OK, having reviewed Mortis, there’re lots of opportunities to make that work, so I will pull that content out of this episode so that Mortis can use it.
I haven’t worked out how I’m going to break Mortis yet - that’s a long way away - but I definitely want to minimise the father, son, and daughter. There’s a lot of visions in there, and lots of content which could be turned from explicit activities into visions, so I think I’d rather keep it as a vision sequence. Sometimes Qui-Gon will show up (using the existing footage), and sometimes just be a whisper in their ear (using the above content).
In my headcanon, and the interpretation I’ll be aiming for with this content, Qui-Gon will have guided them to this area of dark force sensitive space (with ties to the World Between Worlds), to warn them and test them, and guide them through some challenges too. In the original newsreel, they were described as tracking a signal broadcasting a personal code from a 2000-years-ago Jedi, but I think I’ll make it explicit that it’s Qui-Gon’s code that’s being used as a mysterious lure. Also, one of Ahsoka’s visions here features her talking to future Ahsoka, which actually could be interpreted as Ahsoka from Rebels (guiding in parallel with Qui-Gon a little), since she does intersect with the World Between Worlds at one point. Or not, if the viewer prefers.
I’ll skip showing the diamond-shaped planet at all, skip the first landing and escape, and only use the second (crash) landing, since more happens around that point. Having the characters end the episode by just waking up on the ship with no time passed and acknowledging it’s weird solves a lot of potential problems. I probably won’t use the scene (or at least the shot) with the actual Darth Vader mask appearing, because it’s just way too HEY HAVE YOU SEEN STAR WARS?
The question then - one for another day - becomes what content to include in their visions, and in what order, and how much to balance it being a dream versus it being real. It’s odd that they just drive around this dreamscape on regular speeders, for example.
I know Morai is important to the future of Ahsoka, so I will preserve the scene of Anakin using the daughter to heal Ahsoka, but that’ll be tough as I’d really like to remove all of the surrounding Father/Son/Daughter family drama. I want those characters to be loosely-defined metaphors, so I might end up having to lean heavily on foggy VFX and audio reverb. One thing I might add to the sequence of Anakin’s visions of the future might be the audio of Palpatine saying “use the force to create life”, to better set up his later choice to do the daughter/Ahsoka thing. I’ll also see if I can simply have Sister called Morai instead.
Before I properly work on this I’ll also review all of the Family/WBW content in Rebels too.
Anyway. I can put all those thoughts to one side for now. Onwards to s01e00.