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Ridley Scott has called out Donald Trump for the way in which he’s handled the coronavirus crisis.

Speaking in a new interview, the legendary director/producer was asked how he thinks world leaders are handling the coronavirus situation.

“Particularly with this orange-headed fellow that’s running us, he’s a nutcase, isn’t he?” Scott told Variety, referring to the US president.

He continued: “Looking at the globalisation of the politicians that are running the world, half the time being run by idiots and the other time by despots, there are very few worthwhile ones, if you know what I mean. No one wants to go into politics. If anyone has half a brain they wouldn’t want to go into politics anyway, right?”

Also urging Boris Johnson “to limit what you can buy each time” British people go to the shops, Scott touched upon the way in which the UK is handling the crisis.

“People are buying so much food and then the food is rotting,” he said. “I mean, Jesus, Boris, get out your thinking cap, ’cause what we’re now talking on is an iPhone, a perfect coupon distributor to limit what you can buy. And that way, you have order. You must have order and calm.”

Scott’s new movie The Last Duel, starring Ben Affleck, Adam Driver and Jodie Comer, is among the projects that have halted production due to the coronavirus outbreak.

Earlier today, Tom Hardy took to social media to praise the NHS for their work during the current coronavirus pandemic.

The Mad Max: Fury Road actor shared a graphic on Instagram this morning (March 27) that read: “THANKYOU Every member of the NHS.” Also displaying the NHS website address, the graphic’s text concluded with: “YOU ARE BRILLIANT.”

Meanwhile, Mark Blum, the broadway actor and star of the movie Desperately Seeking Susan, has died due to complications from the coronavirus. He was 69.

News of his death was shared by Off Broadway theatre company Playwrights Horizons and later confirmed by actor’s union SAG-AFTRA.

Spoilers ahead.

“Et in Arcadia Ego,” the title for the two-part finale of Star Trek: Picard‘s epic first season, translates to “even in Arcadia, there am I.” The common interpretation of the phrase is that “I” refers to Death, and that “Arcadia” is a version of paradise. So a more apt contextual translation might be, “even in paradise, there is Death,” a phrase that felt ominous and mysterious going into the Picard finale, but now makes a sort of bittersweet sense. In “Et in Arcadia Ego, Part 2,” the erstwhile Captain Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) sacrifices himself in order to save all life in the universe, both synthetic and organic, entering willingly into death in order to achieve his vision of peaceful coexistence. Death, for paradise.

There are other interpretations of the title, of course, including how the utopian Coppelius Station opened a portal to literal universal destruction, or how Data (Brent Spiner) finally achieved his ultimate wish of becoming human by embracing — and even requesting — his own mortality. It’s a question with several possible answers, and one of many which was answered, more or less, by the end of Picard‘s first season. We now know the impetus for the synthetic attack on Mars, the purpose of the Admonition, and even what the show’s hauntingly cryptic opening credits sequence really means (anyone who called “Picard is going to become a synthetic” early on, well done).

However, no Star Trek series has ever definitively answered every question that it has raised, nor should it. After all, one of the great joys of watching Star Trek is in how it often requires its audience to grapple with the same complex, difficult questions facing its characters. From its very first episode, Picard challenged viewers by asking us to reexamine long-held truths that, it turns out, may not have been so black-and-white after all. Is Starfleet really good? Are the Romulans really bad? And what about all those times when Picard insisted that there was no saving the Borg — was it possible that he was just… wrong?

Still, while there are some questions raised in Picard that feel designed to defy concrete answers, there are others that feel as though the show does intend on addressing them head-on, eventually. Some of these got answered in “Et in Arcadia Ego, Part 2,” but there are others that were left dangling, possibly to be picked back up in Season 2. Here are some of our most burning questions that we hope the show answers in its sophomore season:

Where Are the Other Enterprise Crew Members from The Next Generation?

Image via CBS Interactive

Although Picard is mostly its own thing, with most of its main cast unique to this show, its first season featured a number of familiar faces as well. From Picard’s visit with the Troi-Riker family on Nepenthe, to Seven of Nine’s (Jeri Ryan) many well-timed appearances, to learning the tragic fates of more minor characters from previous shows such as Icheb (Casey King) and Hugh (Jonathan del Arco) — R.I.P. to both — we got to catch up with a number of beloved characters from other iterations of Star Trek. Even Mr. Mot, the Enterprise‘s barber, got a brief nod. (He’s on Freecloud running a hair emporium, apparently.)

However, after checking in with Troi (Marina Sirtis), Riker (Jonathan Frakes), and even Data in Picard‘s first season, it’s only natural to wonder what’s up with the rest of the main Enterprise crew, and if we’ll ever see them again. In The Next Generation series finale, “All Good Things…,” Picard’s glimpse of the future showed that Beverly (Gates McFadden) was captain of the medical ship Pasteur, Worf (Michael Dorn) was the governor of the Klingon colony of H’atoria, and Geordi (LeVar Burton) was married to the director of the Daystrom Institute, and had three kids. Did any of this really come to pass? And if not, where are they all, and what are they doing? We don’t ever expect Picard to be The Next Generation — if we see any of these characters in Season 2, it will likely only be for a brief guest spot — but it would be nice to get a status report, all the same.

Did Picard and Crusher Ever Get Married? 

Image via Viacom

One of the other intriguing tidbits about Picard’s future that we learned in “All Good Things…” was that he eventually married, and later divorced, his good friend, Dr. Beverly Crusher. By the time they reunited on the Pasteur, they were back to being merely good (if slightly awkward) friends, although Beverly had kept her ex-husband’s surname, making her the new Captain Picard.

It’s easy to shrug off the future presented in the Next Generation finale as merely an alternate timeline that never happened, except for the fact that a couple pieces of that future have indeed come to pass in Picard. Not only did the series start with Jean-Luc living at Château Picard, which is exactly where he saw himself in the future in “All Good Things…,” but he also finally developed a degenerative and ultimately fatal neurological condition that, while it was never given a name in Picard, sounds suspiciously like Irumodic Syndrome, which he was diagnosed with at the end of The Next Generation.

Plus, even without that peek into a possible future in “All Good Things…,” there was clearly something going on between Picard and Beverly all throughout The Next Generation, a slow-burn romance that never got the chance to fully ignite. We can’t help but wonder if their will-they-won’t-they attraction ever went anywhere, and if so, just how far it went.

Where Did Picard Meet His Romulan Roommates? 

Image via CBS Interactive

One of the most unfortunate dropped threads in Picard‘s first season was the story of Jean-Luc’s two Romulan housemates, Laris (Orla Brady) and Zhaban (Jamie McShane). Both former Tal Shiar operatives, Laris and Zhaban both somehow wound up working as housekeepers, bodyguards, and advisers to the former Admiral, living alongside him at his sprawling château and addressing him like family.

We know tiny pieces of Laris and Zhaban’s backstory, but not nearly enough. Zhaban’s mother was also Tal Shiar, and served as Laris’ handler when she was a young agent. She was the one who originally told Laris about the existence of the Zhat Vash. It is implied that Zhaban and Laris first crossed paths with Picard due to his attempts to rescue and resettle the population of Romulus during the supernova, but no specifics are ever given, and Picard’s two Romulan confidantes are never seen or heard from again after he leaves Earth to search for Soji. (We assume they’re still at Château Picard, eating cheese and drinking wine and giving Number One lots of good pats.) There’s so much more we want to know about Laris and Zhaban, including how they came to live with Picard, and what caused them to turn away from the Tal Shiar. We can only hope that Picard returns to those two intriguing characters, and what’s surely a fascinating backstory, in Season 2.

Why Was Data’s Face Part of the Admonition? 

Image via CBS All Access

Midway through Season 1 of Picard, we finally learned why the Zhat Vash were so intent on wiping out all synthetic life — for hundreds of years, generations of Zhat Vash had experienced the “Admonition,” a message left behind by an ancient race as a warning to those who would come after. The visions that participants in the Admonition received during the ritual were so intense that it drove most of the people who experienced it mad, driving them to kill themselves in order to get the images out of their heads. Later, we learn that this is because the Admonition was never meant for organic lifeforms at all; it was actually created by synthetics, for synthetic minds.

The synthetic Sutra (Isa Briones, who also played Sutra’s synthetic sisters, Soji and Dahj) finally gets the complete message of the Admonition in the penultimate episode of the season. Rather than a warning against synthetic life, as the Zhat Vash had assumed, it was actually communicating exactly the opposite. The Admonition cautioned future synthetics that organics would ultimately attempt to destroy them, and that they needed to be the ones to strike first, in order to safeguard their own survival.

The most curious thing about the Admonition, though, is that one of the images experienced by both the Zhat Vash and Sutra is very clearly Data’s face. It’s established that the Admonition has been around for hundreds, and possibly thousands of years, long before Dr. Soong ever created his first android in his own likeness. So how did these ancient synthetics know about Data? Could it be that the Admonition was not created by synthetics from the past, but somehow by the synthetics of the present or future? And why is Data specifically — or possibly one of his other Soong-created brothers — so important to them?

What’s Up with Dahj and Soji’s Mom?

Image via CBS All Access

Pretty early on in Picard Season 1, it’s clear that there’s something a little off about Dahj and Soji’s mom, who urges Dahj to trust Picard before she ever told her that she was looking for him, and who always seemed a little too eager to tell Soji she was working too hard and needed a break. Sure enough, it eventually becomes clear that their mom — like the rest of their memories — was merely a fabrication, designed to sell the sisters on their counterfeit humanity.

But what exactly was she? It seems most likely that she was some sort of AI who existed solely in the sisters’ comm screens, but who programmed her, and for what purpose? With the Zhat Vash determined to kill all synthetics, and the inhabitants of Coppelius seemingly unaware of Soji and Dahj’s existence, it’s curious that their “mom” seemed so intent on protecting them, and that she’d instruct them to seek out Picard. The first season of Picard assumes that Dahj and Soji were created by Maddox, and it’s possible that he was the one who created their “mom” as well, but there’s still a lot we don’t know about why she was created, or what her ultimate goal was supposed to be. We don’t even really know what Dahj and Soji were created for, why they were programmed to think they were human, or why they left Coppelius in the first place.

Perhaps their “mom” was meant to tell them the truth, eventually, and instruct them as to their larger purpose. Or perhaps she was simply supposed to help them stay alive until they could fulfill whatever mission they were sent out to do. It’s all pretty fuzzy at the end of Season 1, so we hope we get a little more clarity in Season 2.

Who Was “Beautiful Flower?” Does He Have a Twin?

Image via CBS All Access

When we finally learn about the event on the ibn Majid that led to Rios (Santiago Cabrera) leaving Starfleet, it turns out that it was a lot more relevant to Picard’s mission than anyone expected. The ibn Majid took aboard two passengers, a man who called himself “Beautiful Flower,” and a girl, Jana, whom we later learn was the twin of Sutra. After initially greeting their visitors warmly, Rios’ captain received orders from Starfleet to kill his passengers, who were actually synthetics. He followed orders, and when Rios confronted him about his actions, he killed himself, too. Rios covered it up by ejecting the bodies of the synthetics out the ship’s airlock, and erasing all trace of them from the ship’s memory.

Although we know that Jana and Beautiful Flower were both synthetics, we never learn anything more about them, other than that Jana looked just like Sutra, Soji, and Dahj. We never learn what they were doing that led to them boarding the ibn Majid, or what their mission was. Nor do we ever learn why he was called “Beautiful Flower,” when all of the other synthetics we’ve met have more traditional sounding names.  However, since synthetics are always created in pairs, that means that Beautiful Flower must have had a twin as well, and he may still be out there, somewhere. We hope that in Season 2, we learn what Jana and Beautiful Flower were doing on the ibn Majid, and possibly find out a little more about who Beautiful Flower was through meeting his twin.

What Happened Between Raffi and Her Family? 

Image via CBS All Access

While Picard‘s first season does a great job of introducing a new cast of intriguing characters and giving us just enough glimpses into their backstory to keep us invested, there’s still quite a bit we don’t know about the crew of La Sirena. Star Trek shows have always been largely unconcerned with giving us full biographies for each character, choosing instead to dole out selective pieces of information only when they become relevant to the plot, so it’s not out of the ordinary that we don’t know much about the lives of Agnes, Raffi, or Rios before they came together aboard La Sirena.

However, Picard set up one subplot with Raffi that still feels very open-ended by the conclusion of the season: her relationship with her son, Gabriel Hwang (Mason Gooding). Gabriel appears in only one episode, in which Raffi surprises him by showing up at his wife’s prenatal appointment in Stardust City, after being absent for years. Gabriel reacts angrily, especially when it sounds as though his mother is still pursuing the same “conspiracy theories” that led to her dismissal from Starfleet, as well as the rift that prompted Gabriel and his father to leave. Who his father is, we never learn, although it seems likely that his surname is also Hwang.

Gabriel is barely mentioned for the rest of the season, but introducing him as a living, breathing character and not just a name mentioned in passing makes it seem like there’s much more story to explore there. Perhaps Season 2 of Picard will see Raffi attempt to make amends again, and possibly try to forge a relationship with her grandchild in a way that she never quite managed with her son.

Who Are the Synthetics Who Set Up the Admonition?

Image via CBS All Access

The looming threat over the second half of Picard‘s first season isn’t the Romulans, the Borg, or even the secret planet (really, it’s just one settlement) of synthetics hidden away on Coppelius. Rather, it’s the creators of the “Admonition,” who rearranged an entire star system in order to get their confusing message out. For hundreds of years, the secret Romulan organization, the Zhat Vash, assumed the Admonition was set up by an ancient race of organic lifeforms to warn about the dangers of creating synthetic life, but it turns out it’s exactly the opposite: a message created by synthetics, for synthetics, complete with instructions on how to summon them using a signal transmitted along with an encoded frequency. The synthetics of Coppelius wasted no time in setting up a beacon capable of sending out this signal, and before Soji shuts it down during the climax of “Et in Arcadia Ego, Part 2,” we get a brief, terrifying glimpse of giant mechanical tentacles reaching into our universe, ready to tear all organic life apart.

The portal closes before the synthetic Cthulhu can break through, but we’re left wondering just who are these synthetics, what happened in the distant past that led to them creating the Admonition, and why — of all things — did they design their space transport to look like something out of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea meets I, Robot? Although the beacon was destroyed, at least for now, it’s hard to imagine that Picard would just introduce an all-powerful ancient synthetic race bent on the destruction of all organic life in the universe, and then just… abandon it forever. Much like the Borg on The Next Generation, the first encounter was likely just a small taste of a much more significant confrontation yet to come.

Is Narissa Really Dead?

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Anyone with even a passing familiarity with Star Trek — or really, television in general — knows that unless you see a body, death is not a guarantee (and sometimes, even when you do see a body, it’s negotiable). So although it seems as though Seven of Nine kills Narissa pretty definitively in the Picard season finale, by kicking her down a deep shaft in the crashed Borg cube, it’s hard to ignore that we don’t actually see Narissa meet her high-velocity end.

Sure, a fall like that should definitely have killed her, providing she actually hit the ground. But remember that the Borg cube is currently resting on a planet where advanced synthetics have created stadium-sized space flowers that can bring down starships, and magical hand tools that harness the powers of imagination to fix literally anything. So it’s not entirely outside the realm of possibilities that some sort of mind-blowing synth creation could have broken Narissa’s fall, and that we might see her return in future seasons. Alternatively, “Et in Arcadia Ego, Part 2” also establishes the possibility of transferring an organic consciousness to a synthetic host, which could allow her to “live” on even if her body dies. Plus, this is Star Trek, so we can’t rule out transporters, portals, alien intervention, time travel, or secret cloning, either. Basically, until we get confirmation that Narissa is gone for good, we remain as suspicious as a Federation starship on red alert, or as a Romulan on an average Tuesday.

Is Picard Really Alive?

Image via CBS All Access

On the flip side of Narissa, who died (unless she didn’t), there is Picard himself, who it turns out didn’t die… unless he did. You see, in “Et in Arcadia Ego, Part 2,” Picard finally succumbed to the degenerative brain abnormality that’s been threatening to kill him all season, and even intentionally hurried things along, trading the last few moments of his life for for a few precious seconds of pain-free lucidity so that he could talk Soji into destroying the beacon she’d created and, in turn, save trillions of lives. However, before Picard’s brain functions ceased, Agnes and Dr. Soong managed to successfully download his consciousness into the golem they’d been working on, prolonging his life in a new, synthetic body until the end of what would have been his natural lifespan, without the pesky brain anomaly. Picard wakes up looking and feeling exactly the same as before, having sidestepped death through technical innovation.

Except… did he really? One of the central questions of Picard‘s first season (and also of certain episodes of The Next Generation like “The Measure of a Man,” which was heavily referenced throughout Star Trek: Picard) has revolved around the concept of identity, sentience, and what makes someone a person. It’s been woven through plotlines, worked into speeches, and is a common theme in the books lined up on Rios’ shelf. Obviously, Picard (and Picard) comes down hard on the side of synthetic life being sentient life, so there’s really no question that the Picard that ends the season is, without a doubt, alive.

But is he the same person who died at the end of Season 1, or did that person die, and this new Picard is actually a sentient copy? When he meets Data in the afterlife simulation, Data recognizes that he is actually a copy of his former self, and is even missing one of the key memories that his former body would have experienced — his own death. One episode of The Next Generation (“Second Chances”) actually wrestles with the idea of whether a copy of a person is in fact the same person, or someone new, and seems to land on the latter. Additionally, when Data dies at the end of “Et in Arcadia Ego, Part 2,” someone comes to sit with him in his final moments, and then fades away alongside him — Picard, in his old captain’s uniform. Was he just the final hallucination of a dying android, or was that scene subtly communicating that the original Picard actually did die — consciousness and all — and this new synthetic Picard is someone different?

This may be one of those questions that Star Trek doesn’t ever plan on definitively answering, since it seems like one of those meaty philosophical quandaries that the show wants us to chew on for a while. Still, it would be surprising if Picard didn’t at least address the idea of Picard’s personhood in its second season, and while we may not get a concrete answer, we can at least hope for a lively debate.

The Rise of Skywalker concept art has officially been teased online. We have an alternate look at Billy Dee Williams’ Lando Calrissian, which is quite different from the final design. Additionally, we have a look at the ferocious space wolves that J.J. Abrams and Chris Terrio originally wanted to include. As it turns out, there are a few similarities in the concept art to what Colin Trevorrow had planned for his version of the story.

The Art of Star Wars comes to us from Abrams Books and Lucasfilm takes readers behind-the-scenes. Phil Szostak wrote The Rise of Skywalker edition and it is comprised of interviews he conducted with J.J. Abrams, along with the cast and crew. Part of the book goes into the first time Star Wars fans got to see Lando Calrissian on the big screen since 1983. The design is quite different from the Pasaana look we saw in the movie. “I wanted to get that silhouette of an upturned brim of a cowboy hat,” visual artist, Glyn Dillon, says in the book. “From a distance, when the hat flaps up, it did kind of look like that Western silhouette.”

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The Rise of Skywalker concept art also shows an early version of Lando Calrissian’s Crawler vehicle, which he uses to house the Resistance when the First Order finds their location on Pasaana. The early look is similar to an old school cassette tape and it doesn’t provide as much cover as the version that ended up in the final cut of the movie. The final version seems like the wise choice when compared to this one.

Colin Trevorrow originally wanted to have Star Wars 9 end on Coruscant, but he left the project over creative differences. J.J. Abrams and Chris Terrio came on board and wrote a new screenplay from scratch. However, at one time, they were going to end up on Coruscant too. But they were going to add some crazy looking space wolves. This would have been much different than Exegol, that’s for sure. The art features Kylo Ren encountering the space wolves while looking for Jedi Temple ruins.

Another picture from The Rise of Skywalker concept art finds Kylo Ren inspecting his Imperial army, looking very much like his grandfather, Darth Vader, while Leia Organa wasn’t originally going to be the highly respected leader. As it turns out, one version of the story found that most of the galaxy was not happy to know that Darth Vader was her father. This was way before the sequel trilogy was started and it would have been interesting to see how that would have changed the trilogy. We’d watch Leia have to prove herself. The Art of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, which goes on sale on March 31st, which is also the same day the Blu-ray edition comes out. You can check out the images below, thank to Yahoo.

Topics: Star Wars 9, Star Wars

A new poll suggests people only really want to pay around $6 for theatrical on-demand movies. The poll was taken after Universal Pictures announced they were going to release Trolls World Tour for $20 on its theatrical release date on-demand. There’s currently under 400 theaters in North America opened, so studios have been pulling their larger releases, though many are looking to see how the Trolls sequel does with this model to see if it’s worth pursuing in the future.

According to the new poll results, “U.S. adults say the on-demand price range that they’d be willing to pay for a movie currently in theaters is $5 to $8, with the optimum price being $6.” This particular poll was conducted between March 19th and March 21st, 2020 among a national sample of 2,200 Adults. The interviews were taken online with a range of different ages, races, gender, and region. While $20 does seem a bit much, one has to take into consideration the price of going to a movie theater these days.

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When compared to movie theater pricing, $20 is a steal for a family to watch a movie that is currently in theaters. However, you lose out on the theater-going experience. According to the same poll, 40% of people say they would be willing to rent a theatrical release for $20. 35% say they have less interest in doing so. 30% of those polled also said they’d be more inclined to spend that money on a streaming service like Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, Apple TV+, and others. This was more on the younger side of the spectrum, with older groups less likely to sign up.

Studios and movie theaters are going to have to figure something out in the near future since things don’t seem like they are going to change any time soon. AMC doesn’t expect to open its doors for at least 8 to 12 weeks, which could change at any time. China just experimented with opening theaters again, only to close them right back up. So studios, are going to have to figure out a new model in order to survive. The on-demand method could work, though it looks like the price point might scare some people away.

For now, streaming is the place to be. Disney+ has seen more subscribers since social distancing began and so have other services. Out of the people polled, most of them were already subscribed to one or more streaming services. As for what they were watching, comedy seems to be dominating just about everything right now, which makes a lot of sense. For now, we’ll just have to wait and see how our current events end up effecting the entertainment industry in the long run. It’s already beginning to look like the current system will change forever. The Hollywood Reporter was behind the survey.

Topics: Streaming

It’s a curious choice indeed to feature the return of fan-favorite character Ahsoka Tano on Star Wars: The Clone Wars only to relegate her to third wheel in what should be her story. Last week’s new episode, which arrived on Disney+, caught viewers up with the former Jedi after she fled the surface city of Coruscant for the dangerous depths of Level 1313. It was a fine enough introduction to the character for newcomers and a re-introduction of sorts for fans who have been waiting years for the series’ return, and it even featured a fun, action-packed sequence to jazz up the proceedings a bit. But in the follow-up frame, Ahsoka takes a back seat to pretty much everything as newcomers / sisters Trace and Rafa Martez take over.

What part the Martez sisters have yet to play in Ahsoka’s story (because it is still Ahsoka’s story, even if we have to wait for her to take up agency within it again) remains to be seen. Right now, they’re acting as physical manifestations of the philosophical debate raging within Ahsoka. Trace is a hard-working and talented mechanic who’s loyal to older sister Rafa, a devious and cunning crook who’s willing to make dangerous deals with increasingly deadly bedfellows if it means earning a quick buck. Trace, beholden to Rafa, ends up getting the two of them out of a jam more often than not, and now Ahsoka has been pulled into their schemes, for better or worse. To clarify: Trace is similar to Ahsoka’s younger, more naive and idealistic self, while Rafa represents a potential future version of Ahsoka, one who eschews the path of the Jedi and looks out only for herself. It’s just a bit boring to watch Ahsoka sit around and wait for fate to run its course.

Image via Disney+

In the previous episode, “Gone with a Trace”, Ahsoka had to decide whether or not to let Rafa sell dangerous droids to a criminal; in the end, she opted to do so in order to help Trace get a step closer to realizing her dream of escaping Level 1313. In “Deal No Deal”, Rafa’s criminal dealings get taken up a notch: She practically forces Trace to fly her precious ship–the Silver Angel–in order to run a shipment of unrefined spice from Kessel to a waiting Pyke Syndicate crimelord. That may sound easy-peasy, but Trace’s amateur flying skills, Rafa’s high-risk, high-reward attitude, and Ahsoka’s unwillingness to make a firm decision one way or another soon lands the trio in hot water.

First, they’re nearly stopped before they can even leave Coruscant, but a passing Force connection between Anakin Skywalker and Ahsoka allows them to continue on their way. Then, Ahsoka discovers non-droid slaves being put to work in the spice mines of Kessel, but opts not to do anything about it and continue with their spice-running mission. Then, a disagreement aboard the Silver Angel causes Trace to dump their shipment in a childish and nonsensical bid to protect her hard-won ship, leaving them with nothing to deliver to the dangerous Pykes and no way to barter with them for their lives. It’s all rather … forced, shall we say? The only way out of this scenario is for Ahsoka to finally do something and mind-trick the waiting buyer before they make a hasty escape.

Image via Disney+

Much like last week’s episode, “Deal No Deal” feels like an act in a story that hasn’t been fully told yet. Season 7 probably would have benefited from being told in three mini-movies rather than separate four-episode arcs, but Disney+ probably wanted that weekly bump for viewers. In other words, we’re halfway through “Ahsoka’s Return” and have yet to see a disastrous fall or heroic rise, or anything really. Clearly, her run-in with the Martez sisters and the experiences they share together are going to shape Ahsoka’s perspective, developing her into the character we know in Star Wars Rebels. And we’ve still got a lot of Clone Wars to go even after this arc, which ties into the inevitable clash between Ahsoka and Darth Maul quite nicely since the Pyke Syndicate, Maul, and Mandalore are all wrapped up in each other. So as a setup episode/arc, Ahsoka’s return is fine, it’s just not the badass former Jedi we were hoping to see.

Rating: ★★★ Good