The Big Picture
- The Night Troopers in Ahsoka are a new addition to Star Wars in live-action, and they are scarier and more unsettling than your average pop culture zombies.
- The Night Troopers keep fighting even after being killed and are not interested in brains or spreading their virus, showcasing their level of danger and loyalty to their purpose.
- The concept of zombies has appeared in Star Wars before in different forms, such as necromancy performed by the Nightsisters and a hive mind controlling dead Geonosians in Star Wars: The Clone Wars.
When Grand Admiral Thrawn (Lars Mikkelsen) was introduced back in Episode 6 of Ahsoka, many people immediately noticed that his army didn’t look normal. Maybe it’s the patched-up armor or the fanaticism in their chants, but they seem extremely odd and even a little unsettling. Now, the season finale confirmed everyone’s expectations of seeing those weird Stormtroopers — appropriately dubbed Night Troopers — rise up from their deaths even after being cut down by the lightsaber blades of Ahsoka Tano (Rosario Dawson), Sabine Wren (Natasha Liu Bordizzo), and Ezra Bridger (Eman Esfandi).
This is something completely new to Star Wars in live-action, we’ve never had actual zombies show up in the Mando-Verse before. The Night Troopers are particularly terrifying, because they are different even from other iterations of zombies seen in other media, like the books, video games, and animated series. We had already seen an undead person in Ahsoka before, but it wasn’t as impactful — remember Marrok, the last Inquisitor? When Ahsoka defeated him in their duel, green smoke came out of his armor and he just faded away, and then she went on to fight Baylan Skoll (Ray Stevenson) in that same episode, so we didn’t give it that much attention. But the Night Troopers are even worse than what happened to Marrok.
‘Ahsoka’s Night Troopers Are Scarier Than the Average Pop Culture Zombie
When the Ahsoka season finale starts, the main question is: is everybody going to make it out of Peridea and back to the main Star Wars galaxy? That’s what drives the Light side protagonists, as well as Thrawn, the Great Mothers of the Nightsisters, and Morgan Elsbeth (Diana Lee Inosanto). These two sides are also trying to get in the other’s way, so when Ahsoka, Sabine, and Ezra infiltrate the Nightsister stronghold, Thrawn dispatches a platoon of Night Troopers to intercept them. When he does so, we imagine that it’s not going to work for long, we’ve seen Stormtroopers be easily beaten by the Jedi before. What makes the Night Troopers formidable, though, is that they keep fighting after being killed.
They’re not dead from the start, though. When Morgan Elsbeth dispatches the volunteer soldiers, Thrawn asks her if they “were made aware” of what was going to happen, and the Nightsister confirms that they “were honored to make the sacrifice.” So the theories that the whole Night Trooper army was made of undead soldiers is debunked, but they do know they are being sent to their deaths, and that’s part of what makes them so creepy. We can understand someone dying for someone else or for a cause — Rogue One: A Star Wars Story is all about that — but allowing their corpses to be reanimated and keep on fighting after being killed? That’s a whole new level of fanaticism.
There’s yet another creepy aspect to the Night Troopers that separate them from your average pop culture zombies. When they rise up, we see the same green smoke we saw when Marrok died, and a green spark is visible in the visors of their helmets. They don’t waste any time in resuming their chase for the three Jedi and, and when they engage in battle, these zombies prove to be a much tougher fight than when they were alive. They’re not your average, slow and sluggish zombie, they’re armored, undead soldiers. Fighting is their purpose, they’re not after flesh or anything of the sort. They don’t want to bite anyone and are not trying to spread some deadly virus, they are following orders, and that’s what makes them most terrifying. Even after dying, their orders are their purpose. In this case, it’s to stop the Jedi, and they will do so regardless of how many times they’re struck — a dead entity has no limits of pain and suffering, so loosing a limb, for example, is nothing but a scratch.
There were plenty of signs that zombies (or at least similar concepts) would play a role in Ahsoka. First, when Marrok goes out in a puff of smoke after being defeated by Ahsoka. Then, when we see the eerie design of the Night Troopers. Captain Enoch (Wes Chatham), for example, literally wears what appears to be a funerary mask instead of the usual Stormtrooper faceplate. Both of these are tied to the Nightsisters’ powers, and they have done this before, too. Even though Thrawn’s endgame doesn’t involve flesh-eating zombies, it does rely heavily on the idea of reanimating the dead as a way to bolster Imperial trooper ranks in order to reclaim the galaxy from the New Republic. It’s a nice touch that he wants his Troopers to be aware of what they’re getting themselves into, as loyalty has always been one of the defining traits of his Imperial leadership. Still… In character? For sure. Creepy? Most definitely.
Zombies Have Shown Up in ‘Star Wars: The Clone Wars’ and the Expanded Universe
Although the Night Troopers are a debut for zombies in live-action Star Wars, similar undead beings have appeared previously in the franchise in at least three other ways over old Expanded Universe (now Legends) novels, video games and animated series. The one we’ve seen the most of is actually pretty similar to the one in Ahsoka, and is also performed by the Nightsisters with the help of her magick. One of the key abilities of the Nightsisters over their previous appearances in Star Wars: The Clone Wars and the game Jedi: Fallen Order is necromancy, the power to commune and conjure the spirits of the dead. They can even go beyond, actually raising them, as we’ve seen, but this is also the first time we see them do so with beings who were not previously Nightsisters. They often use their power over dead bodies as a way of protecting and defending their homeworld of Dathomir, and that’s what happens in Ahsoka, too, in a way. There are very few Nightsisters left since they were victims of a genocide carried by the Separatists back in The Clone Wars, and the Great Mothers’ alliance with Thrawn is a way of restoring their old glory. The crates they loaded onto the Star Destroyer Chimera are oddly human-shaped, and probably carry beings that will eventually be reanimated in Dathomir.
Also in The Clone Wars, another use of zombies happens during the Second Battle of Geonosis arc, when Anakin Skywalker (Matt Lanter), Obi-Wan Kenobi (James Arnold Taylor), and Ahsoka (Ashley Eckstein) have to fight a hive mind that’s taking control of dead Geonosians and even infects some of the Clone Troopers. This part is closer to the most popular approach of telling zombie stories, but the confirmation of this concept as being part of Thrawn’s plan is reminiscent of another Star Wars story, one of the old Legends continuity — Joe Schreiber‘s 2009 novel Death Troopers. This one is closer to how zombies are depicted nowadays, as being victims of viruses that reanimate their bodies and turns them into flesh-eating monsters. In the story, an abandoned Star Destroyer fell victim to one of such viruses and is located by the crew of an Imperial prison named The Purge. The result is more than five hundred people turning into zombies, among Imperial officers and prisoners.
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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.
