Some people are claiming they can hear the Bendu laughing at 2:02 in this season 2 clip It isn't impossible, they would have already started recording for Season 3 by the time this aired.
Ugh, I hate to say this, but I think you're both right. Here are the cards, in case others haven't seen them yet: There's already some evidence being collected by fans to support the Ahsoka-becomes-a-wolf theory. Or it could be pointless clickbait. Rant incoming: Ahsoka becoming a wolf is beyond stupid. Ahsoka transforming back and forth to a wolf is really asinine, too. Of course we all watched the Mortis trilogy and that suggests Ahsoka dies and is reborn. I just don't want us to have to endure any more mismanagment of the Star Wars mythos as it pertains to unusually flaky usage of the Force-mythology. Ultimately, (and I know I'm in the minority here) the Mortis arc failed to provide any valuable knowledge about the mechanisms behind the Force, nor was the story entertaining. I felt it didn't feel like Star Wars either. Too trippy. The Father, Son and Daughter were hopelessly empty shells of characters and in the end everyone's mind gets wiped? Blar. Tacky. Animal Transmogrification is not Star Wars. // rant Ahsoka is such a great character at her core, not to mention her updated for Rebels adult form is awesome (hoping to see her as an option in Battlefront II as a playable character!!) but to change permanently into a wolf?? I mean, I keep thinking it's all just a wild theory and then I see Dave's grinning face and I think - oh..... no. Please tell me I'm crazy. Or do you guys all want Ahsoka to be the wolf?
Star Wars has always been a fairy tale. It's also always been an eclectic mash-up of tropes from different genres; it's a sword-and-sorcery fantasy with spaceships and robots, and it's a Western and/or samurai movie with WWII dogfights and the occasional giant monster, and sometimes it's even a talky political drama with a Ben Hur race sequence thrown in. So if they want to give us a race of actual witches with magic green smoke powers, or an enigmatic mentor creature who can turn into a storm, or a dead hero being reborn as a wolf -- sure, fine. No more silly or out of place than the rest of it. Heck, I continue to be surprised that Star Wars has never done a time travel story. It's tossed every other imaginable genre trope into the mix by now, and that's a trope that practically no sci-fi or fantasy franchise has ever resisted for long.
I'm honestly glad they steered clear of it. That said, I suppose one could at a stretch count force prophecy as a sort of time travel component, at least in the sense that information is travelling in the "wrong direction". Thankfully they keep that kind of thing to a minimum and it's almost always at least partly inaccurate or misleading and never very clear. I thought it was interesting that in Yoda's vision in TCW, they introduced fragments of things we the audience know don't ultimately happen. "Always in motion is the future" indeed.
You are right about all of that. But I still think it's dumb if Ahsoka is a wolf permanently. Can you imagine how fans would react if Luke Skywalker transformed into an owl or a loth cat? Anyway, she doesn't really look the slightest bit injured in those red cards above so maybe it's not that. I would be totally into Ahsoka being able to commune with animals, maybe even control them. Wasn't that something Ezra was particularly skilled at, communication with animals? Please, please no. Time travel will serve one purpose in Star Wars: to "connect" the SW universe with ours. No thanks. Star Wars is escapism to the degree that Star Trek is not (still deals with plenty of local issues and real-life Earth comparison) and personally, I think escapism should take us as far away from Earth and our modern era as possible. I pray and hope that it never, ever happens. Incidentally, it's interesting to note that the short scene from The Last Jedi teaser shows Rey training with a saber on the cliff - but the video is in reverse.
Honestly, I don't even know what time travel could add to Star Wars. Maybe in Legends continuity, which spans several thousand years before to a century or so after the OT, it could be a handy way to craft a crossover, but I'm glad even they never felt the need to do this.
The closest that the old EU came to time travel, that I remember, was a story line that went through several SW comics called Vector, about a female jedi that got partially possesed by some Dark Side talisman. She kept getting put into periods of stasis and showed up in different eras. She started sometime in the KOTOR era I think, then met Vader right around the time he became Vader, then she met Luke years later (but before RotJ I think), then ended up in the era of the Legacy comic meeting Cade Skywalker. Its not that close to time travel, but it is a character going through different eras and meeting various SW characters.
Fan fiction stuff for Time Travel in Star Wars (that I've used): Extremely dangerous escape method for getting away from an Interdictor cruiser resulted in being sent forward in time (to see an galaxy dominated by the Empire because the playing characters needed to stop a ship or some villain in their campaign...basically I wanted them to have reasons and motivation), They got back via a similar method and by trusting the Force to take them were they were needed. They would never try it again, since each time the ship was basically totaled, and Always in motion is the future. (This is basically the sling shot maneuver Star Trek used since the start of time travel stories) All other instances were cross-over with Star Trek ships (TOS-TMP-TUC era) and were accidents caused by failed early attempt to integrate the hyperdrive and warp drives on Federation style starships. Well aside from the wormhole-like objects to connect the two galaxies together across time and space. (Well I did have one more, but it was done for humor. In the West End Games days, a player in my group left unexpectedly, in the middle of a firefight. I decided to kill off his character in a glorious fashion by having him rush the enemy and take them all out, but dying in the process. All the dice in the universe didn't kill him. Only knocked him out. This was with two thermal detonators and several small arms explosions going off right on top of him (he was a bounty hunter). I still needed to write him off and he wasn't even wounded. So I have him flash out of existence (big white Q-like flash). Then a week or so later, in the other campaign that was set in the future (where only one of the other players was the same as the earlier group), they had just lost the airlock on the hanger and were attempting to close the breech with the emergency lever. Their roles were not cutting it, so the Force (GM) intervened. There was a white (Q-like) flash, and this bounty hunter looking guy appear, was immediately blown out the airlock, but his suit managed to trip the lever and it sealed just after he left the ship. The other players had no idea what just happened, but the one guy who had been there the previous week started laughing.)
Something like that's fine, but I definitely wouldn't push it much further than that. Certainly not having legitimate time travelling or alternate timelines or any of that stuff. The lack of these tropes is one of the refreshing things about SW. Although, I guess if you want to be pedantic about, we kind of have alternate realities now with Legends and canon material.
It's easy to say an idea sounds silly in the abstract, but what makes an idea succeed or fail is the execution. There are countless premises that people thought would be silly at first blush but that turned out to be great. Like, say, a movie that's set in a starfaring civilization but where people still fight with swords, and that spends its first 20 minutes focusing mostly on a couple of comic-relief robots before we even meet the film's hero. Sounds awful, right? Oh, there are plenty of cliched time-travel premises that could theoretically show up in SW, just as they've shown up in other franchises. Like the one where the heroes all get killed horribly but one of them gets flung back in time and has a chance to prevent it. Or the one where they're flung back into the past and have a chance to alter history for the better -- say, when Palpatine is still just the senator from Naboo and they have the chance to kill him before he begins his rise to power. Or, conversely, the one where the villains go back in time to change history in some awful way and the heroes have to go back and stop them. Or the one where a time traveler from the future comes back to warn the heroes that they have to stop their planned attack because it will have cataclysmic results. Or there's the ever-popular "trapped in a time loop" cliche. Or there's the Back to the Future Part II/"Trials and Tribble-ations" approach where the characters are flung back into the events of a classic story and have to tiptoe around them to keep them from being changed, or try to change them and fail. Given how big SW fans and creators are on nostalgia, that one would seem like a natural. (Although it probably wouldn't work in the time frame of Rebels, since who wants to revisit the prequels?) Or it could be more straight-up historical, a way to explore the age of the Old Republic, or the origins of the Jedi and Sith in the distant past. And of course there are parallel-timeline stories too, side trips into "what might have been" realities. There are just so many familiar time-travel plots that so many genre franchises use over and over, so it's kind of remarkable that a franchise like SW, which liberally homages countless other genres and classic films, has so studiously avoided this area. I actually find it kind of refreshing -- as you may have noticed, I feel a lot of time-travel premises have been done to death. Like the ever-popular "trapped in a time loop" cliche. Or the ever-popular "trapped in a time loop" cliche. Or the ever-popular... ooh, I hate that one!
Oh, I totally agree. I love a good time travel story, but it just doesn't fit in the SW Universe. Same with alternate universes and stuff like that. It just doesn't feel right for the universe, which is kind of funny when you think about it. Its ok for the Force to give birth to a kid, but time travel is too much Still, that is how it feels to me, that time travel just wouldn't fit.
Given how seemingly stagnant Star Wars technology seems to be, it almost be funny to have the heroes of one era go backwards or forwards in time several thousands years, and not really notice for a while until they go to a familiar location and everything is changed. But out in the mad reaches of the galaxy, The Rebels fighting the Sith Empire would seem just like fighting the Galactic Empire at first glance. Or a First Order stormtrooper having to operate with Clone Troopers in the Clone Wars.
It's no accident they called all that old material "legends" and that's exactly how I like to think of it. That somewhere, at some point someone told a story about the time Palpatine came back to life in a clone body, or the time Luke Skywalker made friends with telepathic pink space bunnies. They may not be "true" stories, yet they exist in some form. Personally, I'm rather fond of the notion that "The Saga of Nomi Sunrider" is an actual literary saga in the Star Wars. Whether Nomi Sunrider ever really existed would be a topic of debate similar to those surrounded the "truth" behind figures like Robin Hood or King Arthur here in the real world. Remember what Rey said to Finn? "Luke Skywalker? I thought he was a myth!" How much do you want to bet Rey heard a few of those contradictory stories from various scavengers and spacers at Niima Outpost? So no, I don't consider the EU to be some parallel timeline.
I don't know the details since I only read about it on Wookiepedia, but in one of the Legacy of the Force book Jacen Solo is able to use The Force to look back in time and watch Vader's attack on the Jedi Temple in ROTS. I'm not sure if that counts though, since I believe it was more of an astral projection kind of thing, rather than physical time travel. I just looked up the Legends book Crosscurrent on Wookiepedia and that does actually appear to feature time travel, sort of. Thousands of years in the past a Sith ship's hyperdrive malfunctions and it is shot forward into the post Legacy of the Force era.