The Clone Wars is about to solve a huge Mandalorian Season 2 mystery

After spending several episodes avoid her real identity and her life with the Jedi, Ahsoka Tano is back on a hyperspace path toward destiny. But because Ahsoka is about to hit-up the historic "Seige of Mandalore," the most recent episode of The Clone Wars is about to stitch a lot of disparate Star Wars canon together.

Here's what the ending of The Clone Wars, Season 7 Episode 8, "Together Again" really means, plus how it directly connects to Solo: A Star Wars Story, and could foreshadow The Mandalorian Season 2.

Warning: Spoilers ahead for The Clone Wars, Season 7 Episode 8.

After a soul-searching three-episode journey with Trace and Rafa Martez, Ahsoka Tano is recruited by some Mandalorians, including Bo-Katan and Ursa Wren. Their destination is the planet Mandalore, where Darth Maul has set-up shop for quite a while.

Maul, who appears as a hologram in this episode, is almost certainly aware that Ahsoka was sneaking around near the Pykes. He also mentions his involvement with Crimson Dawn, a crime syndicate that gave Han Solo a bunch of trouble in Solo: A Star Wars Story. All of this might seem like small potatoes, but in terms of being a huge confluence of Star Wars canon, The Clone Wars is elegantly pulling together a lot of loose threads at the same time right now. Let's break it down.

Clone Wars is making Solo make sense

Back in 2018, even hardcore Star Wars fans had a pretty big WTF moment when Maul (don't call him Darth) appeared at the very end of the movie and was apparently manipulating everything Qi'ra and Crimson Dawn were up to.

In terms of the timeline, it was possible to do the math and figure out how and why Maul might be a crime boss during the time of Solo. That movie happens in 10 BBY (Before the Battle of Yavin), while the end of The Clone Wars is 19BBY. So, we're dealing with about nine years in which Maul will be in a position of secret-crime-boss of Crimson Dawn, a crime syndicate which we actually hadn't heard about until Solo.

That said, working out the timeline of Solo relative to The Clone Wars doesn't really explain why Maul was running Crimson Dawn nine years after the Clone Wars ended. We know that some kind of showdown with Ahsoka is coming in the big finale, and it seems like that showdown will be instrumental in solidifying Maul as a major crime boss for at least the next ten years.

This means the power and reach of Crimson Dawn at the time of Solo is about to make a little more sense thanks to Clone Wars. It also means the coming showdown might not go so well for Ahsoka.

Clone Wars is poised to explain "The Way"

Chronologically speaking, we know what happens to Bo-Katan and Ursa Wren after the events of The Clone Wars. In Rebels, they're still Mandalorians and still trying to figure out their allegiances while a galactic war rages on. By the end of Rebels, Bo-Katan wields the Darksaber, which we know eventually (around 9 ABY) will be in the hands of Moff Gideon. But at this point in The Clone Wars, Maul will probably still be in possession of the Darksaber, and he'll likely wield it on Mandalore.

But because we're headed to Mandalore nearly two decades before the events of The Mandalorian, it's more than likely that we could meet the sect of Mandalorians who subscribe to the honor code known as "The Way." Obviously Bo-Katan, doesn't, mostly because she takes her helmet off all the time, but there are a bunch of Mandalorians still on Mandalore at this time, and it's a good bet some of them will be revealed as the original folks who either invented "The Way" or revived a very ancient tradition.

The Clone Wars Season 7 is the last Star Wars thing that will air before Mandalorian Season 2 (hopefully) in October 2020. So it seems unlikely we'd go all the way to Mandalore without some kind of canon explanation as to the origin of the "new" Mandalorians we've been seeing post-Return of the Jedi.

Clone Wars is finishing the Clone Wars

Beyond Solo and Mandalorian, the most obvious thing that is happening at the end of "Together Again," is that The Clone Wars is finishing its own arcs. We know Maul can't stay on Mandalore, and we know a big battle has to be fought there. Ahsoka is integral to that story, and so are the Mandalorians.

Regardless of how the specifics shake out, the Seige of Mandalore is one of those big Star Wars events that's been talked about but never depicted. In some ways, it has a similar status to how fans thought about "the Clone Wars" before the prequels: a fabled event that we heard about, but could only infer its importance.

In the next few episodes, The Clone Wars is set to end itself. Everybody's where they're supposed to be. Now let's just wait for the lightsabers to start spinning.

The Clone Wars airs new episodes on Fridays on Disney+.