I’m always suspicious of time travel stories. Too often, they open up a big can of worms that even great T.V. shows can’t reseal. They tend to either involve paradoxes and bits of convenience that we just have to accept as part of the time-bending shenanigans. But most of all, they create problems for both plot and drama.
If you can just go back and change some explosive event in the past, why not travel back even further to a more boring one that lets you avoid the conflict altogether? And more to the point, why do any of your actions matter if they can simply be undone down the line? Time travel risks breaking your universe and weakening your ability to tell meaningful stories.
So I was worried, naturally, when Star Wars Rebels introduced what amounts to time travel in “A World Between Worlds”, thereby allowing the show to revisit two of its most heightened and dramatic moments. It’s a choice that connects this series with the past, present, and future of the Star Wars franchise, while also creating the opportunity to rewrite these major events in the show’s own history. But fraught though these time-tampering opportunities may be, Rebels approaches them in a way that is not only satisfying in terms of mechanics and continuity, but which exists as an episode-length rejoinder to the idea of “let’s just fix the past” that’s otherwise inextricably a part of the DNA of time travel stories
The episode begins with Ezra entering the eponymous “World Between Worlds”, a weigh station connected to different places and times across the galaxy. The design of this unusual realm is instantly striking. It’s composed of a series of transparent paths, looplining and intersecting across the vast reaches of space, and connecting to a series of doorways, empty recesses soon to be filled with visions of places Ezra has been or could go. There is, admittedly, a sense that this place is a rejected Mario Kart track, but Rebels’s design team manages to make the setting distinctive and appropriate as a place of wonder and mystery.
"The air conditioning bill for this place must be insane."
Much of that sense of awe comes from the cacophony of voices that echo across the realm. As Ezra makes his way through this place, trying to understand it, he hears whispers and snippets of lines spoken in the Original Trilogy, the Prequels, the post-Disney films, The Clone Wars series, and Rebels itself. The paths are coming together, as Kanan explained, and Ezra finds himself at their point of intersection, in a rush of pleas and hopes and affirmations, feeling the presence of so much collected in scattered bits at this one central marker.
Ezra’s in the nervous system of the galaxy, one that allows him to step into moments past and present, and change their course, answering questions the fans have had for what feels like ages, and intervening in old events to give familiar faces a second chance.
That’s right boys and girls — Ahsoka lives! Ezra follows an owl implied to be imbued with the mystical presence of the Daughter, and intercedes at the moment where Ahsoka is fighting Darth Vader from Season 2’s “Twilight of the Apprentice.” He pulls her into this mysterious, interwoven realm and away from the prospect of danger and doom that faced her in the temple on Malachor.
And therein lie my concerns. As heartening as it is to see Ahsoka in the flesh again, poised to help the Rebels win the fight against the Empire, as hopeful as it is to see her spared from dying at her former master’s hands, this place and what it’s capable of opens an avenue for the show to cheat, to take back any of the big choices it makes (or that any Star Wars property makes), and thereby leave the choices themselves a little less important or meaningful, the ending points a little less final, than they could or should be.
Has no one in this galaxy heard of handrails?
But “A World Between Worlds” has an ace up its sleeve. As tantalizing as it is want to see more and more of Ezra and Ahsoka in this unique space, the episode also takes time to show what’s happening in the normal world. Much of that is centered on an interrogation between a captured Sabine, and Minister Hydan, the Imperial functionary who’s attempting to decipher the symbols on the Jedi temple in order to help find Emperor Palpatine a way in.
Rebels brings in Malcolm McDowell to play this part (marking the second time he’s portrayed a bad guy trying to get into an interstitial realm in a star-based franchise), and his dynamic with Sabine is outstanding. Sabine is blasé, boastful, and challenging under interrogation, and Hydan is, when pushed, harsh and cruel like we’d expect from an Empire stooge. But at some point in the proceedings, both seem to have a genuine interest in piecing together the clues, in understanding what those images mean, in ways that helps the audience understand the symbolism at the same time the characters do.
But Darth Sidious is trying to understand the symbolism too, and that’s what creates the threat for Ezra and Ahsoka in the other realm. It is an absolute thrill to hear Ian McDiarmid, once again growling, chanting, and cackling his way through an attack on our heroes. The Emperor’s presence both creates the immediate threat and provides the narrative stakes for the episode.
He gives incantations and blasts an engulfing fire toward Ahsoka and Ezra, trying to use one or both as handholds to pull himself into the World Between Worlds. He seeks to break the barrier that keeps him at bay, to gain admission as Ezra did, so that he can use this place to remake the past to suit his needs, to change past and future events to empower himself even further, to become a god who can alter what’s come before and what’s yet to come however he sees fit.
"Fear my evil enchanted bird bath! Mwahahaha!"
In that, Palpatine provides the contrast and counterpoint to the lesson Ezra learns in the same locale — that the past shouldn’t be changed, no matter how much it might hurt you or tantalize you.
Once Ezra figures out that he was able to save Ahsoka, he tries to do the same for Kanan, his departed master. He runs to a distant portal where he hears the tones of his master’s voice. He conjures the image of the man who guided him through so much at the moment when he died. And Ezra aims to save him, to stop him, from being bathed in fire and taken away from a young apprentice who feels lost without him.
It’s the kind of choice a Sith would make. It’s the kind of choice Anakin made, intending to defy the prospect of death because he couldn’t bear the thought of being separated from someone he loved. But it’s a choice that Ahsoka, and in his own way Kanan himself, steers Ezra away from, because it’d be a choice antithetical to how a Jedi views the universe.
When Dave Filoni, who wrote the episode, crafted the finale of The Clone Wars series, he wrote an arc centered on a Jedi’s acceptance of death and on the inevitability of certain events, but also on the good that could be wrung from each of these seemingly unfortunate things. One of the overarching themes of Star Wars — from Obi Wan and Yoda passing gently into the next world in the original films, to Luke embracing both the mistakes and good graces that led him to the same point in The Last Jedi — is an acceptance of our histories and the notion that one’s path must end, a reality and bit of providence that the Sith do anything they can to avoid.
What it looks like when you stumble into an internet argument.
It’s a lesson Kanan himself had to learn. While we’ve only had hints of his personal history here and there, it’s clear that Kanan felt he strayed from the right path in his youth. Much of his adventures with the crew of the Ghost, and his training of Ezra in particular, were efforts to make up for his own past and ensure that Ezra didn’t walk down the same path he did.
But the past handful of episodes showed a different version of Kanan, one who seemed at peace, who accepted his path and accepted his death, because both led him to, as Ahsoka puts it, the moment where he was needed the most.
That is, in the end, what Kanan wanted. It’s what the Force guided him toward. In the shadow of this realization, Ezra acknowledges that as much as it pains him to have lost his master, the same way it pains Ahsoka, they both need to let go, because to do anything else, to tamper with the past or undo Kanan’s choices to better the world with his death, would violate the precepts that his master believed in, the Jedi way, of finding that moment, rather than running from it.
So Ezra leaves this other space, just in time to prevent Palpatine from gaining a foothold and using this realm to do untold damage to the galaxy. And it’s just in time, as his exit, combined with the disruptive activities of the rest of the Ghost crew, lead to a daring escape as the temple on Lothal collapses into nothing.
"Yes, hello, I'm calling about whether the insurance on my temple covers 'Act of Jedi.'"
Therein lies Rebels’ fix for mechanics and continuity. It took a combination of the right moment, the right team, and the will of the Force to put Ezra into that realm, a feat which even the most powerful force-wielder in the galaxy could not accomplish on his own. It’s thus unlikely that any random hero or antagonist could slip in and threaten to remake the past once more.
But more than that, “A World Between Worlds” does the unthinkable — it tells a story about time travel that is philosophically opposed to the usual reasons for turning back the clock and changing the future. It uses the prospect of those galaxy-shifting, life-saving changes to, instead, foster a sense of acceptance of one’s path and one’s end, both hopefully leading you to the moment when the world, and the people you care about, need you the most.
It’s a work of television that indulges in the excitement and possibility of visiting any moment and rewriting it to meet the immediate needs of our heroes, only to show those same heroes turning away, relenting, accepting that such a change would only make them feel better for a moment, and then make the world worse and violate the ideals they live by. It shows them accepting a personal loss for the greater good they were trained to believe in and fight for. Ezra and Ahsoka both lose their masters here, but they stop a great evil in the process, and find a purpose and a principal, worthy of the good men they followed before both were consumed in flame.
