Review: Ahsoka, "Part Three: Time to Fly" | Season 1, Episodes 3
I've got a bad feeling about this
“The Force resides in all living things. Even you.”
One of my favorite underrated movies is the 1999 superhero comedy Mystery Men. I won’t claim that it’s one of the great comedies of all time, but its satirical bent and messy nature remain extremely endearing nearly 25 years later. (Mystery Men is the first film I ever bought on DVD. Remember DVD? Who else feels old now?) One of its many running gags involves the very wise and profound Sphinx, played by Wes Studi. Sphinx has many of the other good guys in his thrall with Zen-like observations such as “He who questions training only trains himself at asking questions.” It’s only Ben Stiller’s grouchy lead character (whose power is his rage) who sees the Sphinx as a beacon of circular nonsense.
I was thinking of Mystery Men at the outset of “Part Three: Time to Fly,” because the opening scene felt like watching the Sphinx train an apprentice without anyone nearby to scoff or roll their eyes at that training. In all fairness, the opening scene of “Time to Fly” is really meant to recall a similar scene in the first Star Wars, in which Luke Skywalker is trained by the wizened Obi-Wan Kenobi, wearing a blast shield helmet without the ability to see his attacker as he wields a lightsaber. Here, it’s Sabine Wren wearing the helmet and Ahsoka Tano calmly, slowly, portentously walking around her Padawan as she tries to encourage Sabine to use more than her Mandalorian skills in wielding weapons.
Where Mystery Men came into my head is less in the direct echo of Star Wars than in the calmness. The slowness. The portentousness. I didn’t dig into it deeply in my premiere review, but one overriding and increasingly silly aspect of Ahsoka so far is how characters like Ahsoka talk. They. Add. Unnecessary. Pauses. In. Their. Sentences. I assume this choice is as much driven by creator Dave Filoni as by a given episode’s director (Steph Green helmed the second part of last week’s premiere as well as “Time to Fly”). Not every character delivers their dialogue in this stilted, unnecessarily labored fashion. But the slowness of line deliveries becomes very notable in “Time to Fly” because of the episode’s relatively limited scope.