Summary
“Gone with a Trace” kicks off the long-awaited story of what Ahsoka did after leaving the Jedi Order, laying the narrative groundwork and offering a great action sequence.
This recap of Star Wars: The Clone Wars Season 7, Episode 5, “Gone with a Trace”, contains spoilers. You can check out our thoughts on the previous episode by clicking these words.
After surprisingly electing to kick off the seventh season of The Clone Wars with a spruced-up four-part arc focusing almost entirely on the Clone Troopers, “Gone with a Trace” is in many ways what fans have been waiting for since this final truncated outing was announced: the story of what Ahsoka Tano (Ashley Eckstein) was up to between leaving the Jedi order and showing up in Star Wars: Rebels.
For the poor folks not already in the know, Ahsoka was Anakin Skywalker’s Padawan during the Clone Wars, and she’s easily the show’s greatest contribution to the canon. At the end of The Clone Wars Season 5, she became disillusioned with the Jedi Order after being framed for a bombing and hunted by the people she had come to trust, and while her name was eventually cleared, the ordeal convinced her to discover who she was outside of the Order.
That’s where we find the character in Star Wars: The Clone Wars Season 7, Episode 5. She’s adrift in the underbelly of Coruscant on a knackered old speeder bike that drops her right into the path of Trace Martez (Brigitte Kali), a lower-level mechanic with no love for the Jedi and dreams of escaping her hardscrabble life in the slums with her sister, Rafa (Elizabeth Rodriguez).
What we have in “Gone with a Trace”, then, is some classic story setup; the mysterious outsider trying to keep her past a secret while also being compelled to help out, and a grubby underworld affair about owing money to the local wrong-un, Pintu Son-El (Bobby Moynihan). We’re reminded once again how despite the focus on the Jedi throughout Star Wars media, most of the regular working folk in this universe either hate them or, as you get further along in the timeline, don’t think they ever existed in the first place.
What this all means for “Gone with a Trace” is that Ahsoka has to help out Rafa and Trace with some sneaky Force usage in a couple of impressive-looking action sequences superior even to those in the first four episodes. That’s perhaps the biggest takeaway of Star Wars: The Clone Wars Season 7, Episode 5, since, it being only the start of a multi-episode arc, there isn’t much to write home about narrative-wise. There is a testy atmosphere between Ahsoka and Rafa, and the expectation that Ahsoka will clear off just as soon as her bike is fixed. It’s up to the next three episodes to take that setup somewhere interesting.