We’ve covered the way Rebels doles out its plots and themes quite a lot since the first season, how just as often as episodes wrap themselves up in a nice, neat little package, they leave tidbits and other things to drift with the possibility of being snagged later on. Some of them were obvious hooks, like Sabine referencing her time at the Imperial Academy, while others were rather more subtle. And as the show has now advanced into its second season, some of those plots both obvious and not have begun paying off.

Back in the first season, we learned about Ezra’s mixed feelings on his parents’ disappearance, how he wanted to find them but also didn’t want to be told that they had met an untimely fate. His encounters with those who had knowledge of their fate, most notably the scatterbrained Rodian Tseebo, provided a look into a boy’s complex psyche, where all of his years spent living on his own have insulated him against hope, but at the same time, something inside of him longs for his family to be alive and well somewhere.

Where we are now, at the midpoint to the second season, is a great place to look back at the series as a whole and how plots like Ezra’s search for his parents have shaped the show. Ezra’s choices in “Legacy” are different from the ones he made in the first season because Ezra himself is a different character now. The plot of the series has evolved as the characters (in this case Ezra) have grown. And the showrunners were patient enough (and had enough faith in their audience) to give the plot plenty of time to simmer before finally taking the cover off. Read More

Ben: Which is worse; a gruesome fate fully realized on the screen, or a future that’s only implied and never stated? As a narrative device, it’s almost certainly the threat rather than the act that’s more effective. While there is certainly an amount of narrative punch to be had in spelling out just how terrible the end of someone’s story winds up being, many more worse things can spring from the imagination of the audience. It’s why horror movies with low budgets can still be just as frightening by not showing exactly what might be killing its character.

That’s what makes the rules of Standards and Practices toward kids’ programs often counter-intuitive. Any potentially traumatizing acts are forbidden to be shown, so the show’s creators will get around that by having the act happen, but placing it off-screen or out of view, or even just relegating it to being mentioned. But a child’s imagination is a fertile thing, and seeing the act has little to do with actually being terrified by it. The sounds, hints and implications are enough.

Rebels very knowingly steps into this territory with “Future of the Force”. The whole plot of the episode revolves around the kidnapping of infants too young to even speak. Whatever fate they might suffer once in the hands of the Inquisitors is never actually said (the closest we get is the Seventh Sister’s declaration “Who doesn’t want to be a mother?”), much the same as this episode’s predecessor, The Clone Wars’ “Children of the Force”. To this point in canon, we don’t know exactly what fate or fates might await the unfortunate infants. But as previously stated, what we can imagine might be even more terrible than what is true.

So let’s do some imagining, shall we? Read More