Category: Feature Articles

Jay: The season three premiere of Star Wars Rebels was an interesting departure from the series norm. I’ve already heard a few people observe that it was less intense — both emotionally and in terms of action — than the opener of the last season, and I agree. I also think that’s a good thing: the story development reasons that required “The Siege of Lothal” to be a very harrowing experience for the characters militate a very different sort of development for the season three opener. That said, I don’t think the character experiences are any less intense just because their engagement with the villains was.

Vader loomed large over “The Siege of Lothal”. He had to — he’s Darth Vader. But more than that, he escalated and changed the stakes in a show where the Ghost crew — even facing the Grand Inquisitor and Grand Moff Tarkin — had a fairly easy time of it. He also drove the crew off of Lothal in a convincing fashion. These were all important for story reasons: it wasn’t just that Vader’s presence demanded that the heroes become overwhelmed, but that they needed an impetus to change the pace of the show and change its setting. “Siege” was exactly what the show needed, and it shocked the audience in all the right ways just as it provided the characters a great shock and opportunity for growth.

“Steps Into Shadow” was different. For one thing, it would be a little unconvincing if Thrawn were to show up and 1) be defeated or 2) defeat the Ghost crew but be prevented from finishing them off. Instead, his presence was slow and methodical — he made himself known as a threat, but in that very deliberate and methodical way that Thrawn does. As Dave Filoni pointed out in an interview, Thrawn is very different from someone like Tarkin (or the other villains that the Ghost crew has faced) — Thrawn is not a politician and he doesn’t have a need to show immediate results. He’s after the bigger picture. That alone makes him terrifying — the finality with which he dismissed the entire Phoenix force by saying, “that is not the Rebel fleet,” says it all. He’s playing to win, and that will take time. Read More

Mike: With everything that went down on Wednesday’s Star Wars Rebels season finale, I wanted us to have an opportunity to get a few more thoughts in without feeling rushed. So consider this part two of Friday’s piece—what did you think, Jay? Will Kanan remain blind, or get super-cool laser eyes? Is Ahsoka dead, alive and well, or a bird? As I’m writing this, Pablo Hidalgo is doing a poll on Twitter that puts an interesting spin on the question—does Vader think she’s dead? Personally, I have a hard time seeing him abandoning the fight unless he’s convinced it’s truly over. Like Filoni has said in interviews for a while now, she represents everything he gave up to become what he is now, and he won’t just let that be; especially after she stared him down like that.

Something else I’ve been thinking about is the notion that Ezra was too gullible for trusting Maul as long as he did. Aside from the fact that Ezra has never been the king of sensible ideas (and that he never completely trusts him), I think fandom tends to lean too hard on the idea that Darth Maul looks to people in the Galaxy Far, Far Away the way he does to us. Here on Earth, if you’re in a dark alley and you come upon a guy covered in red and black with horns on his head your mind is going to jump right to all sorts of evil religious imagery that just doesn’t exist in Star Wars—hell, Maul isn’t even the most devil-looking species out there.

Completely vital to the premise of GFFA culture is the idea that a human being could walk into the Mos Eisley cantina or Maz Kanata’s castle and not find anything particularly terrifying about it—rather, these are the kinds of beings you see around all the time. Maul’s tattoos may differentiate him from the average Zabrak, but are they so unusual as to scream “villain”? What about Savage Opress–he has basically the same look, but does replacing the red with yellow make him seem less evil? And if you’re automatically scared of Savage it doesn’t seem like much of a jump to saying that all Zabraks just look evil—which in a GFFA context would be racist for sure, but really, just seems implausible when there are so many nuttier-looking things walking around. Read More

So, that happened.

The season two finale of Star Wars Rebels was about as intense and dramatic as I expected, and certainly as intense as I had hoped. From the moment the show’s first season wrapped up, I had a feeling I knew where the second season would go. I’d like to say that I predicted everything that the finale held, but that would be a lie. Even with everything that we knew going in, and all of the previews and teasers that made their way across social media, Rebels still managed to surprise me.

I can go on and on with effulgent praise for the show’s direction, its pacing, the superb voice acting and the way so many of the plots and ideas paid off all at once. But there’ll be plenty of time to gush later on. For now, I want to focus on something that Rebels has done pretty much from the get-go and deserves way more credit for than it gets: shaking up the status quo.

This is your one and only spoiler warning. If you haven’t watched the finale yet, do yourself a favor, stop here, and go watch it before reading the rest of the article. I promise, it’s worth it. Read More