Category: Feature Articles

Star Wars Rebels is now at its annual mid-season break, which we usually take as an opportunity to review the first half of the season and speculate some into what might be to come in the latter half. “Visions and Voices” throws some of that out of the window by packing quite a lot of foreshadowing into a single episode that sets up many events of the next part of the show.

This season has been busy building two plots at once: a new foe that the Rebels are going up against just as the disparate cells are beginning to unite, and following up on the events of season two’s conclusion. While most of the season to this point has been concerned with the game of chess that Thrawn is playing and looking forward to his plan to destroy the Rebellion, there has been a lot of follow-up on the events at the end of season two, both in terms of the character dynamics and in terms of the plot itself changing.

Kanan is blind, and withdrew himself from the others so he could find peace with his condition and with the Force. Ezra has grown, but has entrenched himself even more deeply in his obsession with destroying the Sith. We saw some of these effects at the beginning of the season as Bendu was introduced, the Sith holocron came into play, and then Maul was brought back onto the scene. Read More

As this column has gone on, we’ve done a lot of discussion and writing on how Star Wars Rebels deals with its characters. With the ongoing plots and stories revolving as much around the journeys that Ezra, Kanan, Hera, Sabine and Zeb have been on as they do around, well, the plot, it stands to reason that we’ve spent a lot of time talking about them. A character that we talked about some but not as often as the others (mostly because he hasn’t featured as much since the end of the first season) is our stalwart Imperial Security Bureau frenemy Agent Kallus.

Kallus popped up again in this season early on as a bit of arm candy for Governor Pryce and under Grand Admiral Thrawn’s shadow, buddying up close to the two of them and seemingly back in good Imperial graces after his rather inauspicious rescue from one of Geonosis’s moons in “The Honorable Ones” back in season two. While his-first-name-is-Agent Kallus has not been the most visible of threats in the show’s later stages, having him come back and Thrawn taking him under his wing promised some interesting new developments to move forward.

At the same time, though, we started getting hints that there was more to Kallus this season than just back to being an Imperial lackey. Our first hint was back when Sabine was helping Wedge and Hobbie escape from Skystrike Academy, assisted by a new Fulcrum and by Kallus himself in a turn of events that stunned Sabine. At the time, it seemed like Kallus was just repaying Zeb for saving his life, and he seemed to intimate as much, implying that it was a one-time deal and not to expect any further assistance. Read More

Mike: While it was as entertaining as Hondo episodes always are, the thing I found sort of perplexing about this week’s installment of Star Wars Rebels was that I’m not certain what they want us to think of Hondo at this point. He stands firmly apart from the assortment of quasi-recruits we discussed last week in that he has no direct interest in the Rebel cause and only works with them when he can get something out of it, but it seemed like the larger point of this episode was to suggest to viewers that Ezra is fundamentally mistaken in trusting him, and continuing their chaotic friendship is going to lead our heroes to a bad place.

But would that amount to sowing doubt for its own sake, or are Hondo and Ezra headed for a real split soon? It’s more likely, I think, that they’d want us to think they are in advance of a genuine hero moment for Hondo. For all the noise the characters make about him only being out for himself, the creators have always had so much obvious affection for the character (going back to his adventures with Obi-Wan and Anakin in The Clone Wars) that I have a hard time seeing him ever truly betray Ezra and the gang in a serious way—as Ezra notes, he may be sketchy but teaming up with him has always worked out in the end. Are they really signaling a change in that dynamic? According to Taylor Gray in Rebels Recon, Ezra feels genuine affection for Hondo because he reminds him of the carefree scoundrel he was as a child–so what did he take away from this week’s events that he didn’t know already?

Ben: Well, right now it seems to be a question of driving a wedge between him and Hera. Hera’s buckled down on the shenanigans as things have gotten more intense and serious, especially with Kanan being blinded and taking a backseat, and having Hondo (and Azmorigan) around is putting an agent of chaos into the mixture. I feel there was a bit of meta-commentary when Ezra mentioned that every time they team up with Hondo, things seem to work themselves out in the end. Even in this episode, they rescued the Ugnaught and got away with a hold full of proton bombs. Yes, it does work out, we know from a narrative standpoint that it will because Hondo is who he is from an out-of-universe perspective. But Hera doesn’t have our perspective, and neither does Zeb. Read More

Ben: Writing teenagers is hard. It’s very easy for teens to come off as annoying, since the most common stereotypes for them are them being self-confident, rebellious or angst-ridden, and sometimes all three at once. Of course, most adult viewers won’t remember what being a teenager is like, loaded with the beginnings of emotions and understanding that will eventually give way to adulthood, typically through circumstances and time.

Rebels stepped into this minefield right away by giving us Ezra, the precocious youth with the laser slingshot and enough attitude to thumb his nose at the stormtroopers stomping around his hometown. Ezra has developed a lot over the show’s course, though, so the writers knew better than to just give us a teenager and leave him as it was for the long term. It probably helps that they had experience with Ahsoka’s character arc in The Clone Wars.

In “Iron Squadron”, we meet a crew of three teens much like Ezra when we first saw him: young, scrappy and willing to stick it to the Empire however they can. Unlike Ezra, who was on his own before being found by Kanan, the trio who make up Iron Squadron only have each other. Their leader, Mart, lost his father in the resistance, and it was likely his idea for them to take a ship and use it to fight back however they could. Unlike Ezra, who was embittered about fighting after his own parents’ death, Mart sought to follow his father’s example. Read More