I know I'm treading on sacred ground here, so I'll tread carefully. I promise.
Ahsoka was good. And, with filming already underway for season 2, it was good enough for Disney to keep the series going. But, even though it had all the ingredients for greatness—amazing characters, great casting, long-awaited reunions, and even the live-action debut of the dreaded Grand Admiral Thrawn—it remained merely that: good.
Like it or not, season 1 left many fans somewhat underwhelmed by its execution, even if Rosario Dawson was the near-perfect mature version of Ahsoka. As Disney gears up for season 2, there's a single, glaring flaw in Ahsoka—and most Disney+ series—that needs to be fixed.
It's too slow.
Just like The Acolyte, the show falls victim yet again to Disney+'s seemingly mandated eight-episode-per-series rule. What's ironic is that you'll often hear people complain that eight episodes feels too short, that they don't have enough time with the characters and the story. Yet Ahsoka (and The Acolyte) never really felt like a series: it felt like a box office movie being stretched into a Disney+ series.
And stretching a movie-length story into eight episodes when it should have been six just doesn't work.
And I'm not only talking about the story's pacing. It's true, the pacing is slow. The first four episodes drag, despite their occasional flashes of action (which are usually pretty good). But I'm talking about something deeper than that, something that happened in Zack Snyder's Justice League remake, where he filmed everything in slow motion to stretch it into a four-hour movie (still worth watching, by the way).
Watch Ahsoka again, and you'll see it. Everyone seems to take so long to do everything. People walk incredibly slowly, even when they've just said they don't have time to waste. People pause for thirty seconds before responding. The heroes and villains spend so much time standing around that it hurts. It physically hurts. There's just too much dead space where nothing happens.
And we won't talk about that infamous fight with Ahsoka, Sabine, and Ezra take on Thrawn's Stormtroopers (compare it with the animated Order 66 fight). The rest of the action is well-done, so this one gets a pass, even if it misses the mark by a mile. And yes, I know no one can move around like the animated series (except maybe Anakin vs. Obi-Wan in Revenge of the Sith).
How can Ahsoka season 2 can fix this?
Obviously, a tighter structure will eliminate these slower moments, but Disney needs to be willing to have fewer episodes or even potentially shorten their length. I remember watching the first season of The Mandalorian and being surprised by the varying episode lengths. Some were so short compared to the others.
But you know what? It worked.
Changes to the pacing have to be made. Shorten the overall series, shorten individual shows, or write eight episodes' worth of content. If they stick with the eight-episode format when they only six episodes worth of a story, there might not be a season 3.
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