Ahsoka is over (for now, at least it seems), and many questions remain. What are Thrawn’s plans? What will our heroes do to stop him? Just what great mysteries are out there for our other foes left to uncover? But an even sillier question lingers, too: what is up with the eyeballs on this show?
Ahsoka’s commitment to bringing the world of Star Wars animation, whether it’s Clone Wars or Rebels, to the live-action universe being established on Disney+ has brought everything from beloved characters to a litany of deep cuts and nods to decades of storytelling with it. But it’s also brought something a bit more uncanny in the form of the show’s obsession with trying to maintain the eye colors of its animated characters through effects and make up. For some it works much better than others—much better—but, just as they’ve spent the past seven weeks gazing through our screens and what feels like through our very selves, we decided to pass our own critical eye over which worked, and which didn’t.
8) Hera Syndulla
I think we would’ve lived if Hera Syndulla’s intense, viridian eyes changed color in coming to live action. I think, perhaps, we would’ve lived even if her irises weren’t as large as they were in Rebels, given the difference between what Mary Elizabeth Winstead looks like as a flesh-and-blood human being compared to, say, a stylized animated Twi’lek. But my god, this was a case of accuracy above all no matter the cost—and the cost was the vast majority of Hera’s appearances in Ahsoka being like she is permanently eyes-wide staring through the camera into your soul in a way that made me feel like I wanted to reflexively rub my own eyes the longer it went on.
7) Ahsoka Tano
We at least got more time to get used to Ahsoka’s eyes, given that she was largely unchanged between here and her appearances in The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett. But Mandalorian, at least, had the benefit of keeping Ahsoka relatively underlit in her appearance compared to much of Ahsoka—so we get to see that those blue contacts were really, jarringly blue here. Should an alien character look somewhat alien? Absolutely. But when they also look like they’re just staring and not really emoting with their giant bright eyeballs, it becomes somewhat distracting.
6) Ezra Bridger
Ahsoka and Hera were already a lot on their own, but it’s when Ezra returned looking like’d just wandered off of the set of Dune Part 2 high on Spice (instead of, y’know, regular Star Wars Spice) that Ahsoka started to take the biscuit a bit with demanding animation-accurate eyeballs. Literally shaking, buy her brown contacts, please.
5) Anakin Skywalker (Sith Phase)
Ghost-Vision Anakin briefly gets to revel in a moment of going sicko mode (Sitho mode?) in his existential duel with Ahsoka, and in the process we get an awesome callback to Anakin’s descent in Revenge of the Sith with his fiery Dark Side lenses. Bonus points for us getting to see them flare up and then fade back down when he calms down, a cool little touch.
4) Captain Enoch(’s Helmet)
We’re being a little cheeky here, sure. But there’s something very funny about a show so obsessed with weird eyes that they went and gave a stormtrooper a kintsugi helmet so hard that it gave him a creepy art deco face to boot—and haunting, gold-set black eyes in the process. Did Ahsoka’s first season really effectively capitalize on such a great design choice for Enoch and the rest of the Night Troopers? Perhaps not. But as always with Star Wars, sometimes a great design is a great design and nothing more, and this is pretty great.
I would quite like to see The Expanse’s Wes Chatham’s eyeballs underneath that helmet whenever we see Enoch next though. Criminal to deny us this.
3) Morgan Elsbeth (Goth Phase) and the Great Mothers
The Nightsisters of Dathomir and Peridea alike all know the power in a good smoky eye—quite literally in Morgan Elsbeth’s case, when she offers herself up to the Great Mothers in Ahsoka’s finale to be transformed with a similar all-black witchy eye look. Effective and creepy looking, but with intentionality!
2) Grand Admiral Thrawn
Jokes about eerie contact lenses aside, if Ahsoka’s obsession with bringing the eyes of its animated characters to life as distressingly accurately as possible, it was all in service of one character: Thrawn. And it’s perhaps moderately forgivable that most of everyone else on this list so far kind of looked a bit weird considering that with Thrawn’s blood-red eyes, Ahsoka by and large nailed it.
Keeping the visual iris and pupils instead of Rebels instead of going for the blank-red look of the old EU depictions of the Chiss, Thrawn’s eyes balanced a fine line between the alien contrast of their coloration with still feeling human enough that Lars Mikkelsen could effectively emote. Artfully done, as the Grand Admiral might have once said.
1) Huyang
Sure, Huyang isn’t an organic being. But I think he deserves a special shoutout—a crowning shoutout, in fact—if we’re talking about eyes in Ahsoka because the show did such a fantastic job with his design and keeping him emotive with one simple trick: making his photoreceptors LEDs that were capable of animating Huyang’s eyes and expressing emotion (usually disdain over whatever mess he’d just gotten into, but still).
It was a lovely translation of his design from animation to live action, it helped really sell David Tennant’s vocal performance, and unlike a lot of the choices explored elsewhere on this list, it was a decision that actually didn’t sacrifice anything in keeping some animation accuracy. Great stuff.
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