The most recent episode of Ahsoka saw the triumphant return of Hayden Christensen as Anakin Skywalker, and while it’s not made entirely clear what the nature of his interaction with Ahsoka is in the World Between Worlds realm, it’s safest to assume this is after he’s become one with the Force.
He looks just like he did in Revenge of the Sith, however, and that’s actually the same way he manifests as a Force ghost. We see him at the end of Return of the Jedi, and though he’s wearing different Jedi robes in that scene, George Lucas added in Christensen’s Anakin in the special editions. That’s actually for a specific reason.
In a featurette for Revenge of the Sith, released in 2005, Lucas spoke with Christensen as the two answered questions submitted by fans. One of the questions was directed toward Christensen, asking how he felt seeing himself in Return of the Jedi, and after he answered Lucas jumped in explaining why it happened that way. Lucas said this:
“It was added because, finishing off the entire series, the idea was that your inner person would go back to where we left it off. When it turned to the dark side when you got burned up and everything, before you got burned up, so when you come back to the good side of the Force that it’s your former persona that survives, not the Darth Vader persona.”
The way Lucas understood it, when Anakin returned to the light at the end of Return of the Jedi, when he passed into the Force he returned to the ‘moment’ he had previously been true to the light. This was the truest version of Anakin, and it was fitting that he would live on in the Force in this way.
In the recent book Shadow of the Sith, Anakin appears to rescue Luke in-between Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens, and though he appeared as the younger Anakin most of the time, Luke noted that he’d flash back and forth between that younger self and the older Anakin seen on the second Death Star. So even though he normally looks like he did in Revenge of the Sith, it seems Anakin had the ability – whether he could control it or not is less clear – to manifest differently.
Could that extend to his dark side self like we saw in Ahsoka? Possibly. But I think it’s clear that Anakin was teaching Ahsoka to overcome her fear and her guilt, and to do so she needed to face what Anakin had become. Ahsoka felt guilt over her culpability in it, having left Anakin instead of standing beside him. She fought on Mandalore, and as Anakin tells her he didn’t remember the battle, we know why: because at the same time Ahsoka was away on Mandalore, Anakin was falling to the dark side. At his most crucial moment of need, Ahsoka was nowhere to be found. But she also must confront her fear over becoming just like him, turning to the dark side. She’d become the warrior he trained her to be, but what if that led her to embracing the darkness? Anakin was teaching her to overcome these burdens and trust herself and the Force once more.
Star Wars Thoughts 