Not much has happened so far in Star Wars: Ahsoka, the latest Star Wars show on Disney Plus. Sure, Sabine and Ahsoka are reunited, and Sabine has resumed her training. But up until episode 4, the pair had mostly been talking about finding Ezra and Thrawn, and not actually doing it. Episode 4 shook things up in some pretty unexpected ways, including bringing in one of Star Wars: Rebels’ most complicated and important pieces of lore.
[Ed. note: This post contains spoilers for Star Wars: Ahsoka episode 4.]
After some prolonged fights between Sabine and Shin, and Ahsoka and Marrok, and Ahsoka and Baylan, Ahsoka gets herself kicked all the way off a giant cliff and seemingly killed — at least at first.
Immediately after that, Sabine grabs the map but finds herself face-to-face with Baylan and does the only sensible thing she can: gives him the map in exchange for passage to Thrawn (and Ezra). But before we can continue with the quest to find our missing characters, the show cuts back to Ahsoka, who wakes up on a bridge of light seemingly in an area of darkness that looks like space.
As with almost everything in Ahsoka, this new space should be instantly familiar to Rebels watchers as the World Between Worlds. For everyone else, here’s what that means:
What is the World Between World in Ahsoka?
The World Between Worlds (also known as the Vergence Scatter) is kind of like a pocket dimension that exists adjacent to the real world. It’s a Force-connected plane of existence that connects all places and times in the world through a series of doors. These doors lead to all of the moments that have ever happened or will ever happen.
The World Between Worlds is the creation of the Rebels series, where Ezra Bridger accessed it in order to save Ahsoka from the past. After he saved her, the pair find that Darth Sidious is attempting to access it using their combined Force powers, but they successfully repel his attempt.
The dimension is a strange and mysterious part of the Force that only few Jedi have researched, leaving it still somewhat mystical and unknown. One of those unknowns is just how many ways there are to access it. We know that the painting of the Mortis gods, painted on the Jedi Temple at Lothal is technically a portal to the World Between Worlds, though based on what we just saw in Ahsoka, it seems that isn’t the only way inside.
Is Ahsoka dead?
With all that ridiculous, complicated, and somewhat vague lore in mind: Ahsoka is probably not dead. Considering we’ve already seen her get saved via the World Between Worlds before, it seems pretty likely that could happen again.
The real question this time, however, is how exactly it happened. All we can do on that is speculate for now, but it seems possible that Anakin may have had something to do with that, considering he’s the person that Ahsoka meets when she finally comes to at the end of the episode.
Why is Anakin here, and is that really Hayden Christensen?
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The plot reason that Anakin shows up here is a mystery until at least episode 5, and will be until the show reveals its answers. But the real-world reason that Anakin is here is so that the two characters can finally meet in live-action, something fans have been clamoring for since the earliest days of the animated Clone Wars series.
As for whether or not that’s actually Hayden Christensen, it is — he’s given the prestigious “and” credit at the end of the episode’s credits. But it’s not 2023 Hayden Christensen, at least not exactly. Instead, it appears to be the same strange zombie technology they’ve been using to de-age Mark Hamill for Luke Skywalker, or any of the other characters that Star Wars has gone back in time for over the last decade.