Tag: Rebels Revisited

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

Rebels’ second season is fast drawing to a close; the two-part finale is next week and there’s a lot that could still happen in it. What we do know, thus far, is that Darth Vader will make his grand re-entrance into the story and throw down with Kanan, Ezra and Ahsoka, and somewhere in there we’ll also have three Inquisitors and the Maul formerly known as Darth as well. It’s going to be an intense and packed finale.

Because of that, though, the show had to spend some time a week in advance giving the other characters, the ones who aren’t strong in the Force, a chance to say goodbye. The finale is already set in terms of the heroes cast, we’re going to be focused entirely on Kanan, Ezra and Ahsoka. The interesting (and painful) spin on that is that the characters within the show know that something climactic is happening, as well.

When Malachor was first mentioned “in canon” it was used as a euphemism for hell or another similar terrible place, almost an expletive. Now, three of the heroes of the fledgling Rebellion are going there of their own free will, in search of something that will give them the edge against Vader and the Inquisitors. They are almost literally walking into hell in search of a solution to their problem. And Hera and the others are terrified that they may not walk back out again. Read More

Ben: Something that I’ve praised Star Wars Rebels for for a long time now is its character development. Because it focuses on a central core of characters and tells its story in a chronological order, the show gives the characters the opportunity to learn and change as the story progresses and time passes within the narrative. We’ve seen Ezra, Kanan, Sabine and even Zeb evolve their personalities and beliefs (some more than others) as their horizons have changed, their viewpoints have been challenged and they’ve been through increasingly difficult trials.

But there are a couple of characters in the show who haven’t really evolved in that sense as we move toward the end of the show’s second season. Hera is a major one, as is our favorite ISB officer Agent Kallus. And, of course, Chopper. Character development in that sense hasn’t really happened, because none of them have really changed. The Hera we meet in this show, for instance, is basically the same Hera that we see in A New Dawn, give or take a few circumstances.

There’s another aspect to character development, though, and that’s how an audience’s perception of a character changes as we see more of them. We see Hera and Kallus differently now than we did at the beginning of the show because we’ve learned more about them. And the same can be said for everyone’s favorite grumpy astromech droid after this week’s episode. Chopper’s character after his adventure with AP-5 is the same as it is before, but we learn more about him and our own view of him evolves. Read More

Jay: Force visions are interesting — like the characters, the audience wonders if they depict literal truth. This was a thought-provoking episode, not least because folks were immediately wondering what exactly happened in those visions. Rebels Recon basically told us that Yoda had sent those visions to the characters, but the discussion of what actually happened isn’t nearly as interesting as what the visions mean. And just as each character got a different vision, I suspect each of us have our own take on what those visions meant.

What actually, canonically happened is therefore a lot less interesting than what the visions mean for characters and for us. I find it most interesting to see these Force visions as externalizations of the character’s inward struggles. As metaphors.

Kanan gives name to his fears and he defeats them by realizing that he can’t control everything, he can only be responsible for himself and do the best that he can do. As a result, he passes the test and becomes a Jedi Knight. Is he an actual Jedi? I hope not for saga reasons, but let’s play with that idea a little bit. Read More