Entertainment
Star Wars Laziest Trend Continues With Its Hottest Shows
By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
Star Wars fans are generally excited for Ahsoka, Season 2, which promises more misadventures for the title character and returning franchise favorites like Sabine Wren and Grand Admiral Thrawn. Speaking of returns, Ahsoka actor Rosario Dawson confirmed that she and Anakin actor Hayden Christensen will appear onscreen together in her show’s second season.
This has fans hyped up, but it really shouldn’t: after all, Christensen’s return is proof that Star Wars is leaning too much on nostalgia to ever craft a new future for itself.
Disney Plays It Safe, A Little Too Safe
Ahsoka is generally a very good show, but it was also the safest possible series for Disney to create. That’s because the biggest draw for the series was that it brought many beloved animated characters into live-action, including Hera Syndulla and Ezra Bridger. The show also served as the live-action introduction of Grand Admiral Thrawn, the most popular character of the Star Wars Expanded Universe.
Adding to all this nostalgia is the fact that the show centers on Ahsoka, herself the most popular character from the beloved Clone Wars TV show. Season 1 also tilted the chance cubes in its favor by having a cameo from Hayden Christensen’s Anakin Skywalker, whose character interacted with Rosario Dawson’s Ahsoka in a kind of Jedi dreamscape. Now, they are set to reunite in Season 2, but I’ve got (in the Star Wars parlance) a bad feeling about this.
Ahsoka Walks a Very Fine Line
My chief concern is that Ahsoka is already walking a very fine line between nostalgia and innovation. Every episode is filled to its Outer Rim with fan service, including the return of David Tennant’s obscure droid and the reunion of Anakin Skywalker and Ahsoka Tano. Fortunately, it partners all these callbacks to the franchise’s good old days with a fresh new story involving the arrival of Grand Admiral Thrawn, the greatest threat facing the New Republic.
However, having Anakin and Ahsoka reunite again in Season 2 makes me think Ahsoka is about to start leaning too hard into nostalgia at the expense of doing something original. Like, since Anakin Skywalker remains very dead, that means these characters are likely to just run into each other again in The World Between Worlds, probably so Ahsoka can get some more fortune cookie Jedi wisdom. That means this show would be returning to the same well in exactly the same way, effectively squandering the return of Hayden Christensen.
Nostalgia Only Goes So Far
That’s exactly what happened to Obi-Wan Kenobi, a show that answered a question nobody was asking: what was Obi-Wan Kenobi up to before the first Star Wars movie? Originally, most of us assumed he kicked it around Tattooine and never had the time to see Leia (who feels the need to identify herself to the Kenobi in her holographic recording) or Darth Vader (who says he “was the learner” last time he saw his old Master). But the Obi-Wan Kenobi show inexplicably introduced the fact that its title character was inexplicably filling his days with high-flying adventures with a young Princess Leia and death-defying fights with his former student.
Obi-Wan Kenobi didn’t really have much of a plot; instead, the shoestring narrative existed just to move us from one over-the-top fight to the next. It was fan service all the way down, one that relied heavily on our nostalgia of just seeing Obi-Wan and Anakin onscreen together again. Now, Ahsoka looks like it will keep leveraging that same kind of cheap nostalgia by bringing Hayden Christensen back and hoping that audiences tune into his third appearance in the Disney Star Wars era despite the inevitable diminishing returns.
Begun, The Star Wars Fatigue Has
I’d love to be proven wrong here, but bringing one of the franchise’s best actors back for the exact same kind of goofy cameo from before seems like a sign the writers are running out of ideas. Therefore, we’ll probably see more fan-service cameos, all while the show descends to Obi-Wan levels of dangling nostalgia bait in front of our faces as surely as if Kathleen Kennedy were rattling keys. Soon enough, Ahsoka may face the same fate as Obi-Wan, bailing on its cooler plot ideas in favor of awkwardly shuffling us from one set piece to the next.
This is assuming, of course, the show even still has an audience to upset: Forbes estimates we may not see Ahsoka Season 2 until August 2026, a full three years since Season 1 premiered. It’s a delay that threatens the show’s momentum while allowing the core audience to get distracted by rival programming. If Disney isn’t careful, they may discover that no amount of nostalgic cameos may be enough to overcome the widespread apathy that is killing the MCU, a kind of ongoing fandom malaise that could best be described as “Star Wars fatigue.”
