Category: Simple Tricks

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

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