How Ahsoka Can Perfectly Bridge Two Star Wars Trilogies

For the Star Wars fandom to understand our Ahsoka theory, we need to crunch some numbers, but don’t worry–you don’t need C3PO to help figure this stuff out. In the current canon, the Empire is supposed to be more or less defeated after the Battle of Jakku, which takes place just a little over a year after The Return of the Jedi.

The Empire is now in the dwindled state we see in shows like The Mandalorian, and it secretly becomes The First Order about 17 years after the destruction of the second Death Star.

What does all this Star Wars math have to do with Ahsoka? Well, that show takes place about 10 years before the formation of the First Order, and it recently brought Grand Admiral Thrawn back into play.

The general assumption is that this high-ranking Imperial will, as he did in the original Thrawn Trilogy by Timothy Zahn, rally the Empire into a force to be reckoned with, one capable of threatening and destroying the New Republic at the height of its power.

In Zahn’s books, there are two primary ways that Thrawn makes the Empire great again, starting with him finding the long-lost Katana fleet of dreadnaughts. In the old Star Wars EU lore, this was a mighty fleet of 200 ships that had slave circuits in order to reduce the manpower needed for each ship.

But a virus infects and kills all of the crew on these ships, with one of the last of the command crew blindly jumping the Katana into hyperspace, and the entire fleet follows.

Thrawn manages to retrieve the majority of these ships, and he also finds and uses the Emperor’s old cloning equipment. This gives him a powerful new fleet and an endless (at least, until our heroes blow up the cloning equipment) supply of soldiers to fill it.

And while this Star Wars story is no longer canonical, we think Ahsoka can utilize part of it to thread a very fine storytelling needle.

As our lovely math indicates, if Thrawn is going to become a true threat to the New Republic, he needs to do so in less than a decade. That gives him time to re-establish the Empire as a galactic menace before getting killed, leaving the Imperials scattered and disorganized.

This will lead to the formation of the First Order, which transformed the remaining Imperial Remnant into a force to be reckoned with.

If Disney takes a few pages out of the Star Wars EU, they could have Thrawn discover and utilize the Katana Fleet in subsequent seasons of Ahsoka.

Furthermore, the Nightsisters can supply him with an endless array of zombie soldiers. This puts Thrawn more or less in the position of the books: he’d have a huge new fleet and the crew to staff them. 

Conveniently enough, cribbing from these old Star Wars books in such a way would also give Ahsoka an easy way to reset the status quo as needed. Perhaps those zombie troopers fall lifeless when the Nightsisters are defeated, or maybe the slave-rigged ships once again blindly jump to the middle of nowhere (something returning Jedi hero Ezra knows quite a bit about).

Best of all, we’d have a worthy bridge between the Original Trilogy and the Sequel Trilogy because we’d get to see the Empire nearly restored to its former glory and making one last major attack before being permanently defeated.

For all our Star Wars love, we don’t know what the future holds (always in motion, the Disney executives are), so we can only hope that future seasons of Ahsoka bring back the Katana Fleet.

If nothing else, this would be an easy way to make the live-action Thrawn as much of a threat as he was in the EU. That would give your average fanboy something better to salivate over than what he currently has: the fervent hope that the new manic Sithy dream girl can fix him.