Disney’s new Star Wars series, Ahsoka, has reached its fifth episode, and I am finding it… educational, in an odd way. Because it is really showing me how the other half lives.

I saw Star Wars – the first movie, the one that’s now known as “Episode IV” – in 1978, and it’s fair to say that it fried my little fifteen-year-old fanboy brain. It was ridiculously epic space opera brought to life on the big screen, with everything I’d come to expect from space opera – exploding planets, weird aliens, more robots than you could shake a stick at, blaster bolts and laser swords – it was awesome and amazing and spectacular, and I loved it to bits. Of course I knew there would be a sequel – that much was obvious as soon as I saw Darth Vader regain control of his TIE fighter – and in due course it came out, and it was The Empire Strikes Back, and it wasn’t what I expected, but that was kind of a good thing; it broadened and deepened the setting, and posed a number of interesting questions, while still delivering on the spectacle. By the time Return of the Jedi came along… well, the spectacle was still there, but the story seemed weaker, the interesting questions posed by Empire didn’t really get satisfactory answers – I still enjoyed it, it was a lot of fun, but I felt, rather, as though the story had come to a natural end. Two great movies and one fairly good one, that was enough for me. I’d heard of George Lucas’s idea of a nine-film series, a trilogy of trilogies in which the films I knew were only the middle bit. I didn’t think that was ever going to happen.

But Star Wars was immensely popular, and the spin-offs, tie-ins and cash-ins started almost at once. Toy shops were absolutely flooded with those little plastic figures, featuring every character in the movies, from Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader down to alien-glimpsed-for-half-a-second-in-the-cantina-scene. There were tons of the things, and I wanted them… but, even in those days, I was a morbid completist, and I could see that, if I started collecting them, there were so many coming out that I would never get a full set… so, in a rare moment of intellectual maturity, I decided not to start at all. And – and here comes trouble – I took the same decision regarding most of the spin-offs, too.

Somewhere, I think, I still have my copy of Alan Dean Foster’s Splinter of the Mind’s Eye, but that’s the only Star Wars spin-off novel I’ve ever read. In latter years, I got to know some of the video games, and I do think Knights of the Old Republic was thoroughly amazing (and I still get goosebumps when I remember seeing the big plot twist for the first time), but the whole “Expanded Universe” pretty much passed me by.

Of course, in the end we did get the trilogy of trilogies, despite my doubts. The sequel trilogy went rather like the first one – spectacular first episode, more thoughtful and interesting second one, flashy but a bit lame conclusion. The prequels, however… oh dear.

It wasn’t that they were bad movies – although they were – it was the way they grafted a load of backstory onto the first film, and it didn’t fit. The Jedi, who are a near-forgotten myth in “Episode IV”, are everywhere a generation before, leading the Republic’s forces into battle with lightsabres blazing, not to mention running a galaxy-wide programme of stealing Force-sensitive children. And then there’s the question of Jedi celibacy – the idea of “non-attachment”, which is apparently so important that Anakin’s violation of it is the catalyst for driving him to the Dark Side. (Not that Anakin’s tragic character arc is exactly convincing anyway – his conversion to the Sith philosophy looks an awful lot like a sustained fit of sulking to me.) Not only is this an unattainable ideal (one which some of us wouldn’t even want to attain,) it’s also inherently violated by the Jedi one-on-one mentoring system – go on, just show me a master/padawan pair who don’t have strong feelings about each other. And, of course, the original film has Ben Kenobi telling Luke Skywalker that his father was a Jedi… the same way he might have said “your father was a quantity surveyor.” Not a hint that a Jedi being a father was a world-shaking transgression. No further comment along the lines of “and that was very bad and wrong of him, he should have stuck to the old Jedi tradition of relentless masturbation like the rest of us.”

So, Anakin Skywalker became Darth Vader because of 1) breaking a Jedi rule that I’d never heard of and that didn’t make much sense, 2) generic worrying about mortality, 3) sulking over some perceived slights from the Jedi hierarchy, and 4) general late-adolescence going through a Goth phase. I wasn’t impressed.

Nor was I impressed by the way the Republic was portrayed, as an organization that combined the worst features of sclerotic bureaucracy and complacent aristocracy. As for the wise and noble Jedi – well, apart from the whole child-stealing and stuffy-hierarchy thing, I question the wisdom and nobility of employing a captive army of brainwashed clone troopers, ten year old kids in twenty year old bodies – especially one which they came by in distinctly suspicious circumstances (“fell off the back of a lorry, squire, no questions asked.”)

No, I didn’t like the prequels very much. But other people did. Enough to justify a new round of spin-offs and tie-ins. The Expanded Universe expanded itself yet further, and of course I, err, continued not to keep up with it. Apparently, in the animated “Clone Wars” movie, Anakin Skywalker acquired a young padawan called Ahsoka Tano, who had a rather turbulent history with the Jedi over the course of seven seasons of the Clone Wars animated show, none of which I watched. And then she was involved in four seasons of Star Wars: Rebels, which followed the likes of Hera Syndulla, Sabine Wren, Ezra Bridger and Chopper the droid around. Or so I gather. I didn’t watch it.

But I have been watching the recent live-action shows. I may not be as fond of them as some people are, but they’re generally entertaining, and they haven’t, until now, depended on my knowing eleven seasons and who knows how many tie-in novels worth of backstory. So, when Ahsoka Tano cropped up in The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett… well, I noticed her, anyway. I can’t honestly say she made all that much of an impression – since I knew pretty much nothing about the character, she just came across as Random Jedi Person #386 to me. But I did notice quite a lot of buzz around the character, from people who did know who she was, and had followed her career for a long time.

So that’s where I was when the Ahsoka series started. And, well….

Fans, who know these characters and care about them, were understandably thrilled to see how these new versions had grown and developed. I have read reviews, praising the character interactions and the way their shared history shows through. Except, I know nothing about their shared history, and a great deal of the show, therefore, consists of people I don’t know doing things I don’t care about. Consequently, I tend to agree with some other reviews I’ve read, in that all this character stuff makes the actual plot move only slightly faster than the pitch drop experiment.

The first episode begins with Ahsoka searching, slowly and methodically, for a bronze cricket ball thingy that is evidently some important plot MacGuffin. I don’t know why she’s looking for it, or where she’s looking for it, or how come she knows it’s there. Not a good start. Later, we get quite a lengthy sequence of Sabine Wren being, well, a bit of a brat – blowing off a public speaking engagement to zoom around on her hover-bike and then hang out at her space-apartment with her freaky space-cat. This is my introduction to the character, and it really doesn’t make me want to care about her. If you have been following her career previously, no doubt it makes sense. The bronze cricket ball turns out to be a star map which may lead to another galaxy, where Ezra Bridger and Admiral Thrawn were lost, back in something I didn’t watch. The good guys want Ezra Bridger back. The bad guys want Admiral Thrawn back. There is only one bronze cricket ball, so it becomes a bone of contention between them. So far, so obvious. I still don’t know who these people are, although I note that Ezra Bridger has a surprisingly normal-sounding name for someone in the Star Wars setting. And so things move, slowly, on….

By the end of episode four, the bad guys have seized the cricket ball and are on their way to the other galaxy. Oh, and Ahsoka herself has been tossed off a cliff and is now talking to the ghost of Anakin Skywalker – well, at least I know who he is, but at this point, you couldn’t pay me to care about Anakin Skywalker. (Did anyone really believe she was dead? In a setting where people come back from the dead even if you’ve seen them get killed? When she’s spent quite a bit of the preceding three episodes leaping from great heights and sticking the superhero landing with not so much as a tentacle out of place?) Episode five had a lot of Ahsoka revisiting her past relationship with Anakin, which as far as I could see consisted of them angsting at each other while lots of clone troopers got killed around them. Then they climbed aboard the magic space whale and followed the bad guys to the other galaxy. I can’t help thinking that the conclusion of episode four would have made a great cliffhanger ending for episode one, and the end of episode five could have been a great way to end episode two, and the show would then have three more episodes in which the characters could do interesting and exciting things, instead of things like going through the work records at the spaceship breaking yards, or failing to levitate a coffee cup, or spending a quite inordinate amount of time hanging around for a very long and tedious countdown to reach zero.

Is this a flaw in the show? I’m inclined to think that it is. It’s all very well for the dedicated fans, but the less dedicated, such as myself, could do with meeting these characters in a way that doesn’t depend so much on all that backstory. It’s not a problem confined to the Star Wars franchise, of course; people are already complaining about the amount of prior knowledge you have to have in order to understand the later Marvel Comics offerings. (And that one’s going to get a whole lot worse, if the Fantastic Four and the X-Men get grafted back onto the franchise. Even now, I keep coming across the bleached bones of reviewers who’ve perished while trying to map the continuity jungles of the X-Men.)

So anyway. Here are some things which I, in my non-fan sort of way, have jotted down about the story so far:-

• Rosario Dawson is perfectly fine as Random Jedi Person #386. She is cool and collected and efficient, and gives the impression of having a full, rich, inner life. That she is going to keep to herself.
• Hera Syndulla serves no narrative purpose at all. I know she has to be there, because the character was in Star Wars: Rebels and this is all about the fanservice, but she doesn’t actually do anything of any significance. “But she rescues Ahsoka from the ocean!” I hear someone cry. Yeah, right, like the star of the show couldn’t wash up on a beach somewhere. At the end of episode five, Ahsoka actually leaves her behind in another galaxy, and there is nothing to indicate she will be missed.
• This is not the first time Star Wars has showcased characters with no narrative purpose. I’m thinking of The Phantom Menace, and Darth Maul. Darth Maul, whose only contribution to the plot is to make sure Qui-Gon Jinn falls down a big hole. Which means you could replace Darth Maul with a carelessly discarded banana peel, and it would make no functional difference to the story.
• Because Hera Syndulla has nothing to do, it is necessary to fake up some conflict with the New Republic authorities for her, which mainly makes the New Republic look like the same kind of dicks as the Old Republic. She’s supposed to be a general, surely she has enough autonomy to take her personal ship and a fighter escort, to check out a piece of intelligence? Though the Republic has always had a tendency to hand out the rank of general to anyone who can successfully tie their own shoelaces two times out of three.
• Talking of that fighter escort, there’s good old Carson Teva again. I remember him from The Mandalorian, and now he’s in this one, proving, once again, that the Star Wars galaxy consists of a tiny group of important people who all know each other. In this setting, everyone would know Kevin Bacon.
• There was quite a bit of speculation about Marrok, a faceless character with very few lines, who looks tough for a bit but then dies an ignominious death. Not the first time Star Wars fandom has latched on to a character like that. No doubt, in the fullness of time, Marrok will get his own spin-off series. And I’m sure it will be every bit as good as The Book of Boba Fett.
• One positive note. After something like four thousand years of Sith Lords being shrivelled geriatrics (Traya, Sidious, Dooku), horribly disfigured (Malak, Sion, Vader) or freak shows dressed up in look-at-me-I’m-evil outfits (Maul, Nihilus)…. finally, the Sith Order has wised up to the positive PR they can get by hiring some decent eye candy. Shin Hati can turn me to the dark side any time, folks. Those eyes, man, those eyes….

Am I being silly? Probably. But it has been a salutary lesson to me, this, in what fandom looks like from the outside. This is how I feel about Ahsoka – there are people who feel the same way about the whole of Star Wars. Or the MCU. Or Star Trek, or Doctor Who, or even (gasp!) Blake’s Seven. It’s a sobering thought.

I’ve talked before about how the breakout hits (in any genre, in any medium) tend to have the “plus factor”, something which appeals to people beyond the core constituency of their fan base. Ahsoka, I fear, is sadly lacking in that plus factor. Fans of the character are visibly loving it, and good luck to them. But if you’re not a fan of the character, it’s not offering much reason to become one.