'Ahsoka' Season 2 Will Keep Spamming Us With Hayden Christensen

Just to drive home how great I am at pop culture predictions after I made myself “The Batman: Part II will be cancelled” guy, I also didn’t think Ahsoka Season 2 would see the light of day. The Star Wars series on Disney+ have rapidly become a parade of diminishing returns that already saw its first knifing with The Acolyte. Christ, Skeleton Crew is lying dead in a ditch somewhere.

Well, thanks in no small part to Dave Filoni becoming the Chief Creative Officer at Lucasfilm, Ahsoka Season 2 is charging full steam ahead. Filming started this week, and Hayden Christensen confirmed at Star Wars Celebration Japan that he is coming back to work the nostalgia saber again. In fact, he’d like to keep those sweet Vader checks coming, please.

Via Comic Book:

“There’s a lot that we could still explore with Vader,” Christensen told ComicBook about Anakin’s dark side. “I think from where we left off, after Episode III, and everything that he has to reconcile after he’s trapped in this new version of himself, there’s just a lot of very rich stories that we could still tell.”

In fairness, Christensen’s return in Obi-Wan Kenobi went over huge with fans, and I’ll be the first to admit that his flashback scenes in Ahsoka were a delight. Ariana Greenblatt’s pitch-perfect casting as a young Ahsoka did a lot of the heavy lifting, but Christensen’s Anakin was a key component. I’m a jaded old fool, and even I was grinning from ear to ear.

That said, Ahsoka couldn’t resist making things weird. The show seemed very determined to champion Anakin’s status as a great Jedi like fans saw in The Clone Wars animated series. (Dave Filoni loves his babies.) Naturally, that runs into the very unavoidable wall of Anakin becoming Darth Vader. A villain whose origin literally begins with mowing down unarmed children. George Lucas specifically filmed Christensen walking into a space daycare and firing up his saber to drive home the heel turn. Sure, Vader ultimately rejects the Dark Side and destroys the Emperor to save his own son, but that didn’t unkill them kids.

I will die calling the Youngling scene the worst creative decision in the entire franchise, and I sat through all of The Book of Boba Fett, so that says something.