TWG recently sat down with Executive Producer and Supervising Director Dave Filoni, and even though we had many questions in mind, we only had enough time to ask one question.

Following the episode “A World Between Worlds,” many of us went back to the Ahsoka Tano digital cards that were released by Topps in 2016. We first asked Filoni about the correct order.

“That seems like such an obsessive thing, a correct order,” he joked, and we laughed in response. “How do you read Narnia? Do you start with The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe?”

We changed the question up slightly, and instead, asked if what’s depicted on the cards had anything to do with Ahsoka jumping into her own timeline rather than following Ezra.

In response, Filoni said, “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.”

He also mentioned that he had written different bits of exposition while they were running away from Darth Sidious and joked around by saying, “Ezra, I can’t go with you because if I do, this is really bad. No, we just need to get away from the fire!”

On a more serious tone, he added, “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.”

As Anakin’s Padawan, Ahsoka was exposed to a variety of strange and unusual situations, Mortis from Star Wars: The Clone Wars being the one that sits at the top.

“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. … 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.”

Lastly, in coming back around to the Topps cards, Filoni mentioned that he wanted to figure out where that was going visually, “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 living. It’s a very hard journey to then make real because it’s a journey you need to think about more than you actually experience, so that’s why we haven’t really experienced it.”

In regards to Ahsoka’s return, his favorite part was that even though we got answers, her story didn’t move forward past the point where we last saw her.

“You really don’t know anything more, but you know a little bit more. That really appealed to me. I pitched that whole story—that story, if you can believe it, was one episode when I pitched it. It was all supposed to fit one episode, and I started writing it, and I told Carrie Beck, I said, ‘Carrie, I can’t. I haven’t even opened up the door.’” The door being the Mortis painting at Lothal’s Jedi Temple!

Instead of one episode, it became two, but they still had to kill a lot of ideas that were originally in the mix that offered more clarity here and there, but it slowed the story down. Like the age-old saying, less is more.

At the end of the day, the cards are just images that helped him explore that story, and he humorously added that it’s like a game when it comes to putting them in a certain order.

“Sometimes, the beginning is the end and the end is the beginning, but an end is always the beginning because something ends and something else begins. It’s never just an ending.”

Listen to the entire 6-minute segment (and laugh it up with the rest of us) below:

Thank you for visiting TWG, where we provide news, reviews, and opinion pieces pertaining to the Star Wars animated shows! You can also find us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr. Send us news, tips, and inquiries here or visit our Contact page. Lastly, if you’re looking to add a few Star Wars podcasts to your playlist, check out our Podcasts page.