During the final minutes of The Rise of Skywalker, the struggle against the Sith and Palpatine culminated in Rey calling on the Jedi who came before her including Ahsoka Tano who many assumed had passed on into the Force, but not so according to Dave Filoni who explains how Ahsoka could easily still be alive at the time of Rise.
“I have to wonder with Star Wars fans, they seem to watch the movies but they don’t take all the lessons. They deal a lot in absolutes, which is very much a Sith thing. I remember in The Empire Strikes Back Luke speaking out through the force to Leia. Vader also does this at the end of Empire Strikes Back. There’s no absoluteness that these people are dead. I mean, some of them we know are dead.”
Luminari Unduli, Anakin Skywalker, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Yoda, Kanan Jarus, Aayla Secura, Adi Gallia, Qui-Gon Jinn and Mace Windu all spoke to Rey and – apart from Windu who was attacked by Palpatine but his body never found – all confirmed dead. Despite this, Filoni doesn’t really consider the film to have any bearing on what he plans on doing with Ahsoka.
“It doesn’t really have any big implications to what I’m doing with the character, to be honest, I just thought it was a really fun thing. I thought J.J.’s instinct to be so inclusive with all these various elements of Star Wars and characters [was great]. And I thought it would be a great thing for the actors involved to be a part of something that was just really this celebrating moment of the Star Wars saga. So I didn’t think of it in a literal story [way]. The film, to me, is like a different area.”
