Summary
“Practice Makes Perfect” answers an interesting question about Ahsoka and Order 66, but it’s a very short and thin episode that provides little beyond a couple of fun things to read into.
Episode 5 is the weakest short in Tales of the Jedi Season 1, at least in part because it’s so short – too short even to tell a cohesive story, really, and primarily exists to provide an answer to a nit-picky fan question that, in the grand scheme of things, could have just been hand-waved away in the first place.
After Episode 1 showed us Ahsoka as a baby, the next three episodes completed a neat arc about Count Dooku’s fall to the dark side. Here we return to Ahsoka, this time in a much more familiar time period and setting – while still Anakin’s apprentice, training at the Jedi Temple on Coruscant.
This is the episode, I think, that feels closest to The Clone Wars, partly because it involves Anakin and Obi-Wan. But it’s too trim to be character-driven or illuminate anything meaningful about Ahsoka herself. It has more to say, in a roundabout way, about Anakin.
The idea is that Ahsoka is finding the typical methods of training too simplistic. She’s slicing up remote droids left and right. Anakin thinks, justifiably, that the training exercise is pretty lousy and doesn’t give Jedi the necessary tools to defend themselves. So, he ropes in Captain Rex and the rest of the clones to concoct a more challenging exercise – she has to deflect their blaster bolts. And she can’t.
Of course, she manages to eventually, and that’s the big takeaway that the episode is building towards. In teaching Ahsoka how to do this, he inadvertently taught her how to survive Order 66. The implication is clear, but it’s also a bit… pointless? Like, it’s a nice little nod for fans, and it makes a degree of sense, but it wasn’t worth a whole episode in an otherwise excellent and worthwhile anthology.
As I mentioned earlier, it reveals more about Anakin, specifically his ability to think outside the box and possess a more realistic understanding of the challenges the Jedi would ultimately face in their peacekeeping efforts. It contrasts, interestingly enough, with Mace Windu’s depiction in Episode 3, as a conformist who was, to Dooku’s obvious dismay, rewarded for refusing to question the Jedi in any way. Anakin’s unconventional training methods don’t just imply he’s a good teacher, but also predict on some level his eventual fall to the Dark Side.
However, this is what I infer, based on my knowledge of the characters and canon. It’s not something the episode gives me because, at 10 minutes, it can’t really provide me with anything beyond Ahsoka taking a bunch of stun rounds to the face. So, a well-intentioned idea with some things to read into, but not much of an episode beyond that.
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