WARNING: Potential spoilers for The Rise of Skywalker below. Proceed at your own risk.
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During her battle on Exegol with the Emperor towards the end of The Rise of Skywalker, Rey closes her eyes and hears the voices of several Jedi in her head. Yoda, Anakin, Obi-Wan, and others call out to Rey to give her the strength she needs to rise up and conquer the Sith evil once and for all.
One of the Jedi voices Rey hears is from Ahsoka Tano, which may have left some fans wondering if Ahsoka was no longer alive given past instances in the Star Wars saga where fallen Jedi commune with the living through the Force. But Dave Filoni suggests fans pump the brakes on that line of thinking with these comments via io9:
“I have to wonder with Star Wars fans,” Filoni said. “They seem to watch the movies but they don’t take all the lessons. They deal a lot in absolutes, which is very much a Sith thing. I remember in The Empire Strikes Back Luke speaking out through the force to Leia. Vader also does this at the end of Empire Strikes Back. There’s no absoluteness that these people are dead. I mean, some of them we know are dead.”
Ahsoka will be heavily involved in Season 7 of The Clone Wars animated series on Disney+ and the last time we saw her character on screen, she was getting ready to embark on a journey with Sabine Wren to search for Ezra Bridger at the conclusion of Star Wars Rebels. Obviously both of these animated series take place well in advance of the events of Episode IX, but does the conclusion to the Skywalker saga have any impact on Ahsoka’s future storylines? Filoni doesn’t believe so.
“It doesn’t really have any big implications to what I’m doing with the character, to be honest,” he said of the moment in the film. “I just thought it was a really fun thing. I thought J.J. [Abrams]’s instinct to be so inclusive with all these various elements of Star Wars and characters [was great]. And I thought it would be a great thing for the actors involved to be a part of something that was just really this celebrating moment of the Star Wars saga. So I didn’t think of it in a literal story [way]. The film, to me, is like a different area.”
