Star Wars fans have a complicated relationship with maps, and they’ve been easily misunderstood in the past. So when a map to a missing character was introduced in Ahsoka, some fans understandably were skeptical.
The map supposedly leads to Grand Admiral Thrawn, but some fans expressed confusion over how Thrawn left a map in the first place. It reminds me a lot of the confusion surrounding the map to Luke Skywalker in The Force Awakens, as people mistook it for being left by Luke so that people could find him. But the truth was clear all along, from the context clues: the map was to the first Jedi Temple, where Luke was believed to be. It was just easier for the characters (and writers) to say the map led to Luke.
I think it’s the same thing with the map to Thrawn. Rather than leading directly to Thrawn, I think it leads to the location the others believe Thrawn is at, and therefore it’s just easier to say it leads to him. The show could prove me wrong before long, but here’s my guess: the map leads to the home of the Purrgil.
There are several contextual clues in the episode that lend toward this, but let’s first remember why this would be the supposed location of Thrawn. At the end of Star Wars Rebels, a group of Purrgil surrounded Thrawn’s Star Destroyer and took him and Ezra Bridger away into hyperspace, to an unknown location. The Purrgil are a species of space whales that can travel through hyperspace, and it was actually by studying them that hyperdrive was discovered and invented. We don’t konw where they were from, but it’s conceivable to think they could travel to another galaxy as well.
Returning to the map, we are told in the episode that it was found in an ancient Nightsister temple, and the villains unlock the map on the planet Seatos. When the map opens and Morgan Elsbeth uses it to find the location of “Thrawn’s” new galaxy, the portal surrounding it has images of Purrgil flying around it. Additionally, when Baylan Skoll first arrives at the shrine on the planet, he hears a sound (like a whale call) and looks up into the sky, where we see the silhouettes of some Purrgil flying above. In other words, there are some very strong Purrgil connections to this place.
It would make sense, then, that they are in some way following the path of the Purrgil as they look at the Pathway to Peridia, where Thrawn supposedly is at. If the Purrgil took him away, and this is a pathway charted by ancient explorers from another galaxy thanks to the movements of the Purrgil, and if there are a number of Purrgil at this location, then it all begins to make sense that perhaps that is the key to this map.
All of this is speculation (albeit, hopefully, informed speculation), but here’s what I think we can say for sure: the Purrgil are not just the key to finding Thrawn, but also have strong connections to this map and this mysterious pathway to another galaxy. We’ll just have to wait and see how exactly that all works.
Star Wars Thoughts 