Every Lightsaber Fight In Ahsoka Season 1, Ranked

There's a new "Star Wars" show centered on a Jedi, and you know what that means: lightsaber fights! They'd best be good ones, too, since Ahsoka Tano (Rosario Dawson) is an active Jedi. She's not aging and out of practice like Obi-Wan Kenobi, or utterly absent Force training like so many characters who have tried wielding the Darksaber on "The Mandalorian." Ahsoka's foes are no slouches. Baylan Skoll (Ray Stevenson) and Shin Hati (Ivanna Sakhno) may not be Jedi, nor formally Sith, but they're certainly Force wielders. The mysterious, masked Marrok, meanwhile, sure looks like a Dark Side-empowered Inquisitor.

In ranking lightsaber battles on the show, we're counting every fight that involves the use of an actual lightsaber. Only one participant need have one for it to count, but training fights without real lightsabers do not qualify, even if the training session involving Ahsoka, Sabine (Natasha Liu Bordizzo), and Huyang (David Tennant) busting some General Grievous moves was pretty cool in its own right. The show has averaged two lightsaber battles per episode; this article will update every week of the season's run to reflect the newest developments. Here is how they stand as of now.

Throughout the first few episodes of "Ahsoka," people assumed that because Marrok wore full-body armor covering their face, they'd turn out to be a surprise reveal. Galen "Starkiller" Marek, maybe? Cal Kestis? An evil clone?

Not so much. Marrok had an entirely different reason for that full-body armor, as it seems they're a gaseous being underneath it all. Like most of the Inquisitors, Marrok is literally full of hot air when it came to taking in a Jedi. Trusting in the helicopter spin that those circular sabers do, the black-clad villain fails to count on Ahsoka's concentration and her perfectly timed single slash.

That's just half of this battle, initiated when Sabine starts blasting at Shin, sensing perhaps that her foe isn't enough of a Force master to effortlessly deflect every blast from a Mandalorian markswoman. The two pairs of foes split up once the battle begins, with a major threat of jeopardy to Sabine, as we know she can't use the Force. Once Shin figures that out too, she gets cocky, without noticing that her opponent has something up her sleeve, and then in her face. Luckily for Shin, she has perfected the Batman act of dropping a smoke bomb and disappearing from the scene.

This isn't much of a fight, admittedly, but it does feature combatants and has a definite winner and loser, so it counts. In the show's second episode, Ahsoka visits the scene of the first Sabine Wren vs. Shin Hati battle, and discovers that one of the droids is still there, seemingly hiding out in the attic. That's just what Ahsoka was hoping for. Warned by Sabine's Loth-cat, Ahsoka quickly turns around and slashes the 'bot to pieces.

It's a massively one-sided battle, since the droid doesn't seem to have the smarts to grab a decent weapon first. There's just no excuse for that since this is, after all, Sabine's place, and she was more or less a career vandal during the Age of Rebellion. You just know she has gear stashed all over that place that might have allowed the assailant to last, oh, maybe 30 seconds more, and the robot had all night to search the pad. It's not as if it really stood a chance against one of the greatest Jedi ever, but it figuratively lost its head before it literally did.

Just as her master Anakin Skywalker found spinning to be a good trick, so does Ahsoka, but in a different way — spinning her lightsaber blades to cut a perfect circle in the ground. It works to let her descend as needed, or to drop a few inconvenient droids along the way.

The build-up to this fight feels very video game-ish, as Ahsoka solves a puzzle by moving objects around to reflect each other in just the right way, revealing the object she needs. But as any gamer ought to know, once you've solved the puzzle, the enemies emerge. She's prepared for all their moves, and even the lightsaber-proof magna-staffs, but she's taken off-guard that they're willing to turn suicide bomber so quickly. They should have opened with that, and they also shouldn't have announced it so loudly. Then again, in "Star Wars," enemy armies do tend be comprised of morons.

Thanks to "The Phantom Menace," we know that "awkwardly edited jump to safety on an open starship ramp in flight" is a thing that works against Darth Maul, so it suffices just fine against an explosion wave. Sure, said wave is less instantaneous than it would be on our world, but "Star Wars" has had provably different physics before now.

Sabine's monomaniacal focus on finding Ezra above all else makes her just a touch oblivious to other things, like the fact that she's probably going to cause an entirely new war. She spaces out on some of the little things, too. When you're riding a large wolf-like creature and it suddenly stops and starts sniffing and turning its head like something's about to go wrong, pay attention! That beast is a native of the planet Peridea, and attuned to its threats. Sure, Sabine was warned she'd probably be attacked by nomads, but she seems unprepared nonetheless, in a scene that echoes Luke Skywalker's assault by Tusken Raiders in "A New Hope."

As a Mandalorian, Sabine's really off her game at the start of this fight. Bo-Katan would take out these red-armored nobodies easily, but Sabine finds it most difficult to counter their staff-fighting skills — until she finally pulls out a lightsaber, that is. To be fair to her, she's probably pretty used to HK droids with unsliceable magna-staffs that counter lightsabers. When the nomads' staffs cut apart easily, it's something of a pleasant surprise. Yeah, Sabine, you could have just been doing that the whole time. At least some of Ahsoka's training stuck.

As Ahsoka prepares to take on Morgan Elsbeth (Diana Lee Inosanto), she tells Sabine and Ezra to hurry and get aboard the soon-to-depart Star Destroyer. They run up to the docking platform, only to be met with an even worse threat than resurrected Night Troopers — zombified Death Troopers! The tall, elite army builders introduced in "Rogue One" are tougher and smarter even as zombies, and pretty hard to kill. Direct blaster shots to the head aren't enough to take them down, presumably because the good troops get the best helmets.

Fortunately, at just the right time to save herself from strangulation, Sabine manages to use the Force, draw her lightsaber to her, and impale her assailant through the noggin, which proves effective. Moments later, everyone learns that decapitation works too.

The Star Destroyer seems to be getting away, so Sabine, secure in her newfound Force ability, suggests Ezra do a Force jump, and she'll push him at the same time, like a Mario-style super jump. They pool their powers, and it works. Their conversation implies Ezra will then levitate Sabine up to meet him, but as we later learn, that isn't exactly what transpires...

As Ahsoka, Sabine, and Huyang enter the Denab system to see exactly what's been going on around planet Seatos, they're ambushed by enemy starships. Shin Hati, Marrok, and some of their generic, gasmask-wearing grunts fly their space versions of what look like vintage World War II fighter planes in attack formation. Because Ahsoka and Sabine aren't quite on the same page yet, the villains disable their ship, even though Sabine manages to shoot a couple down.

It's a good thing lightsabers and the Force exist. Ahsoka may not be able to pull down an entire spaceship the way her former mentor Darth Vader can, but in nothing but a spacesuit, standing on the hull, she can use both lightsabers to deflect incoming laser fire — and slice one of the attacking crafts to pieces. She needs a little help afterwards to get back inside, but with a 360-degree rotating wing and a master of weaponry like Sabine in control, she gets scooped up quickly.

This does make us wonder, though — shouldn't Force pushes and pulls be easier in zero gravity?

Everything is "Star Wars" perfection in this scene, from Baylan and Shin arriving down the shuttle gangplank amid hissing steam just like Palpatine, to pretending they're Jedi diplomats in the mold of Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon. These are familiar tropes, but with a twist — they could just do the mind-trick when Captain Hayle (Mark Rolston) asks for identification, but Baylan and Shin prefer a showier proof of power. She draws a lightsaber; he twists the Captain's arm from a distance. They are no Jedi!

Splitting up, Ray Stevenson delivers a better version of Darth Vader's "Rogue One" hallway massacre — better because coming from a new character, it doesn't feel like gratuitous fan-service for an iconic figure who never demonstrated moves like that before. Shin goes to the bridge, and presumably wipes them all out the way Anakin did the Jedi Younglings, with a very similar cutaway moment.

In one scene, the stakes are established — at least as they stand until Grand Admiral Thrawn shows up. He'll have bigger, Palpatine-like plans, no doubt, but in terms of whom Ahsoka and Sabine will have to fight with lightsabers, we see pretty early on that these are no-nonsense killers ... if they're "well-paid for it."

Episode 5 of "Ahsoka" delivered the right kind of fan service, and of course it involved the Clone Wars.

Awakened from near-death into what is either an extremely vivid dream or the Jedi afterlife, Ahsoka encounters her former master, Anakin. He's still looking the same age as she remembered, thanks perhaps to the rejuvenation of Darth Vader's Force ghost (and definitely to ILM's digital facelift technology). Anakin demands she choose life or death and ignites his saber, but as Ahsoka parries, the fight begins as fairly basic strike and block. Then Anakin pulls his surprise move, slashing the astral bridge out from under them and sending Ahsoka into vivid flashbacks.

In the first, she fights beside Anakin in an early battle of the Clone Wars. In the second, she returns to the Siege of Mandalore, which she fought with her own Clone division after Anakin's fall. In both cases, heavy clouds of smoke allow our imaginations to fill in what even the ample special effects don't — this is live-action "Clone Wars." The fan arguably being serviced more than any other here is Dave Filoni, but he brings the rest of us with him. 

As Anakin flickers between himself and Vader, the battle returns to the astral bridge. She refuses to strike down her turned master, and he turns back and congratulates her, as she awakens back in the real world. There, like Gandalf, she returns from her supernatural bridge fight having replaced her gray clothes with white.