "I am a good guy who wants to help my friends and stop the bad guy."
Agree with all of this, particularly the bolded parts. I will add that I did like the way they characterized Thrawn, even if his motivation as a character feels pretty thin. His cold, calculated tactics come across pretty perfectly, and even if the rationalization of
why his troops support him so steadfastly is nonsensical or hand-waved away, the characterization of that support is done well.
The lightsaber fights were well choreographed, although I think I prefer the one Ahsoka and Morgan had in Mando season 2 to the one they have in this finale. The best fight of all, for my money, was easily the first fight between Ahsoka and Baykal Skoll. The clearly contrasting fighting styles each used made it a much more visually interesting fight than most other lightsaber fights, even counting other Star Wars media. Im in the camp that didnt care as much for the fast-and-furious, disorienting lightsaber choreography of the prequel movies, though, so my opinion here is admittedly shaped by that.
All in all my opinion of the show hasnt changed from what I summed up in the last topic about it I posted in: its a mostly good-looking show, with lackluster writing due to its somewhat bland characters, that leans waaaaay too heavily on every episode having some sort of extremely contrived fan service moment, so that the audience can tweet about how hype it was.