Ahsoka Dropped One Last Major Star Wars Mystery on Us

In Star Wars, nothing is ever really gone, especially if you’re a contemporary streaming show on Disney+ and are in need of another callback to the wider saga. This week’s Ahsoka finale gave us one such callback in its final moments, setting the stage for a fascinating arc—one rooted in Star Wars’ most esoteric Force mythologies.

“The Jedi, The Witch and The Warlord,” the final episode—of this season, at least—of Ahsoka, concludes with heroes and villains alike scattered across galaxies. In Star Wars’ primary galaxy, Thrawn and the Great Mothers arrive on Dathomir, ready to enact their plans to revive the Empire, while Ezra reunites with Hera to warn her and the New Republic of the threat to come. Meanwhile back on Peridea, Sabine and Ahsoka bide their time, while Shin Hati and Baylan Skoll go their separate ways. The former finds solace in strong-arming her way into leading the raiders that call Peridea home, while it’s the latter that has the most crucial discovery of all. Chasing down the power that has called to him across the show, Baylan’s arc of the season concludes with a major reveal as to just what he might be up to, with a crucial connection to the Force mythologies explored in The Clone Wars.

What Is Calling to Baylan?

He’s largely absent from the rest of the episode, but the final moments of “The Jedi, The Witch and The Warlord” see Baylan traversing the barren plains of Peridea, before the camera turns and reveals that he is in fact standing in the palm of a giant statue—amid a set of three depicting an older bearded man, a young bald one with facial markings, and the remnants of a female figure, partially destroyed. The figures depicted are immediately familiar, as so many of this show’s references to the wider Star Wars canon are, to fans of The Clone Wars and Star Wars: Rebels: they depict the Father, the Son, and the Daughter, a trio of extremely powerful, seemingly immortal Force practitioners from the Mortis realm.

Who Are the Ones of Mortis?

The Father, Son, and Daughter first appeared in trio of Clone Wars season three episodes “Overlords,” “Altar of Mortis,” and “Ghosts of Mortis,” residing in secret on the planet Mortis, a world located in the Wild Space of Star Wars’ primary galaxy—beyond the Outer Rim, in uncharted areas of space on the edges of the universe. Even beyond that Mortis itself seemingly existed outside of usual spacetime, a extraplanar realm of existence where the power of the Force was heightened and time passed differently than it does in the rest of the galaxy.

The Ones—the family of the Father, the Son, and the Daughter—were not native to Mortis, but came there so that the Father could better control the diametrically opposed elements of the Force his children personified. The Daughter represented the Light Side of the Force, embodying the totality of its traits, from compassion to self-sacrifice, while the Son represented the Dark and all its own impulses, from brute strength to paranoia. The Father then, in seeking to mete out his children’s strongest extremes, embodied a sense of balance between the two binaries. While not entirely explicit, there is at least some evidence that the Ones and Mortis itself play a part in the origin point of the Force itself, with the Father’s balance exerting itself on the wider flow of the Force, Living and Cosmic alike, across the physical plane.

Anakin, Ahsoka, and Obi-Wan encountered the Ones on Mortis after discovering an active, ancient Jedi distress signal—only to learn that this was the machinations of the Father, who, in the twilight of his life, was trying to ascertain if Anakin really was the prophesized Chosen One, and could replace him as the guardian of his children after his death. What unfolded on Mortis was instead disaster: the Son, plotting away to be free of his Father’s influence and spread his own influence across the galaxy, ultimate lead to the seeming destruction of the Ones as a unit. The Daughter perished at the Son’s hands unintentionally, sacrificing herself to save the Father, and shortly thereafter the Father killed himself to allow Anakin the chance to destroy the otherwise immortal Son, which in turn returned the trio of Jedi to the physical realm moments after their arrival.

But the Force works in mysterious ways, and the impact of the Ones was still felt even beyond their deaths. There powers were seemingly linked to another extraplanar realm in the Force, the World Between Worlds—which Ahsoka itself already visited this season—when the gateway to the realm on Lothal was revealed through a mural depicting the Ones in Star Wars: Rebels. And one of the trio in particular has an even more explicit connection to Ahsoka Tano, in particular…

How Is Ahsoka Linked to Mortis?

During the events of Clone Wars’ Mortis arc, Ahsoka finds herself corrupted by the influence of the Son in an attempt to goad Anakin into making an alliance with him. The Son seemingly killed Ahsoka after she had outlived her usefulness to him, but after inadvertently mortally wounding his sister, the Daughter transferred her own dwindling life essence into Ahsoka, reviving her and cleansing her from the Son’s corruptive influence. Since that moment, Ahsoka has found herself seemingly connected to the spirit of the Daughter through Morai, a white and green Convor (an owl-like bird) often depicted in artwork pertaining to representations of the Daughter.

Whether simply spiritually connected to the Daughter in some way or some kind of reincarnation of the being has never been made explicit before, but Morai has watched over Ahsoka from afar for years since, with Ahsoka claiming the Convor saved her life—and tying her to places of vast strength in the Force, like the World Between Worlds and even its connections on planets like Lothal and the Sith world Malachor. And now, the Convor has now seemingly crossed between galaxies as Ahsoka has, making herself known to the latter on Peridea after she and Sabine were left stranded on the world at the climax of Ahsoka’s finale.

What Does This Mean for Ahsoka’s Future?

Well, it’s hard to clearly say other than there’s some truly ancient Force weirdness going on on Peridea—and Baylan Skoll wants in on it. The existence of these statues on the world implies that before the Ones came to Mortis, they might have called Peridea home, or at least had an influence on its galaxy sizeable enough to be revered by its cultures as godlike beings in the past. Given the Nightsisters’ own extragalactic origins, it’s perhaps even possible that their dark magicks and manipulations of the Force have an origin in the Son’s corruptive powers—although we can’t declaratively say, the fact that the Daughter’s statue is the only one that has been seemingly defaced (quite literally, with its head and largely broken off and left unseen) seems to suggest that part of the reason the Father planned to take his children to a place where their powers could be more easily controlled was that there was an imbalance beforehand, seemingly in favor of the Dark Side.

But while the Ones have a history with Peridea, it’s hard to say if they’re actually what’s calling to Baylan right now—when we see him in Ahsoka’s finale, he’s simply navigating across these statues to some distant goal, not these statues in particular. Could the Ones’ potential connection to the very origins of the Force be pointing to whatever has called Baylan? Is there something of the spirit of the Son still out there influencing his desire for power, akin to how the Daughter’s spirit lives on through Ahsoka and Morai’s connection? Could their depiction herald, just as it did in Rebels, Peridea having another connection to the World Between Worlds, and a chance for friends and foes a like to traverse across galaxies back to their home?

We’re probably going to have to wait a while to find out—whether or not Ahsoka’s story will continue in either a second season or across other Star Wars avenues like The Mandalorian and eventually Dave Filoni’s “Mandoverse” movie is currently unknown, but it’s clear that this is going to be a major part of its story, even beyond Thrawn’s machinations.

Stream Ahsoka season 1 now on Disney+

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