The Only Thing Ahsoka’s Finale Nails Is Bringing Star Wars Horror Novel into Live-Action

The eighth and final episode of the Ahsoka TV series is finally here, and while it didn't provide the definitive conclusion many fans were hoping for, instead ending on a massive cliffhanger, it did bring some long-awaited answers.

Most notably, it clarified what Grand Admiral Thrawn's mysterious plan was all about, confirming a popular fan theory that resurfaced with the release of episode 6 two weeks ago.

The strange crates that look suspiciously like coffins on Thrawn's Star Destroyer do indeed contain bodies that will be transformed into the Grand Admiral's army of undead soldiers.

After Ahsoka, Sabine, and Ezra dealt with the Stormtroopers sent to stop them, the Nightsisters used their magic to instantly resurrect them, turning regular Stormtroopers into even more dangerous zombie soldiers, resistant to otherwise fatal blows.

All of this is a clear homage to the 2009 novel Death Troopers by Joe Schreiber, which is now part of the Legends canon.

It was about prisoners on the Imperial prison barge that came across a seemingly abandoned Star Destroyer in the middle of space.

Little did they know that it was a place where the Imperial Bioweapons Project I71A was being created and studied, until an outbreak resulted in nearly all of the Star Destroyer's crew being turned into the flesh-hungry undead.

Naturally, this led to a second outbreak aboard the prison barge, and a ragtag group of heroes, including a few characters familiar to any Star Wars fan, had to find a way to stop the infection and escape the inevitable doom.

The Ahsoka TV series took a less grounded approach to the idea, combining parts of Legends with the current canon, with the zombies now being resurrected with the Nightsisters’ magic instead of a weaponized virus.

But aside from the whole idea of zombie Stormtroopers, the show also made its undead more sentient and capable of using weapons, just like in the novel.

Previously, the dead resurrected by Dathomirian magic were much more feral and similar to the zombies seen in mainstream media — perhaps because those corpses were old and withered.

Now that fresh dead bodies are being resurrected, they have much higher intelligence and are able to not only use melee combat techniques, but can also shoot from blasters with relative accuracy (not that Stormtroopers are known for their accuracy anyway).

Disney- era Star Wars is known for recycling ideas from Legends, but this is a particularly good case, as not many fans ever expected to see such borderline horror elements in the franchise, especially in live-action.

The show hasn't been renewed for season 2 yet, and it's unclear if it can be renewed at all, as the intention may be to wrap up the story in the upcoming "Mando-verse movie," which will conclude the stories of Ahsoka, The Mandalorian, and The Book of Boba Fett.