The Star Wars universe is expanding once again. After making her live-action debut in The Mandalorian, Ahsoka Tano now has her very own spinoff series.
Star Wars: Ahsoka is set to drop its first two episodes on Disney+ at 9 pm E.T. on Tuesday, August 22, with Rosario Dawson—who first appeared as Tano in The Mandalorian season 2—reprising her role as the former Jedi Knight. The first season will run through October 3, with a new episode premiering each week on Tuesday.
Written and co-directed by Star Wars veteran Dave Filoni, the series will build off the backstory for Ahsoka that was established in the 2008 animated Star Wars movie The Clone Wars and its subsequent TV series, The Clone Wars and Rebels. Filoni has said that Ahsoka will pick up where its titular heroine’s storyline left off in Rebels, when Ahsoka no longer considers herself a Jedi.
“She’s a wanderer at this point, and is in a lot of ways wary of any organization as such because of the power that comes with it as a group,” Filoni told Empire. “She walks a path that basically died out a long time ago. And there aren’t many like her left, if any. So that’s a lonely thing. What is that life like? If you are a loner, you have a very small circle of friends. What is it like, then, when you try to open back up?”
Here’s everything you need to know about Ahsoka ahead of the series premiere.
How Ahsoka fits in the Star Wars timeline
Set within the same timeframe as The Mandalorian, the events of Ahsoka take place after the fall of the Galactic Empire in Star Wars: The Return of the Jedi, the final film in the original trilogy.
In terms of Star Wars years, Return of the Jedi is set in 4 ABY (after the Battle of Yavin) and The Mandalorian begins around 9 ABY, which means Ahsoka is also set in that general period. This is a time when the New Republic, the democratic government formed by the Rebel Alliance following their victory over the Empire, has only a tenuous hold on the galaxy.
The first season will follow Ahsoka as she investigates rumors that Grand Admiral Thrawn (Lars Mikkelsen, who also voiced the character in Rebels) has returned as “heir to the Empire.” In The Mandalorian season 2, we saw Ahsoka face off with former Imperial Magistrate Morgan Elsbeth (Diana Lee Inosanto) in an attempt to obtain information on Thrawn’s whereabouts.
As Ahsoka’s quest continues to play out, she will also be reunited with fellow Clone Wars and Rebels favorites like Mandalorian warrior Sabine Wren (Natasha Liu Bordizzo) and New Republic General Hera Syndulla (Mary Elizabeth Winstead).
Who is Ahsoka Tano?
First introduced in The Clone Wars movie as the teenage padawan of none other than Anakin Skywalker (voiced by Matt Lanter), Ahsoka (voiced by Ashley Eckstein) has a storied past within the Star Wars canon.
After being trained in the ways of the Jedi by Anakin during the Clone Wars, Ahsoka was framed for murder by another Jedi and expelled from the Order. Although she was eventually absolved of the crime and invited back, the incident caused her to become disillusioned with the Jedi and she set out on her own.
As the events of The Revenge of the Sith play out and Anakin turns to the Dark Side and becomes Darth Vader, The Clone Wars series shows that Ahsoka is off fighting to retake the planet Mandalore from Darth Maul (voiced by Sam Witwer), who is revealed in the show to have survived his seemingly fatal fight with Obi-Wan Kenobi on Naboo. The final season concludes with Ahsoka surviving Order 66, the command given by Emperor Palpatine to execute all Jedi.
Hayden Christensen, who played Anakin in the Star Wars prequel trilogy, is slated to reprise his role in Ahsoka, which presumably means that we’ll get some flashbacks to the time the two spent together as master and apprentice in Clone Wars since Anakin is dead by the time that the events of Ahsoka are set to take place.
In Rebels, it’s revealed that Ahsoka went on to become an integral member of the Rebel Alliance as a leader of their intelligence network under the codename “Fulcrum.” She eventually ends up fighting Darth Vader in a lightsaber duel and is believed to have been killed. However, we come to find out that she was actually rescued by resistance fighter Ezra Bridger (voiced by Taylor Gray), who used the World Between Worlds—a mystical dimension within the Force that touches every point of time and space in the Star Wars universe—to travel back in time to save her.
Ezra later disappears alongside Thrawn and is a big part of the reason that Ahsoka and her allies are seeking to discover Thrawn’s location.
