“Ahsoka” Director Explains Marrok Reveal

The fifth episode of “Star Wars: Ahsoka” has just been released, but people are still talking about last week’s events with the reveal regarding the masked figure Marrok.

SPOILERS AHEAD FOR “AHSOKA” UP TO 1×04

Marrok’s identity was a hotly debated issue for several weeks in the fandom, and that didn’t really change with his death last week when the character was slashed and disintegrated into green smoke.

Many have argued about what that means, most taking it as confirmation he’s a ‘Nightbrother’, but even so it raised more questions than it answered. It turns out, that episode’s director himself isn’t sure either.

Peter Ramsey, who helmed the fourth episode, tells IGN that even he was initially unaware of there being any smoke coming out originally and explained how that came to be:

“It’s funny. Because I don’t think there was a puff of anything originally. There was none of that detail. They are pretty tight-lipped about a lot of those details. They don’t like a lot of info going out. [Dave Filoni] may have known that all along and could’ve said, ‘We’ll make it something else’ [in post]. But what I remember is him saying something like, ‘Yeah, it’s kind of mechanical. He’s not entirely human.’

So I was like, ‘What is Marrok? Is he human? Is he kind of more machine than man, like how Darth Vader used to be described sometimes?’ And that was kind of what we were going on. I was like, ‘It would be great if something could burst out of him.’ Like, what would be his version of antifreeze or whatever it is? Because it couldn’t be blood.

So in the final analysis. I don’t know what it’s supposed to be, but I think the assumption we were going on was, ‘Well, he’s in this partially mechanical suit.’ Or part of him is mechanical or whatever, so there’s some sort of non-human stuff that’s bursting out of there at the end. I don’t know what it might have been.”

One thing that is certain though is that the scene itself is inspired by a scene in Akira Kurosawa’s “Sanjuro” in which Toshiro Mifune dispatches a challenger with one stroke and a spray of blood: “I mean, yeah, basically I completely ripped it off.”

It’s not clear if future episodes of the Disney+ series will explain more about Marrok or if it will just be dropped as the series shifts to other antagonist targets.