Did Star Wars: Ahsoka Just Get Meta About the Legends Canon?

We’re nearing the end of the first season of Star Wars: Ahsoka, a live-action series that has taken the Star Wars mythos to some surprising heights. Revolving around Ahsoka Tano (Rosario Dawson) and an eclectic ensemble of characters, the first six episodes have had no shortage of surprising storylines. As we wait to see how the final two episodes of Star Wars: Ahsoka shake out, one aspect of the show has been particularly fascinating — its meta references to the larger Star Wars mythos. If the most recent episode is any indication, that might’ve included a meta nod to the franchise’s Legends, or “EU”, canon. Obviously, spoilers for Episode 6 of Star Wars: Ahsoka, “Far, Far Away”, lurk below! Only look if you want to know!

Midway through the episode, Baylan Skol (Ray Stevenson) and Shin Hati (Ivanna Sakhno) speak about the new galaxy they have traveled to to find Grand Admiral Thrawn (Lars Mikkelsen). Baylan repeatedly remarks that he’s amazed this alternate galaxy even exists, and regards it as “children’s stories come to life.” “Stories of this galaxy are considered folktales. Some ancient past, long forgotten,” Baylan explains to Shin, who argues, “With good reasons. Sometimes stories are just stories.”

While Baylan’s narrative seems to be teasing a new pivot to the light and dark dichotomy of the Jedi, this conversation can also potentially be interpreted as a take on Star Wars itself. As fans who have followed the franchise know, a massive amount of spinoff media followed the original Star Wars trilogy in the decades after its initial release. Affectionally known as the “Expanded Universe”, these stories were told in countless novels, comic book issues, and video games, and filled in the larger lore of the Star Wars galaxy. Following Disney’s purchase of Lucasfilm in 2014, nearly all of the body of work in the EU (outside of Star Wars: The Clone Wars) was dubbed non-canonical, and was given a new “Legends” banner.

While Lucasfilm has still put out new Legends work in the years since, it has played fast and loose with which pieces of its lore “count.” Thus far, the biggest elements to be brought over to the main Star Wars canon have been characters like Thrawn, who have gained a renewed life in other Lucasfilm-approved media. In a way, this reframes Ahsoka‘s whole premise of Thrawn being stuck in “another galaxy”, as that domain could metaphorically represent the EU in and of itself. Baylan and Shin dialogue viewing that galaxy as the subject of long-forgotten folktales — stories that maybe should be forgotten altogether — could be seen as Lucasfilm keeping the EU at arm’s length, letting it exist but not encouraging fans to regard it with the same weight as the modern-day Star Wars media. Sure, all of this could just be a hypothetical way of interpreting the episode, but it’s a fascinating outlook nonetheless.

New episodes of Star Wars: Ahsoka debut on Tuesdays exclusively on Disney+. If you haven’t signed up for Disney+ yet, you can try it out here. 

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