Hayden Christensen returned as Anakin Skywalker in this week’s episode of “Ahsoka” — yes, we mean Anakin, not Darth Vader — fulfilling the hopes of fans who hoped to see a live action version of him and his former padawan together. But the all-too-brief return left us with questions.
First and foremost: did Ahsoka just get him in Force Ghost form?
The moment came in the final minutes of episode four, after Ahsoka (Rosario Dawson) loses a lightsaber duel with Baylan Skoll (the late Ray Stevenson) and falls off a cliff. When she wakes up, she’s in a Force dimension known as the World Between Worlds, first introduced in “Star Wars Rebels.”
With a coy “Hello, Snips,” — Ahsoka’s nickname from him — “I didn’t expect to see you so soon,” the camera turns to reveal Christensen, de-aged to his most glorious “Revenge of the Sith” appearance, before the credits roll. Naturally, Ahsoka is shocked but viewers, of course, were not.
That’s because we got a healthy dose of Christensen in “Obi-Wan Kenobi” earlier this year. Not only did we get him as Vader in that series, but we also got a scene of him and Obi-Wan (played of course by Ewan McGregor) sparring — once again utilizing the de-aging technology, though in this instance, to his “Attack of the Clones” age — prior to his turn to the dark side. (Obi-Wan also has a brief hallucination of him out in the desert, but that only barely counts as an appearance).
What’s noticeable is that he definitely doesn’t look like a Force Ghost here. In every other installment of this franchise, dead Jedi appear with an ethereal glow around them. And, given the fact that “Ahsoka” takes after the events of “Return of the Jedi,” Anakin/Vader is definitely dead at this point. But uh, he doesn’t look it?
Well, as Emperor Palpatine explained in an episode of “Rebels,” the World Between Worlds “connects all of time and space, creating a conduit between the living and the dead.” Normally when we see Force Ghosts, they have entered the mortal world. Perhaps this is just how inhabitants look in their home turf.
Eventually, Ahsoka will have to return to her world (we’re presuming), a dimension in which Anakin very much does not exist anymore. Does this mean we won’t be seeing any more of him? We have no idea, but we do know there’s nothing stopping Anakin from visiting Ahsoka in the mortal plain the way Obi-Wan did with Luke in the original trilogy, and Qui-Gon Jin (Liam Neeson) did with Obi-Wan at the end of that show.
At the very least, it seems we’ll get some answers come episode 5.
