Ahsoka Is The One Star Wars Show Or Movie To Quote This Famous Opening Crawl Line
Contains spoilers for "Ahsoka" Episode 5 — "Part Five: Shadow Warrior"
"Star Wars" is responsible for some of the most iconic lines in popular cinema, from Darth Vader's (James Earl Jones) plot-altering "I am your father" in "Episode V" to Obi-Wan Kenobi's (Ewan McGregor) melancholic "It's over, Anakin. I have the high ground" during the climax of "Episode III." Episode 5 of the Disney+ original series "Ahsoka" explicitly references another famous line from the franchise, quoting part of the text crawl that opens each of the films in the Skywalker saga. In fact, "Ahsoka" is now the first "Star Wars" project to reference this line in dialogue rather than merely include it in text.
Near "Ahsoka" Episode 5's conclusion, Ahsoka Tano (Rosario Dawson) communes with a large purrgil — a flying whale capable of traveling through hyperspace — whom she hopes will take her to the distant galaxy where Ezra Bridger (Eman Esfandi) and Grand Admiral Thrawn (Lars Mikkelsen) are located. When Hera Syndulla's (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) son, Jacen (Evan Whitten), sees the purrgil for the first time, he tells her, "It's just like the stories you told me. How the whales took Ezra and the bad guys far, far away."
Jacen's line references the text that opens every numbered "Star Wars" movie, "a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away," manifesting in this case as dialogue for the first time ever in a "Star Wars" project.
Jacen quoting the opening crawl could be significant to the plot of Ahsoka
It's entirely possible that Jacen describing Ezra and Thrawn's galaxy as "far, far away" is nothing more than a simple Easter egg intended to light up the part of viewers' brains that gleans satisfaction from recognizing things. It's also possible that this particular phrasing is intended to clue viewers in to just what might be in store for Ahsoka when she presumably arrives in this new galaxy.
The original opening crawl is most likely describing the galaxy in which "Star Wars" takes place as being far away from the Milky Way, as if a storyteller is recounting the events of "Star Wars" as history relative to Earth. Keeping this same distance in mind, then, would suggest that Ahsoka will meet Ezra and Thrawn in our very own Milky Way galaxy. Some fans have floated this theory online with varying degrees of seriousness, like Twitter user @preston__tano, who added an "lol" after bringing up the possibility. User @jtimsuggs likewise joked, "Imagine if the other galaxy is Earth and Ahsoka and Sabine just end up at a Denny's in Chicago."
In all likelihood, Ahsoka is going somewhere new and not simply near Earth. Nevertheless, Jacen's line seems to be hinting at the possibility, even if that hint ultimately amounts to nothing.
Could Ahsoka be linked to the narrator responsible for the opening crawl?
If Jacen's "far, far away" line does indeed turn out to be important and not just a reference in and of itself, it's also possible that Ahsoka could become a historian of sorts, recounting the events of the "Star Wars" movies to the inhabitants of her new galaxy. In this case, the opening crawl would be positioning the "Star Wars" galaxy as far away not from our own, but from a third location home to someone telling the stories of the numbered "Star Wars" movies long after they are passed down by Ahsoka.
Should this possibility come to pass, it will implicitly retcon the nature of the original opening crawl given that George Lucas almost assuredly intended its audience to be Earthlings and not the inhabitants of an entirely unrelated galaxy. That said, canonizing the opening crawl by introducing a new galaxy where the events of the "Star Wars" movies are popular legends would open the franchise up considerably in a manner reminiscent of the current multiverse trend without actually having to introduce any parallel universes.
Regardless of its significance or lack thereof, "Ahsoka" is now the first "Star Wars" project in which a character speaks the words "far, far away," more than 45 years after they first appeared on a film screen. Whether or not this means anything for the story of "Ahsoka," however, remains to be seen.