‘Ahsoka’ Teaser Trailer Appears To Show That Dave Filoni Is Retconning ‘Star Wars Rebels’

John F. Trent |

Aug 11, 2023

Natasha Liu Bordizzo as Sabine Wren on the character poster for Star Wars: Ahsoka

A new teaser trailer for the upcoming Star Wars: Ahsoka appears to reveal that series creator Dave Filoni will be retconning his own Star Wars Rebels series.

The official Star Wars Twitter account shared a new teaser trailer that shows Ahsoka Tano training Sabine Wren how to wield a lightsaber.

The trailer sees Rosario Dawson’s Ahsoka appearing to tell Wren, “Concentrate. Take in all that is around you,” as Wren faces off against Shin Hati in the middle of a forest. It then cuts back and forth with Ahsoka and Wren sparring with wooden lightsabers and the battle against Hati.

A new threat will emerge. A new hero will rise.

Experience the two-episode premiere of @AhsokaOfficial, a Star Wars Original series, streaming August 23 on @DisneyPlus. pic.twitter.com/S95dbS2NkJ

— Star Wars (@starwars) August 11, 2023

This brief training montage appears to indicate that it’s actually Ahsoka Tano who will train Sabine Wren on how to wield a lightsaber. However, Kanan Jarrus had already taught her how to wield a lightsaber in Star Wars Rebels Season 3 Episode 15 “Trials of the Darksaber.”

In that episode, Kanan and Ezra Bridger take Sabine to a remote location on Lothal, where Kanan begins to instruct Sabine how to use a lightsaber with a wooden training saber.

As the episode progresses, Kanan shows just how untrained Sabine is as he mercilessly parries and counters all of her attacks. He eventually tells her, “Every mistake is a limb lost. The blade is never at rest.”

Kanan then delegates the training to Ezra who is instructed to walk her through the forms, which he does. Sabine doesn’t take too kindly to Kanan’s methods of instruction and the two become frustrated with each other.

However, Kanan would eventually change up his tactics and began training Sabine with the Darksaber rather than the training saber and worked through the various forms that Ezra had taught her as Kanan attacked.

By the end of the episode, Kanan’s new training tactic was able to breakthrough the mental block that was holding Sabine back and he declared, “You’ve come a long way in a very short time. Where you go from here is up to you. But know this family will stand by you no matter what you choose.”

By the next episode of Star Wars Rebels,”Legacy of Mandalore,” Wren used Ezra Bridger’s green lightsaber to disarm and defeat Gar Saxon, who had taken the Darksaber as his own.

Not only does this new teaser seem to indicate that Filoni his retconning his own work with having Ahsoka train Sabine Wren, but it further fuels the theory that Sabine Wren will attempt to become a Jedi or some kind of pseudo Jedi under Ahsoka Tano.

The series’ first trailer hinted at that possibility when Sabine informs Ahsoka, “You never made things easy for me, Master.”

After Wren calls Ahsoka master, the trailer cut to a scene of Sabine watching a hologram of Bridger saying, “As a Jedi, sometimes you have to make the decision no one else can, but I’m counting on you to see this through.”

The idea that Dave Filoni would retcon his own work should not come as a surprise to anyone who has followed his comments about Star Wars canon.

Speaking with ScreenRant at Star Wars Celebration this past April, Filoni said, “People get into all these debates of what’s canon, what’s not, and sometimes forget just the special nature of telling a good story and creating great characters.”

“Part of the fan debate in the past always used to be what’s canon, what’s not, because there was George and we always knew George was the canon. I look at it very broadly and just say, there’s just a love of Star Wars. Because I knew George, I worked with him. None of us are going to be him, but we love the galaxy he created and we are very much a product of it, growing up with it,” he concluded.

What Filoni misses here is that the Star Wars universe does indeed have a history and when you violate that history or you change the history you ruin the immersion of viewers.

J.R.R. Tolkien explained this idea in his essay On Fairy Stories, “What really happens is that the storymaker proves a successful ‘sub-creator.’ He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is ‘true’: it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside.”

“The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed,” he continued. “You are then out in the Primary World again, looking at the little abortive Secondary World from outside. If you are obliged, by kindliness or circumstance, to stay, then disbelief must be suspended (or stifled), otherwise listening and looking would become intolerable.”

“But this suspension of disbelief is a substitute for the genuine thing, a subterfuge we use when condescending to games or make-believe, or when trying (more or less willingly) to find what virtue we can in the work of an art that has for us failed,” Tolkien asserted.