What Happened to Ezra Before 'Ahsoka'?
Editor's note: The below contains spoilers for Episodes 1 and 2 of Ahsoka.
Ahsoka may be the titular character of the newest Star Wars show, but she’s not the only one finally getting some live-action love. Ahsoka (Rosario Dawson) together with the help of Mandalorian Sabine Wren (Natasha Liu Bordizzo) and General Hera Syndulla (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) is attempting to track down Grand Admiral Thrawn (Lars Mikkelson) and save Ezra Bridger (Eman Esfandi) before some up-and-coming Sith can beat them to the punch. This storyline is directly carried over from the end of Star Wars: Rebels where all these characters met in the early days of the Rebellion. We know Ezra sacrificed himself to save his friends and all of Lothal and that Sabine will do anything to get him back, but how exactly did all this happen in the first place?
Who Is Ezra Bridger?
To understand what happened to Ezra and all the crew of the Ghost, we first need to understand who Ezra is and where he comes from. At the start of Rebels, Ezra (Taylor Gray) is an orphan — alone, hotheaded, and selfish. He’s lost his parents, is living alone on Lothal, and cares for very little other than himself until he meets the crew of the Ghost and becomes a part of the early Rebellion. Among the crew is the captain, Hera Syndulla (Vanessa Marshall), her husband, the Jedi Kanan Jarrus (Freddie Prinze Jr.), their Lasat muscle, Zeb Orrelios (Steve Blum), the rebellious Mandalorian we catch up with in Ahsoka, Sabine Wren (Tiya Sircar), and last but certainly not least, the beloved droid with one of the highest canonical kill counts (yes, really), Chopper (Dave Filoni). With this crew, Ezra not only finds a purpose but a family. Over the course of the show, we see Ezra grow up, literally, from a young teen who cares for no one to a Jedi willing to sacrifice himself to save everyone he cares about.
Ezra, like many Star Wars protagonists, is Force-sensitive. As he discovers his purpose with the Rebels, he also finds his talents as a Jedi becoming a padawan to the initially reluctant Kanan (who’s probably the best master you could ever hope for). Like Ahsoka, Kanan rejects a lot of the Jedi’s teachings; instead, he tries to teach Ezra as best he can but without the strict anti-attachment diatribes and carefully maintained sense of distance from normal people. They’re trying to save normal people, they are normal people, and they love and feel just like normal people do, and it’s through this teaching and this family Ezra finds himself a part of that he grows not only into a powerful force but a wonderful person.
What Happened to Ezra in 'Star Wars Rebels'?
The end of Rebels coincides with where the Rebellion as we’ve seen it in the original trilogy really kicked off. Like Rogue One, the show was concerned more with telling intimate stories of individual actions rather than a grand sweeping narrative of massive heroes. With Ahsoka’s help as the agent Fulcrum, the crew of the Ghost and a number of other Rebel cells are able to challenge the authority of Grand Admiral Thrawn. His army has occupied Lothal, and they take the battle to him to try and finish things once and for all. Only Ezra knew ahead of time they would only be able to win by taking extreme measures. Like all the Imperials, Thrawn was cunning and vicious; there was little he wouldn’t do to meet his goals, so Ezra had to do the same.
While the Rebels deal with the battle at large, Ezra heads to Thrawn’s ship to take him down. He is even tempted by Darth Sidious (Ian McDiarmid) with the possibility of getting his parents back, but he dismisses the temptation because of his love for his new family and his dedication to their cause. Earlier in the show, we'd been introduced to creatures called Purrgil. They’re essentially massive space whales with tentacles that live in deep space and possess the ability to travel through hyperspace. The crew of the Ghost had run into them before and Ezra had been able to connect with them through the Force. In the Battle of Lothal, he uses them as his Hail Mary.
Ezra calls on the Purrgil to destroy Thrawn’s fleet, which they do magnificently, before calling them to his location on the bridge of Thrawn’s ship. Here, Ezra makes his final goodbye while Hera, Sabine, and the rest beg him not to go through with it, but Ezra has made up his mind. The whales wrap their tentacles around the ship and launch it, Grand Admiral Thrawn, and Ezra Bridger into hyperspace headed for deep space. None of them have been seen or heard from since.
How Much Time Has Passed Since the End of 'Star Wars Rebels'?
The Star Wars timeline can get a bit messy at times, but we can actually figure this out pretty simply thanks to some choices made for Ahsoka. The last scene of Rebels is actually recreated in Episode 2 of Ahsoka, right down to Sabine poking Ezra’s cheek. Ahsoka and Sabine meet up at the mural of the crew Sabine had painted on Lothal, as Sabine tells the audience she knows Ezra is still out there somewhere and will find him. Seeing how this has become the main plot of Ahsoka, it’s likely we’ll finally get to see Ezra (and Thrawn) again soon. So with the shows literally overlapping in the timeline for this scene, how much time has actually passed since Ezra disappeared?
Short answer: Possibly 10 years, if the timeline was probably retconned a bit. (And given that Sabine now has a history as a Jedi-in-training, that seems likely.) Long answer: It’s clear time has passed at the end of Rebels, but given how little Sabine and Ahsoka have changed in age in the animated version of the scene, it probably wasn’t nearly a whole decade. It’s definitely after the war ended, but it feels a bit earlier in the timeline. Rebels ends in the year 0 BBY, the year the first Death Star exploded, but we’ve seen Ahsoka in shows like The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett that all take place nearly a decade later — and Ahsoka takes place after her appearance on those. Given how Sabine seems to have aged up a bit from her late teens as she was in the cartoon, it’s likely they’ve adjusted that a little to suit the new extended timeline. It’s been nearly a decade since Ezra sacrificed himself, but now his friends are going to get him back.
New episodes of Ahsoka premiere every Tuesday night on Disney+.
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