Editor’s note: The below contains spoilers for Ahsoka Episode 5.
Ahsoka delivered another great piece of Star Wars in this week’s episode, “Shadow Warrior”, and much of what makes this such a great story is the return of Anakin Skywalker (Hayden Christensen). He meets Ahsoka Tano (Rosario Dawson) in the World Between Worlds after her defeat in a duel against Baylan Skoll (Ray Stevenson). He’s there to finish Ahsoka’s training, and things take dramatic turns as they travel through different points of their shared past.
The premise of the episode is Ahsoka coming to terms with her master’s legacy, an issue that’s been heavy on her shoulders for a long time, and there’s no way for her to overcome it without confronting the duality of Anakin’s character. The name of the episode is a clear reference to him, who may have been one of the finest Jedi ever, yes, but was also responsible for so much death and destruction after he became Darth Vader (James Earl Jones). The series does a great job of bridging the gap between these two personas, showing the kind of nuance that only creator Dave Filoni has been able to do so far.
Are Anakin Skywalker and Darth Vader Really Two Separate Entities?
The debate around Anakin and Vader is very interesting and has been going on for a long time — pretty much since we learned they are the same person when The Empire Strikes Back first came out. Anakin was supposed to be this great and noble warrior of whom Obi-Wan Kenobi (Alec Guinness/Ewan McGregor) always spoke so highly — how could he be the same person who’s the franchise’s worst villain? James Earl Jones himself didn’t believe it when he recorded the lines. And lying about this wouldn’t come as such a surprise, since we’re talking about someone as despicable as Darth Vader, right?
But the very way he’s been written and portrayed in the Original Trilogy already gives us an idea that Darth Vader and Anakin Skywalker couldn’t really be the same person. Maybe different personas, but not necessarily the same. At the end of The Empire Strikes Back, this person seems even sad about seeing Luke (Mark Hamill), his son, run away from him. In Return of the Jedi, when he saves Luke, we even get to see who he is beneath his mask, right? And that can’t be Vader. Vader is the black-clad machine-like brute who chokes people, not that scarred and frail man. It’s always difficult for us to assimilate that our favorite characters can be bad, and villains are especially fascinating and alluring. We believe there’s hope of redemption, even for them, and Vader got his — or was it Anakin?
Deep down, Darth Vader is the mask that Anakin Skywalker wears to allow himself to be terrible – he just happens to have gotten a literal one, so we forget who we’re looking at. In the Prequel Trilogy, George Lucas reworked his vision and made it pretty clear by showing us this character saving Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid), killing younglings at the Jedi Temple, and facing his old master in Mustafar while wielding a blue-bladed lightsaber. When we look at that man, we see Anakin Skywalker, but the truth is that we just divide him into two personas because Darth Vader wears the armor.
How Has Star Wars Dealt With the Anakin and Vader Personas in the Past?
If it’s difficult for us to face that Anakin and Vader are the same people, imagine how it is for the characters who are related to him. In fact, it’s difficult even for storytellers to grasp, and we can see that by the way these two identities are portrayed and referred to in the Star Wars stories that have been coming out since Revenge of the Sith. Usually, Anakin Skywalker is treated as someone who passed away a long time ago and, because people miss him, is seen as a saint, while Darth Vader is just awful.
A character as complex as Anakin Skywalker isn’t easy to write and is even harder to portray (and this is meant as a compliment to Hayden Christensen) because he has lots of different aspects to himself. He’s the friend that would do anything to help you, even the worst things you could imagine — but would you like him to? That’s why writing him is so hard, so using the absolutes is easier: Anakin is good, Vader is bad, and the armor plays a pivotal role in making things easier for us to assimilate.
But even without his armor, it may be difficult to write him. In Obi-Wan Kenobi, we see him struck by Obi-Wan, and a chunk of his mask is torn off. “You didn’t kill Anakin Skywalker; I did” is the sort of thing someone would say to purposely hurt someone else. Of course, this line is supposed to make his redemption in Return of the Jedi even more impactful, a shocking statement that makes evident how deep this person has fallen, to the point of seeing himself as fractured — but we’ve always known Anakin to be hurtful, too, especially when he didn’t get what he wanted… and he didn’t, then. So choosing these absolutes is not just easier to write; they sound more impactful and shocking, too, but it’s still a failure to grasp the complexity of the character.
How Does ‘Ahsoka’ Succeed in Embracing Both Anakin and Vader?
What’s interesting about the scene in Obi-Wan Kenobi is that it was inspired by a very similar scene in the animated series Star Wars Rebels. There, Darth Vader finally gets a shot at fighting Anakin’s old apprentice, Ahsoka Tano herself (voiced by Ashley Eckstein). Towards the end of the duel, she strikes him in the face and tears off his mask, revealing familiar eyes (and Matt Lanter‘s voice) behind it. Just like this week’s episode of Ahsoka, that scene was written and directed by Dave Filoni, and that was the first time the line between Darth Vader and Anakin Skywalker was portrayed as something blurred — or even nonexistent — since the Prequels.
Filoni is the filmmaker to best understand the ambiguity of Anakin Skywalker and Darth Vader since George Lucas himself, and a lot of that has to do with how we perceive them ourselves. The key element that usually serves as this line is the armor. When Ahsoka chops off a piece of it in Rebels, we get a glimpse of Anakin because that’s who’s truly there (unlike in Obi-Wan Kenobi, where we just get what people perceive as Vader without a mask).
The key element is the armor, which usually serves to “protect” the Anakin persona from being perceived as bad. Ahsoka sees the armored shape of Darth Vader only covered in fog and in the distance, but that’s all removed when he gets close to her, because it’s the only way she’d let him. That’s a typical trait of an abusive personality, and he does talk down to her in that episode, too, for example. Unfortunately, Anakin is an abusive person, and that’s a hard lesson for Ahsoka: she can let go after being struck down by Baylan Skoll and remain in the water, or understand that she doesn’t have to take everything that Anakin was as her own.
When Filoni removes the armor in “Shadow Warrior,” it forces Ahsoka to stare into Anakin’s changed eyes and face the fact that that’s her master, too. He and Vader are the same person, but that doesn’t mean she has to inherit every single thing about his legacy. Anakin has as many great things about him as he does bad, and Ahsoka can accept the former and take note of the latter without incorporating it. He was a great friend who’d do anything for the people he loved, including burning the whole galaxy down, but that’s not who Ahsoka is. Every master trains their apprentices to be better than them, and that’s Anakin’s lesson.
New episodes of Ahsoka premiere every Tuesday on Disney+.
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Khushi Patel is a science fiction author who lives in Austin, Texas. She has published three novels, and her work has been praised for its originality and imagination. Khushi is a graduate of Rice University, and she has worked as a software engineer. She is a member of the Science Fiction Writers of America, and her books have been nominated for several awards.
