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This article contains spoilers for Ahsoka episode 4.
So far Ahsoka is pretty good. It’s no Andor, but right now it’s far from The Book of Boba Fett. This week’s episode upped the ante, delivering several extremely cool lightsaber duels, teasing a leap to a whole other galaxy next week (which should mean we finally get Ezra and Thrawn), and a big cameo that we all knew was coming but was exciting regardless.
The only thing is that this episode confirms my suspicions that it hasn’t exactly been tightly plotted and that the villainous Morgan Elsbeth’s plan makes so little sense we can only ask one question: Is she stupid?
Let’s rewind to episode 1. We first meet Ahsoka as she searches through some sandy and crumbling ruins for a mysterious relic, which proves to be a baseball-sized encoded star map. Ahsoka emerges from the temple to face off against a squad of HK droids also after the map. After Ahsoka defeats them, they self-destruct in a gigantic nuclear explosion that obliterates everything for miles around.
We know these droids were sent by Morgan as she’s used the same type in The Mandalorian season 2 and also in today’s episode. We also now know that Morgan has already constructed a gigantic (and presumably enormously expensive) craft known as the Eye of Sion in the Denab system, which is practically complete as Ahsoka season 1 begins.
In the fourth episode, we also learn that this star map is absolutely critical to the Eye of Sion’s functioning, as without the course it charts, the ship will not be able to fulfill its purpose of making an extragalactic hyperspace leap. This is underlined by Baylan, who says that the map is “the only way” to make the leap, with Morgan’s worried reaction when she learns that “the final calculation is incomplete” indicating he’s not bluffing.
You may be able to see where we’re going with this. If the star map is the lynchpin of her plan and cannot be replaced, why did Morgan send a squad of robots to get it that would nuke the place it’s kept at the slightest hint of trouble? If her droids had succeeded in blowing up Ahsoka then the star map is also gone (it’s not indestructible, as proven by Baylan destroying it at the end of this episode to prevent them being followed) and her plan is toast.
At this point, Morgan would have constructed a huge starship for no reason, blown up the one thing that gave it purpose and consigned Thrawn to eternity in another universe. So, either the main villain of this story is stupid, or the writers didn’t think this through and hoped we wouldn’t notice.
It’d have made a lot more sense to send Baylan and Shin to retrieve the map in episode 1, especially as they have the Force sensitivity needed to find it in the first place. But, for narrative reasons, Ahsoka can’t meet those characters right at the start of the story, so some anonymous droids had to fill in as antagonists.
But even if the writers’ hands were forced on that decision for the sake of the wider narrative, the script deciding they needed to go nuclear on Ahsoka doesn’t make a lick of sense. Oh well, a least that massive explosion sort of raised the tension for a few seconds, though nobody believed that Ahsoka was in any real danger ten minutes into the first episode of her self-titled show.