In the series premiere of Ahsoka, we're following up on two story threads from two different Star Wars TV shows. The more obvious of the two threads comes from Star Wars: Rebels, which ended on a cliffhanger that sent the Imperial Grand Admiral Thrawn and series protagonist Ezra Bridger off into hyperspace toward a still-unknown fate. Our main protagonists here are Ahsoka Tano, Sabine Wren, and Hera Syndulla--all major Rebels characters.

Warning: The following contains spoilers for the first two episodes of Star Wars: Ahsoka on Disney+. If you have yet to watch the show, stop reading now.

The second thread is a bit more fresh. In the opening scene of the series we see a pair of Force-using, lightsaber-wielding baddies (named Baylan Skoll and Shin Hati) invade a New Republic cruiser and free a prisoner we've met before: a disciple of Thrawn named Morgan Elsbeth, who served as a one-off villain in Season 2 of The Mandalorian. These Force users don't belong to any existing Order that we know about--they seem to be mercenaries, for now.

All of these characters want one thing: to go to wherever Thrawn and Ezra ended up, which may or may not be in a different galaxy, and rescue the one that's on their side. So they spend much of these two episodes fighting over some kind of star map that allegedly leads to that location. By the end of the two-episode premiere, the map is in the hands of the bad guys, but our heroes are right on their tails.

Given that Ahsoka almost functions as a new live-action season of Rebels, most of the references to that animated series serve more as "previously on Star Wars: Rebels" sort of reminders than as true Easter eggs. But this is Star Wars--there are still plenty of real Easter eggs anyway. Let's dig in.

1. Morgan Elsbeth

This character previously appeared in the 13th episode of The Mandalorian, dubbed "The Jedi." That's the episode where Ahsoka first met Din Djarin and Grogu--Elsbeth hired Djarin to kill Ahsoka, but instead they teamed up to take her down. But even after she was captured, Elsbeth kept her mouth shut about whatever she knew about Thrawn, despite Ahsoka's attempts to pry. Now, though, she's free.

2. Actors who reprised their Rebels roles on Ahsoka

Two well-known actors from Rebels return to play their characters on Ahsoka. The first is Clancy Brown as Lothal governor Ryder Azadi--Brown voiced the character in many episodes of Rebels, and he gets a brief cameo as the live-action version of the character.

The other is David Tennant as the voice of Ahsoka's droid Huyang. Since this is only a voice role in both shows, it only makes sense that they would want to keep Tennant around. He's pretty good at it.

Lars Mikkelson as Thrawn will be another example of this once he actually appears on this show, but that hasn't happened yet.

3. HK droids

The bad guys on Ahsoka make heavy use of HK assassin droids wielding electrostaffs when they're doing their dirty work. These aren't the crappy, disposable battle droids we're used to--HK droids pose a challenge even for Ahsoka. HK droids originated in the video game Knights of the Old Republic and made frequent appearances in the sequel and The Old Republic MMO, but they're nearly nonexistent in the current canon. We did, however, previously see these specific models during Elsbeth's episode of The Mandalorian.

4. The Nightsisters of Dathomir

After Skoll and Hati free Elsbeth, they go to the remains of that ancient shrine that Ahsoka had just raided and wrecked. Elsbeth says it was built by the Nightsisters of Dathomir, who are sometimes referred to as Force witches. The Nightsisters originated in an old Expanded Universe novel from the 1990s called The Courtship of Princess Leia (it's as bad as it sounds), and they were occasionally a key faction in the Clone Wars series--Ahsoka knows them well, obviously.

5. Darth Maul homage

During the first episode, the villainous Force apprentice Shin Hati is tracking down Sabine Wren and the map orb, and we get a scene of her standing in front of her ship consulting with a probe droid. It's gonna be tough for any Star Wars nerd to not think of a similar Darth Maul scene from The Phantom Menace when they watch this.

6. A hyperdrive core from an SSD

While Ashoka and Hera are investigating some of Elsbeth's former holdings on Corellia, they notice an unusually massive hyperdrive core sitting in the shipyard. So they ask the local corporate manager about it, and he tells them it's the hyperdrive core from "an SSD." He's not talking about a solid state drive here--in Star Wars, an SSD is short for Super Star Destroyer. The best known example of such a ship would be the Executor, Darth Vader's gigantic flagship in The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi.

7. CLL, IW-37, HV-7 droids

That same corporate guy namedrops a bunch of droid model numbers in quick succession, and he wasn't making up any of them. They're all lifter droids, in fact. A CLL droid is a binary load lifter seen in the original Star Wars film; an IW-37 is a load lifter with a pincer arm, as seen in Revenge of the Sith, and the HV-7 is an incredibly obscure pull from the Legacy Era supplement to the old Star Wars RPG from Wizards of the Coast. The Legacy Era consisted of a series of comics books set 130 years after Return of the Jedi--it was one of the last frontiers for the Star Wars Expanded Universe before Disney rebooted the whole thing.

8. The Eye of Sion

The key to finding Thrawn, at least according to Elsbeth, is a ship called the Eye of Sion, which is apparently going to need that big hyperdrive to make the journey. This recalls a massive, Super Star Destroyer-sized ship called the Eye of Palpatine from an old novel called Children of the Jedi--in the old canon, the ship was used by remnant Imperial years about a decade after the events of Return of the Jedi in a bid to revitalize the Empire. But Children of the Jedi was a particularly weird story, and the parallels probably end there