#and bring in DBB for half an hour to record generic lines for the Pabu invasion

[heyclickadee]

Okay, but all of this.

I ran out of room in the tags 😅, so I’m putting this here: One thing I wanted to touch on is the Ahsoka thing. The treatment of Ahsoka’s “death” at the end of season two of Rebels didn’t strike me as odd when I was watching through the first time as that show was coming out, because I wasn’t super attached to Ahsoka at the time, but, looking back, it’s weird. Ahsoka goes out in this huge self-sacrifice, we don’t see her die but they sure imply she dies off screen, there’s a little thing you see at the end that may or may not be her or her ghost, Ezra’s devastated, we get sad looks from Rex, a sort of funeral march version of her theme, the season ends, and then…nothing.

Ahsoka doesn’t get a funeral. The only person who gets close to saying she died is Tarkin (“Now that Vader has eliminated the Rebel’s Jedi leadership”). She hardly ever comes up, and when she does it’s usually in a, “We could have asked Ahsoka about this Jedi thing,” capacity. Rex, her oldest friend, doesn’t talk about her. Her death doesn’t motivate anyone—in fact, almost all of the conflict in the front half of the season is driven by the other things that happened in the season two finale, Kanan’s blinding and Ezra falling in with Maul—except maybe as subtext. We don’t even know for sure that everyone believes Ahsoka is dead; there’s even one moment that kind of indicates Ezra’s holding out hope that she’s not.

The show basically ignores the big Ahsoka-death shaped elephant in the room until two seconds before Ezra is pulling a very alive Ahsoka into the world between worlds. And contrasting that with the other important deaths in the series, mainly Kanan, and then Mira and Ephraim Bridger, where they actually go out of their way to hammer home how dead they are, make the deaths integral pieces of the plot, include entire episodes of processing, and do the work necessary to allow the audience and the characters to move on, it ends up being obvious that Ahsoka was never actually meant to be dead at all. She’s MIA until she comes back and the show treats her like she’s MIA, not like she’s dead.

And the reason I keep coming back to Ahsoka on this is that despite being the implausible resurrection franchise, the list of main Star Wars characters with planned fake out deaths which fake out the audience in addition to the characters is pretty short, and they all kind of fit this pattern. (For a truncated example, check out KB in Skeleton Crew. We get Captain Wrong dead certain she’s going to die before she even crashes, KB doing her best to fix things and find a way out while her moms and her friends say she can do it, horrified reactions when she crashes, aaaaand then twenty seconds later the story completely forgets about KB and how she just “died” until about ten minutes later when the kids are like, “Oh! KB!” and they rush off to find her alive).

To me one of the biggest pieces of evidence that Tech is alive and planned to come back in a future installment is that, were I to be trying to write a fake out death, I cannot think of anything else I could add short of literally showing him alive (at which point it's no longer a fake out.)

Give extensive development to his ability to rapidly think his way out of anything and stay calm in stressful situations? Check, we have Faster showing that he can make these plans in seconds while in the middle of driving and he actually says outright that the second one is a skill of his.

Give survival foreshadowing? Check, just check out the extremely blatant hold on him after Romar's "I'm a survivor" line. And again in Faster - it'd actually be an excellent place to put some foreshadowing of his possible death, have him win but in a way that causes a crash or something of that nature, making it so that his gamble worked but was a close call, rather than an easy survival for him. Instead we get others doubting Tech could survive but he not only does, but he does it easily. We have lines from Phee implying that there's more to come - her first line, better late than dead, is one that is an odd intro to her as a character but works perfectly if taken as foreshadowing for later. And her oddly specific 'don't go running off with any pirates or smugglers' in their last scene together is another one where it just feels primed for a comeback later on. His final conversation with Saw also is an interesting aspect here - Saw is the one that is leaning hard on 'sacrifice is necessary for the greater good' while Tech tells him to work smarter and take your enemy down from within. If you're going to have a character sacrifice himself, why put him at odds with the concept of sacrifice immediately before? There are just a lot of pieces that make the most sense if they're foreshadowing something to come with him.

Open plots that aren't yet resolved? Check on multiple angles. He has Phee of course - and they could have resolved that by either giving more closure in their last talk together or by having more of Phee in season 3, allowing her even one scene to talk with Omega about moving past something that she will never get closure on. This leaves their dynamic hanging wide open, but not in a way that uses the lack of closure for plot development. They also introduce a theme of culture and memory with him, which isn't allowed to go anywhere prior to him dropping into the mists and isn't developed in season 3 in his absence, where nothing is done in his memory and his goggles being placed in the Archium isn't even about remembering him it's about Omega not wanting to leave Pabu behind. AND, going back to Faster yet again, Cid drops that she owes him one, which hasn't come back. Cid is still out there, and that favor could still be called in if Tech comes back, otherwise it's an empty line that doesn't connect to anything. All of these were opened in season 2, so they're not just leftovers from changed plots.

Ambiguous method of death? VERY Check. Falls are one of the classic fakeout death methods because as long as we don't see the results anything could have happened between the moment we lose sight of Tech and when he would have impacted the ground. Did he manage to get on top of the rail car and use it to break his fall? Did he manage to find an alternate landing place and use wind resistance to angle himself towards a softer landing? Is the armor protecting his head and torso shock resistant enough to allow for survival? Could be any of those or more, we don't know because we don't see it. TBB also puts a lot of effort into making sure you know falls aren't that fatal. Here's a great post from @heyclickadee going into the WIDE variety of falls that would have logically been fatal but that are wriggled out of through the series. They could have given him some kind of injury that makes it less likely he'd survive, but nope despite being blown off the railing he's totally fine and able to maneuver out of it. He even flips into the skydiver's position before we lose track of him, which is the first thing you're supposed to do if you find yourself in freefall.

No body? VERY check. They picked a method of death that lets them not show a body, and then they go out of their way to make sure no one can look for a body. Omega's hurt so they can't go back and look for him. She passes out in front of a body but it's not his. Hemlock claims all he found is goggles in a moment where he has every reason to lie to them. They could have had Hemlock recover the body and show it under a sheet in his lab. Omega passes out in front of a body, that could easily have been made to be Tech to drive home that he's gone. There's a lot of options there! They took none of them.

Nobody ever gives him a funeral or has a mourning scene outside of the initial shock moment? Check. And, in fact, the only time he's even referred to as dead by anyone it comes from the mouth of Crosshair, the guy that's in this show primarily to be wrong about things. Every other time he's brought up, it's a moment of sadness and moving on. This is an easy fake out trope, because it allows the grief to linger without taking up a ton of screentime for something you're ultimately going to reverse. (See: Ahsoka in Rebels)

If I wanted to add to this, if I wanted to make it MORE clear that he was coming back without just saying so in words or literally showing him alive, I don't know what could be added. Front to back it's fully loaded with everything that goes into a fake death. And nothing that typically signals a real death. You can't rely on real life statistics for long falls because it's not real life, it's fiction. And by all fictional standards, Tech never died and it's just a matter of when and where they'll reveal him. (I'm still putting tentative money on it being sometime between the ending shot of the tree and the epilogue, to justify why they pulled his goggles out of the Archium rather than leaving them there as a memorial.)