Every Star Wars: Ahsoka Marrok Theory Just Got Smoked

Episode 4 of Star Wars: Ahsoka, the new Disney+ show, is now streaming and did something I found extremely satisfying: It straight-up told people that their theories about who Marrok (Paul Darnell) is sucked. Whenever some masked lightsaber-wielder shows up in Star Wars, there is a huge amount of fans that are immediately convinced that this is someone they know. And they get really mad when they are wrong.

In this case, the person wearing the outfit of an imperial inquisitor was tapped to be either Barriss Offee, a character from Dave Filoni’s Star Wars: The Clone Wars animated show, or Starkiller, a popular and completely overrated video game character from Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, who is no longer considered canon. The silliest theory out there proposed that Marrok was Ezra Bridger, the Star Wars: Rebels protagonist Ahsoka and Sabine are looking for in the first place, which would have made no sense whatsoever.

I get it: It’s cool to see familiar faces and there can be payoff for returning characters, if done in the right manner and for the right reasons. It also makes the setting feel incredibly small, though, and Star Wars already has huge issues with that – just look at how much stuff is happening on the completely unimportant desert planet of Tatooine that we apparently contractually have to return to in every second Star Wars show.

Thankfully, we were spared something like that in the case of Marrok – they were not Barriss Offee, a fallen jedi who framed Ahsoka for terrorism many years ago, and they were not Darth Vader’s über-powerful secret apprentice, the edgy Starkiller. Obviously, they were not Ezra.

They were something much more awesome: a Nightsister magic-powered zombie. Didn’t have that on your bingo card, did you? When Ahsoka (Rosario Dawson) cut Marrok down during their duel on Seatos, we could hear faint, non-human screams and Marrok vanished in a plume of green smoke. This isn’t something without precedence either. Both The Clone Wars and Rebels featured Nightsister magic, which is a unique way of using the Force. It’s always signified by the use of green color.

When General Grievous and the droid army attacked the Nightsisters’ home planet of Dathomir in The Clone Wars, the sisters used their magic to reanimate their dead, trying to stop the droids with a flood of zombies – though that didn’t save them from being wiped out in the end. We’ve also seen Savage Opress, a brother of Darth Maul, being enhanced through Nightsister magic to become a powerful warrior. When he was killed by Palpatine in The Clone Wars, wafts of green smoke left his body.

It seems like these elements of the lore were combined in the character of Marrok, which is a different kind of payoff – and one that doesn’t make the universe feel smaller.

Thanks to an earlier episode, we already know that Morgan Elsbeth (Diana Lee Inosanto) is a Nightsister and can use their Force magic, so it seems like Marrok might have been her creation – either as an artificial being or in the form of a reanimated inquisitor who bit the dust at some point. That would explain the rusty inquisitor gear the masked warrior wore.

For me, this seems like the perfect outcome from what was ultimately a cool looking background character that had been blown out of proportion by the fandom in its importance.

Now, bring out your theory on who Marrok was beforehand…