Ahsoka Director Talks About [Spoiler]’s Return in Episode 4 — Plus, Who (or What) Was Marrok?
The following contains spoilers from Episode 4 of Ahsoka, now streaming on Disney+.
Because Anakin Skywalker and Ahsoka Tano had never shared a live-action scene together before the ending of DIsney+’s Ahsoka Episode 4, the magnitude of that “meeting” was not lost on Star Wars vet Hayden Christensen.
“He was pretty happy about being there after all this time,” Peter Ramsey, who directed the well-received episode, “Fallen Jedi,” told IGN. “It had a lot of meaning for him.”
Christensen famously played a younger Anakin in the Star Wars films Episode II: Attack of the Clones and Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, and reprised the role in last year’s Obi-Wan Kenobi series, which reunited him with fellow franchise vet Ewan McGregor.
The characters of Anakin and Ahsoka, meanwhile, have a storied past dating back to the animated series Star Wars: The Clone Wars. As such, Ramsey told IGN, he and Christensen “talked about what it’s like for [Anakin] to be seeing Ahsoka after all this time, that it’s a reunion for them. And I just told him, ‘It’s like you haven’t seen your daughter in two years. She’d gone off to college and you’re seeing her again and she’s like a different person but still your daughter.'”
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Of course, more than a couple of years have passed since Christensen’s Revenge of the Sith days. And whereas Obi-Wan Kenobi made some attempt to shave a few years off the fortysomething actor, Ahsoka clearly is using the now-trendy “de-aging” CGI technology.
Ramsey, though, says he “hadn’t heard too much talk about that” when he submitted his director’s cut of Episode 4. “[De-aging Christensen] was a decision made at some point,” he added. “Maybe it means something.”
Also clearly “meaning something” was the Episode 4 reveal that Morgan Elsbeth’s helmeted henchman, Marrok, was not quite human, as evidenced by the plume of green dust that burst out of his midsection after being gutted by Ahsoka’s lightsaber.
Ramsey — admitting that in directing Marrok’s death, “basically I completely ripped … off” a similar moment from Akira Kurosawa’s Sanjuro — told IGN that he is not entirely clear on what the double-bladed lightsaber wielder is, er, was.
“I was like, ‘What is Marrok? Is he human? Is he kind of more machine than man, like how Darth Vader used to be described sometimes?” Ahsoka head writer Dave Filoni, however, was mum on specifics, only “saying something like, ‘Yeah, it’s kind of mechanical. He’s not entirely human,'” Ramsey related.
“So in the final analysis, I don’t know what it’s supposed to be.”
