Dave Filoni Is Not The Star Wars Savior You’re Looking For

Look, we get it. Some Star Wars fans aren’t thrilled with the direction the franchise has taken since Disney bought it in 2012. But rather than blame George Lucas for selling Star Wars in the first place, the “fandom menace,” as some call them, decided to direct all of their hatred toward Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy. Meanwhile, this particular corner of the Star Wars fandom has put Dave Filoni up on a pedestal as the franchise’s savior. He’s not, and we’ll tell you why. Dave Filoni, like some mad scientist from a ’50s b-movie, has succeeded in shrinking the Star Wars universe down to a cramped little sliver of its former self.

In Dave Filoni’s Star Wars, everyone knows each other, and they’re constantly running into one another despite the galaxy being home to billions upon billions of sentient life forms. Filoni wants both the animated and live-action Star Wars shows to function like the MCU, to the point where everything references everything else and fans have to have consumed a ton of media across different platforms to understand it all fully.Imagine, if you will, that every Star Wars is someone’s first Star Wars. Picture a hypothetical fan starting their Star Wars journey by watching Andor. Even with no outside knowledge of the rest of the franchise, the viewer would quickly figure out what’s going on, who the good guys are, who the bad guys are, and what’s at stake if the good guys lose.

Now, imagine you decide to introduce someone to Star Wars by having them watch Ahsoka. Without at least a passing knowledge of Dave Filoni’s work on The Clone Wars or Rebels. Your hypothetical viewer would be lost and desperately in need of a Star Wars cheat sheet just to enjoy the show.We’re not saying that The Clone Wars isn’t the best thing to come from the prequels. It definitely is. And obviously, a big part of that is Filoni and his original characters like Ahsoka. It’s just that everything Filoni has a hand in seems to connect back to his earlier work in a way that is alienating to new fans.

Obviously, there are die-hard fans who love sitting down to a new Dave Filoni Disney+ show and spotting all of the references to the other shows—and that’s fine. But it shouldn’t be the only option. Enjoying a Star Wars project shouldn’t require homework. The problem might actually stem from Dave being one of the very same fans described above.Filoni is so enamored with his own characters that he can’t bear to part with them. When Ahsoka was first introduced in The Clone Wars, most fans expected that by the end of the series, she would meet a tragic ending that would explain why she isn’t in the films set after TCW. Filoni could have even spun Ahsoka’s death into a tragic event that further explains just why Anakin turned to the dark side.

Instead, Dave Filoni just came up with a convoluted reason for why she disappeared for 25 years or so. He did the same thing for the cast of Rebels. It kind of kills the dramatic tension if the viewer knows nothing really bad will ever happen to the main characters, thanks to their incestuous relationship with their creator.If Star Wars does need saving, and that’s up for debate, Dave Filoni isn’t the one to save it. At least not by himself.