After the debut of Ahsoka episode 3, we are noticing a worrying pattern that we desperately hope won’t continue in follow-up episodes, lest it go the way of Marvel’s Secret Invasion.
You see, like Secret Invasion, Ahsoka‘s first two episodes were quite strong and rather lengthy, at almost an hour each. What’s more, they provided a satisfying amount of action and story beats, hooking many viewers in. While we’re only at Ahsoka‘s third episode, it’s already half the length of those first two episodes and feels more like one long exposition dump than a truly thrilling chapter in an ongoing adventure.
Secret Invasion similarly came out with shorter and shorter episodes as it progressed, amounting to underwhelming stand-alone chapters. Basically, the beginning of the series was front-loaded with tons of action and intrigue and the middle episode became increasingly less interesting.
While the jury is still out on the general consensus of Ahsoka‘s episode 3, it’s obvious from our point of view that it contained a lot less of the pulse-pounding fun chases and lightsaber battles that made the first two episodes so interesting. Instead, at least half or more of the episode was dedicated to Rosario Dawson’s Ahsoka Tano training Natasha Liu Bordizoo’s Sabine Wren and discussing the various nuances of how the Force works. While there was a brief dogfight near the end of the episode — which gave some needed attention to Ivanna Sakhno’s Shin Hati and Paul Darnell’s Marrok — it still failed to paint an overall picture of an exciting installment to the adventure.
This tendency to fall into the trap of relegating too much runtime to plainly shot dialogue moments that are thinly veiled excuses to dump exposition onto the audience was the tell-tale sign we saw in Secret Invasion‘s middle episodes that let us know the show was on a gradual decline. The shorter runtimes of the episodes as the series progressed contributed to this problem, with Ahsoka seemingly following the same pattern. While Ahsoka still has time to turn things around for the better, both in terms of brief runtimes and episode structure, it is still a worrying sign to see these little red flags pop up.
Hopefully, the final episode of Ahsoka will provide a satisfying conclusion to the first season, rather than the baffling CGI-filled climax that we got with Secret Invasion – which notoriously represents the MCU’s ultimate low point from a critical standpoint.
New episodes of Ahsoka drop on Disney Plus each Tuesday.