Ahsoka Tano’s Underworld Journey | Dave Filoni’s art for Topps cards shown during Ahsoka’s Untold Tales panel, at Celebration Europe 2016 (x)
DAVE FILONI: I did a series of images for Topps […] [They] start to explore visually, metaphorically, what the end [of the second season of Rebels] is about. They’re all just red and black. And white. So you could stare at them for hours and try to figure out… what does it mean. […] [The third and fourth pictures] are the most revealing, the most interesting I think, because this starts to get into really… this kind of psychological subconsciousness, what does this journey into the underworld mean? Because it’s obviously Ahsoka in that doorway [at the end of Twilight of the Apprentice], what does that mean? I know. And so this is going to tell you a little bit. If you stare at these… It’s not like if you stare at them, the images become something else, it’s not a magic trick, it’s just to try to understand the metaphors and the symbolism and the meaning of this journey, which is a very classic journey. (x)
TWG: The Ahsoka Topps cards. […] Is there a correct order or…
DAVE FILONI: That seems like it’s such an obsessive thing, a correct order. It’s like, how do you read Narnia, do you start with The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, or you know, the correct order… […]
TWG: Well, does that have anything to do with why Ahsoka went in her portal rather and not with Ezra?
DAVE FILONI: No, because the reason why she doesn’t go is that she’s savvy enough to know that you can’t. You can’t just leap out of your time. And, unfortunately, in the middle of this running, I had different bits of exposition, but it’s like, ‘Ezra, I can’t go with you, because if I do, this is really bad!’ It’s like no, we just need to just get away from the fire. Sometimes you write this stuff, and then you stage it, you watch her running and you’re like… no, when I’m running from fire, I’m just like, ‘I can’t go! I’ll see you when I get back!’ and you have to distill it down to, okay, that’s very real, because if she stops to have exposition she could burn up in a blue ball of flame.
So [Ezra] doesn’t get the explanation, but I tried to portray her – I talked to Ashley [Eckstein], she doesn’t know what this place is, but she has kind of instincts about it because she’s older and has experienced more – and she’s been on the weird side of things before, especially. She’s like, oh this is like [Mortis], I’ve been down that road before. And she knows that you can’t break those type of continuities, for the lack of a better term. And so she’s pretty much figured out that, ‘I have to go back where I came from, you have to go back from where you came from.’ Because you can’t just… If she leaps in there to service the Rebellion where Ezra’s at now… I get that that might be a good idea as a good person, but it’s also cheating. Because she doesn’t know what she’s skipping, and who then she’s not going to help, or what she has to do independently of all that.
So the only things that were a constant were that she went down that staircase, and the Topps cards were just me trying to explore visually… where are we going with that, and I tried to do it all in a very… symbolically, suggestive way, and there are lot of elements in those images that are trying to be evocative of a transformative nature in a journey, which is kind of a symbolic journey, of a transition from death back to life. Going through an underworld is a theme in a lot of mythology, having a great wound, coming to an understanding that challenges you and your makeup, and having to walk through the world of the dead into the world of the living. It’s a very hard journey to then make real, because it’s a journey you need to think about more than actually experience, and so that’s why we haven’t really experienced it. My favourite part about it was just leaving her where we last saw her, so you know she’s in the door, and you really don’t know anything more, but you know a little bit more. That really appealed to me. (x)
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