Anakin’s Second Arc
The Ahsoka trailer got me thinking about this proposal I wrote after Anakin’s big episode in season one.
TL;DR: What if Dave Filoni has been building a sneaky second arc for Anakin Skywalker?
I count myself as one of the harshest critics of the prequel trilogy, but even my calloused heart is warmed by Hayden Christensen getting another chance to play Anakin. Seeing him bring the wisdom and heroism I find so absent in the movies is like finally seeing the Anakin I pictured during the fallow years between Return of the Jedi and The Phantom Menace.
The crazy thing though… This appearance made me wonder if Anakin’s story truly ended with his death.
I’ve never been able to consolidate The Clone Wars as part of the prequels’ story. That disconnect doesn’t just come from the interquel nature of the series forcing it to jigsaw its way into the timeline, but because there a certain flavor to Dave Filoni’s Star Wars series that contrasts with George Lucas’ Star Wars.
There are points and arcs that feel almost like a current running through the ocean that is Star Wars. Like there could be two stories of Anakin Skywalker that dance around each other without ever quite touching.
On one level, we have Lucas’ story of a young boy who becomes a heroic Jedi, falls to the Dark Side, and is redeemed by his son. On a second, hidden level, there’s Filoni’s story of how Anakin’s journey fulfilled the prophecy of the Chosen One and brought Balance to the Force.
Lucas says that Anakin fulfilled the prophecy by destroying the Emperor and ending the Sith. Maybe it’s the jumbled storytelling order—with not knowing there even was a prophecy until years later and Rey defeating Palpatine (but for real this time!) again thirty years later—but I can’t watch Vader turning against the Emperor as anything more than an act of love from a father. And I don’t think it NEEDS to be more than that! It’s beautiful if that’s all it is! It’d be weird if there was an entire prophecy that was built on this one, last minute emotional turn from a fallen Jedi.
But then we have the Mortis arc. Which introduced the craziest shit from Filoni until the World Between Worlds came along. I mean…what the hell is this story? It adds an entire mythology that is so tonally different, I don’t even know if it belongs in Star Wars. Now there are Force gods who exist outside reality and are archetypes of the Light and Dark Sides and can shapeshift, but they can be cowed by the sheer might of Anakin because…why? Because he’s the Chosen One? Because he’s meant to ascend to the level of the Father? It’s nuts, but it makes more sense as an end to the prophecy than turning against Palpatine.
Except it isn’t an end. Forgetting that it would be anticlimactic as hell if his purpose as The Chosen One had been fulfilled between Episodes II and III, at the end of the Mortis arc, the Father says that Anakin isn’t done yet, and he will bring Balance to the galaxy.
So Anakin exits the Filoni Current and goes on through Revenge of the Sith to Return of the Jedi. He dies and is able to become one with the Force as Qui-Gon, Obi-Wan, and Yoda have before him. And then we come to “Shadow Warrior.”
Anakin’s clearly progressed from where we saw him at the end of RotJ. Switching between Anakin and Vader, between Light and Dark Sides, would seem to be the definition of finding Balance. His ability to direct Ahsoka through events in her history implies a command over the World Between Worlds akin to the Mortis gods’ grip on their plane of reality. It all suggests that Anakin’s death in the physical world was an ascension where he truly became “more powerful than [we] could possibly imagine.”
My hunger for more of this “final stage” Anakin is probably clouding my better judgement, but fuck if I don’t want to see the in-between stuff that would have happened from RotJ to “Shadow Warrior.” I want to see Filoni continue to patch continuity together and canonize Anakin and his Balance as a guiding hand through to the sequel trilogy. Seeing him like this, I care for the first time about his status as the Chosen One and how Palatine’s return invalidates Anakin’s purpose in the story. For the ultimate madness, take it a step further: what if Anakin helped Rey and her generation of Jedi to bridge the gap between Light and Dark?