For weeks, we all shared our increasingly crazy theories about Marrok's true identity in Ahsoka. Everyone from Starkiller to a corrupted Ezra Bridger and even Supreme Leader Snoke were among those suggested, but when he was cut down by the title character in last Tuesday's "Fallen Jedi," it was clear none of those ideas were correct.
When Marrok fell to the ground, a blast of green smoke erupted from his wound, and it was obvious to fans of The Clone Wars and Star Wars Rebels that the villain had been resurrected with Morgan Elsbeth's Nightsister magic (in fact, the most compelling explanation now is that Marrok was a zombified Eighth Brother).
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Talking to IGN (via SFFGazette.com), director Peter Ramsey explained that he and showrunner Dave Filoni bonded over their shared love of Akira Kurosawa's films, with those ultimately playing a role in how Marrok's demise was portrayed.
"It’s funny," he began, "because I don’t think there was a puff of anything originally. I mean, yeah, basically I completely ripped [Kurosawa film Sanjuro] off." It sounds like, initially, the burst we saw was meant to be blood, with the decision to add the green mist made during post-production.
"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," the filmmaker adds. "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."
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Realising Ramsey was unaware of how this could all tie into Nightsister magic, the site put it to him that Marrok may have been a revived Inquisitor forced to do Elsbeth's bidding. Alas, it seems Filoni kept him in the dark about the character's true nature.
"There was none of that detail," he admitted. "They are pretty tight-lipped about a lot of those details. They don't like a lot of info going out. He 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, a mixture of magic and tech? Only time will tell whether we'll learn more about who and what Marrok really was, but we're not expecting to learn more about Elsbeth's abilities until next week when the spotlight presumably turns to that other Galaxy Far, Far Away.