Ahsoka Season 2: Are you a Jedi or just very good with swords (trailer).

Star Wars: Ahsoka is returning for a second season, and the first proper teaser suggests Dave Filoni has decided there weren’t quite enough Jedi, Imperial remnants, lost galaxies, mystical Force gods, blue military dictators and unresolved emotional issues in the first one. So he’s added some more.

The new season arrives on Disney+ on 20 January 2027, with Rosario Dawson returning as Ahsoka Tano, the former apprentice of Anakin Skywalker who has spent a considerable portion of her adult life explaining that she isn’t actually a Jedi while carrying two lightsabers, training apprentices, communing with the Force and generally behaving in a manner which might confuse the people at Jedi licensing.

The teaser neatly makes that identity crisis its central question. Hayden Christensen’s Anakin asks Ahsoka whether she is, or is not, a Jedi. It’s a fair question.

Ahsoka joined the franchise way back in 2008 as Anakin Skywalker’s teenage Padawan in the animated Star Wars: The Clone Wars. Initially greeted by some fans with roughly the enthusiasm normally reserved for discovering Jar Jar Binks has been appointed your new GP, she subsequently became one of the most popular characters created outside the original films.

She survived the Clone Wars, walked away from the Jedi Order, survived Order 66, fought Darth Vader, helped the Rebel Alliance, wandered through something called the World Between Worlds and eventually made the jump into live action, where Rosario Dawson first played her in The Mandalorian.

By the time she acquired her own series, Ahsoka had accumulated enough continuity to frighten an accountant.

The first season of Ahsoka was nominally a new television series but was really Star Wars Rebels: Season Five, Now With Actual Humans. It reunited several characters from Filoni’s animated Rebels, including Mandalorian artist and explosives enthusiast Sabine Wren, pilot Hera Syndulla and missing Jedi Ezra Bridger.

The problem was that Ezra had vanished years earlier along with Grand Admiral Thrawn, one of the Empire’s most dangerous commanders. Thrawn is blue, extremely clever and approaches galactic conquest with the quiet confidence of a man who has already read your battle plan and marked the spelling mistakes.

Season one finally found both men stranded on Peridea, a world in another galaxy. Unfortunately, retrieving Ezra also allowed Thrawn to escape back to the familiar Star Wars galaxy, accompanied by the Great Mothers, a trio of Nightsisters who make your average witch look insufficiently committed to the profession.

The heroes therefore achieved approximately half their objective, which by Rebel Alliance standards probably earns a medal. Ezra got home. Thrawn got home too. Ahsoka and Sabine didn’t.

Season two consequently begins with the board rearranged rather nicely. Ezra has reunited with Hera and is now fighting alongside the New Republic against the Imperial remnant, while Thrawn is preparing to rally what remains of the Empire. Lucasfilm says the new season will put the Grand Admiral’s threat front and centre, while the teaser promises larger battles and rather more lightsaber-related occupational hazards.

Meanwhile, Ahsoka and Sabine remain stuck on Peridea, which would already constitute a moderately serious travel problem even without the place being home to ancient Force mysteries and two extremely dangerous former Jedi.

One of those is Shin Hati, again played by Ivanna Sakhno. The other is Baylan Skoll.

Baylan was one of the strongest things about the first season, largely thanks to the late Ray Stevenson, who gave the fallen Jedi a melancholy intelligence rather than playing him as another chap who had discovered that red-orange lightsabers look excellent with black clothing.

Following Stevenson’s death in 2023, Lucasfilm faced the unhappy question of whether to end Baylan’s story or recast him. Dave Filoni consulted Stevenson’s family and decided the character was simply too important to abandon. Rory McCann, familiar to Game Of Thrones viewers as Sandor “The Hound” Clegane, has taken over the role. Filoni describes Baylan as a deliberate parallel to Ahsoka, another Jedi who became lost but travelled down a very different road.

McCann seems rather inspired casting. If you’re looking for somebody capable of standing on an alien mountain looking enormous, haunted and faintly likely to hit destiny with an axe, your recruitment process may reasonably begin and end with The Hound.

Baylan’s obsession brings us to the really peculiar part. The Mortis gods are coming back. Those who watched The Clone Wars may remember the Father, the Daughter and the Son, immensely powerful Force beings associated respectively with balance, light and darkness. Their episodes pushed Star Wars away from spaceships and laser swords and towards outright mythology, where the Force behaved less like a useful telekinetic skill and more like something ancient that might have opinions about you.

Ahsoka herself has a particularly intimate connection to this mythology. During those events, the Daughter sacrificed herself and her remaining life force helped restore Ahsoka. A mysterious bird-like creature called Morai, linked to the Daughter, has watched over Ahsoka ever since.

At the end of Ahsoka season one, Baylan stood beside enormous statues of the Mortis gods on Peridea, apparently being called towards something in the distance. Filoni has now confirmed that the Mortis gods will affect season two.

Which means casual viewers who thought Star Wars was principally about goodies shooting stormtroopers may wish to keep a notebook handy. There will still be spaceships, thankfully.

In fact, Lucasfilm has promised substantial space battles, and one familiar fish-faced military officer is coming back to help with them. Admiral Ackbar returns, with Filoni saying he will go directly against Thrawn. The production has even constructed large-scale New Republic hangar sets complete with full-sized fighters.

Presumably somebody in the writers’ room suggested Ackbar could announce that Thrawn’s attack was a trap, only to be escorted from the premises for everyone’s protection.

Zeb Orrelios from Rebels is also joining the party, further completing the transformation of Ahsoka into a live-action continuation of that animated series. Then there is Anakin Skywalker.

Hayden Christensen is back again, and the teaser shows both young Ahsoka, played by Ariana Greenblatt, training with Anakin during the Clone Wars and adult Ahsoka communicating with her former master. Christensen says Anakin will continue advising and challenging her, especially over that inconvenient Jedi question. Death has clearly improved Anakin’s mentoring technique enormously.

When alive, he tended to solve his personal problems by ignoring wise advice until several thousand people were dead. As a Force ghost, however, he appears remarkably calm and reflective. Apparently becoming Darth Vader, destroying the Jedi Order, serving an evil emperor for decades and finally dying is the Star Wars equivalent of an unusually comprehensive management training course.

The other returning players include Natasha Liu Bordizzo as Sabine, Eman Esfandi as Ezra, Mary Elizabeth Winstead as Hera and Lars Mikkelsen as Thrawn. Lucasfilm is also promising the return of Sabine’s Loth-cat Murley and, in perhaps the least surprising merchandising development since Baby Yoda, baby Loth-cats whose legs are too small to walk properly and therefore roll around instead.

Dave Filoni actually joked that he has to pay for the programme somehow. The man’s been in this business long enough to recognise a plush toy when he creates one. The interesting thing about the teaser, though, is that Ahsoka appears increasingly comfortable being the strange mystical corner of modern Star Wars.

Andor dealt with fascism and revolution. The Mandalorian became space western territory. Ahsoka, by contrast, appears determined to rummage around in the ancient machinery underneath the Force and discover what starts humming when somebody presses the forbidden button.

There are Imperial fleets to fight, certainly, but there are also vanished civilisations, Force entities, witches moving between galaxies and fallen Jedi chasing powers whose precise nature even they don’t appear entirely to understand.

Here at SFcrowsnest magazine, that is probably the bit that interests us most. Star Wars is at its best when the galaxy feels bigger than whichever Imperial officer currently owns the largest triangular spaceship.

The teaser suggests season two may deliver plenty of the familiar stuff while allowing Filoni to venture into the weirder cupboard marked DO NOT OPEN UNLESS YOU HAVE WATCHED SEVEN SEASONS OF CARTOONS. And somewhere in all this, Ahsoka must finally answer Anakin’s question. Is she a Jedi?

After two lightsabers, several apprentices, repeated conversations with dead Jedi Masters and what appears to be another season spent defending civilisation from the dark side, we suspect HM Revenue & Customs would probably classify her as one for tax purposes.

Star Wars: Ahsoka season two begins streaming on Disney+ on 20 January 2027.