Author: Ben Wahrman

Mandalorian culture has been a rather interesting topic of discussion for quite a while now, pretty much since Boba Fett first walked onto people’s screens, and the idea was seeded that he came from a culture of warriors dressed in similar armor. It’s been teased, fleshed out, then rolled back and retconned and fleshed out again several times, from the pre-prequel era in Boba’s early Expanded Universe exploits, through the prequels with Jango Fett’s backstory and Karen Traviss’s books, then in The Clone Wars, and now in Rebels.

Back in TCW, most of the slate was wiped clean, with the idea that Mandalore had been taken over by a largely pacifistic faction and their warrior culture was frowned upon and shunned. The few warriors who stuck around were labeled terrorists, siding with the Death Watch. Then Obi-Wan got involved, Darth Maul arrived, and things started to go downhill very quickly. By the end of what we’ve seen (with the fabled “Siege of Mandalore” being largely unknown) Mandalore has been torn to shreds by civil war, with Duchess Satine and her faction being all but wiped out and two factions of the Death Watch battling for control of the capital.

Since then, Rebels has been trickling out the details about what Mandalore is like in bits and pieces. Sabine mentioned in the first season that she had attended the Imperial Academy there, and in the second season we were introduced to Fenn Rau and his Protectors, a faction of soldiers acting as police of a hyperspace lane. They value honor, respect the strong, and strike an alliance with the Rebels while still nominally serving the Empire in an attempt to maintain their independence from either faction. We also got our first clues of exactly who Sabine Wren is, in that her family is said to be loyal to clan Vizsla, the same clan as the leaders of the Death Watch. Read More

We’ve brought up The Clone Wars a lot in this column as we’ve discussed Rebels, both because it’s the latter’s direct predecessor in terms of production, and also because Rebels itself has featured the characters and events carried over from its own series quite a number of times. But Rebels has also done something in relation to TCW that sequels often do: a better job of explaining, extrapolating and summarizing their predecessor than the original work itself ever did.

The Clone Wars was a scattered show in terms of its plot and tone, as often happens to shows with long runtimes. But even as long as it did last, TCW still felt like it was cut short, leaving many running plots unresolved and some characters in limbo. While some of the stories ended on perfectly acceptable notes (Ahsoka leaving the Jedi, Maul’s insurrection being ended) those were not the last installments the TCW team had planned to tell about them. Each story had more to go, and that was evident before and after the show’s actual cancellation.

Rebels is doing its part, not to replace those stories that would have happened if the show had not been cancelled, but to be a proper sequel series that would exist no matter how long TCW itself had run. What “The Last Battle” is meant to show isn’t the end of the Clone Wars, the actual war itself ended well over a decade before when Order 66 came down and the droid army was deactivated. This episode shows us (and Ezra) what scars were left behind by that war, and lets us see it with the benefit of hindsight. Read More

The pendulum of Rebels has moved back and forth between the Force-centric and the martial-centric quite a bit this season so far. It’s been a gradually growing shift of emphasis from episodes based around Ezra and Kanan trying to pick up the pieces of what happened after “Twilight of the Apprentice” to the theme of unity beginning to grow among the rebel cells that we saw through the first two seasons. As the timeline moves closer to Rogue One and A New Hope, the Rebel Alliance that we know and love is in its infant stages, with groups working in closer and closer harmony. This is not done in a vacuum, though, since greater rebel activity has naturally drawn more and more attention to the various “fulcrums” of that same unity across the galaxy.

More than anything, this week’s episode demonstrated the escalation between the two major factions we’ve seen throughout Rebels. The Rebellion is beginning to take shape, with the Ryloth cell working hand in hand with Hera to coordinate activities and evacuations of key people like Cham Syndulla after being put on the run by Imperial forces. At the same time, however, Grand Admiral Thrawn has made his way to Ryloth due either to orders from on high or by his own volition, backing up Captain Slavin and turning the tide against Cham and his forces by promoting swift, decisive assaults against key positions, like Cham’s home province.

The larger Rebellion is forming, and Thrawn knows it. He preys on the connection between Hera and her father by blockading Ryloth and forcing Cham to go on the run, knowing that she and her crew would be along shortly to try and run the blockade and save the day. But the destruction of Hera’s group and their cell is not the goal he has set for himself; he values information more than the piddling victory that would come from the death or capture of the Syndulla family or even the subjugation of Ryloth. Read More

Ben: From the very earliest part of the saga, we’ve heard about the Imperial Academy. Luke wants to go there to learn about becoming a pilot, and to see more of the galaxy once he leaves Tatooine. We also find out, from an initially cut scene that was still included in the novel and other sources, that Biggs went to the Academy, and upon his return to Tatooine confides to his friend that he intends to jump ship and join the Rebellion. It’s an open acknowledgement that whatever training the Empire offers is valuable, especially to those living in the more out-of-the-way systems, but the confrontation of Imperial philosophy there makes some of the recruits and trainees uncomfortable enough to bounce out.

We saw one level of the Academy in Rebels’ first season, with Ezra infiltrating at the cadet level and making friends with Zare Leonis. What we see in this season with “The Antilles Extraction” is a higher-level facility, Skystrike Academy, where the best prospective pilots that the Empire has go to learn how to fly the Imperial way. Wedge, Hobbie and others are being taught to be ruthless and follow orders regardless of piddly things like regulations and morals. This follows the same lessons that the cadets in the younger Academy were learning, that personal feelings fall by the wayside in lieu of following orders.

So what do people like Wedge do? They abandon ship, try to get out before it’s too late, before they do something that will draw them in too deeply, or before the hooks the Empire puts into them take hold. Some don’t make it. A lot don’t make it. Wedge and Hobbie had Sabine there to save them, and Ezra and Kanan there to extract the trio and make their way back to safe space. Biggs made it. Crix Madine made it. But others don’t, they aren’t that lucky or skilled. Wedge’s friend Rake is unceremoniously killed by their own squadron commander, shot down to force the others to surrender. Others are recaptured and brainwashed into submission (as we saw in Servants of the Empire), becoming even more fanatic than those who still possess their own sense of judgement. Read More