Star Wars:Rebels
Star Wars: Rebels was an american TV series that was released in the shadow of TCW. Generally considered an ok show, but not a great one. It adds the nice little bits of mysticism back into the Star Wars universe, while also making its most powerful threat look like harmless fails. General opinion is mixed, but the results tend to lean towards tolerable. Ultimately its up to you whether or not its good, though most fans agree its way above whatever the hell resistance was supposed to be.
Rebels is set a few years before A New Hope and covers the early formation of the rebellion from the perspective of one cell focused on the planet Lothal. Much like the Clone Wars, it starts off weakly with slow pacing and erroneous animation, but gets better as the seasons and storyline progress, with season 4 often equalling the very best Clone Wars arcs for quality and storytelling. If you liked Rogue One but thought it should be about 25 hours long and done in cartoony CGI then this is the show for you.
Since the show does have a fair amount of dedicated fans, likely possibly certainly more than the sequel trilogy itself, Disney has made a habit of planting Easter Egg references to Rebels in basically everything moving forward, usually in the form of an appearance by the iconic ship The Ghost or the friendly-ish space pirate character Hondo Ohnaka.
The Good
- All the main characters are well-written, fleshed out, with reasonable, sympathetic backstories and significant character arcs, along with different enough skill sets that they don't step on each others' toes. Each one feels like an integral part of the team; the pilot, the gunner, the muscle, the tech, the swordsman and the hot-shot rookie.
- Seriously, you'd think that with two jedi in a 6-man crew you'd get some overlap, but they feel like very different characters, both in personality and powers. Kanan is very much the quintessential combat jedi (as is to be expected as he was trained during the Clone Wars), while Ezra's signature ability to connect with the galaxy around him and especially its wildlife marks him out not only from the rest of the Ghost crew, but from every other force user we've seen on the screen.
- Grand Admiral Thrawn makes his debut in Disney Star Wars, along with the TIE Defender project. The character doesn’t lose much in the translation, and later on is arguably treated better than the source.
- The bearded old guy in the Endor strike team in RotJ turns out to be Captain Rex. Fan theory at first, later confirmed.
- You CAN combi-weapon a lightsaber and a blaster, and it's OP as shit
- Force wolves (no, not those force wolves)
- Game of Thrones-style Mandos (Krownest is pretty much Space-Winterfell).
- Imperial Inquisitors. Sure they don’t last long, but they were intimidating while they were, and it planted the seed that was used elsewhere.
- Good appearances by Vader and Sheev.
- The Maul vs Obi-wan decades-long duel finally comes to an end... and what an end it is.
- The season finales are, invariably, fantastic.
- Animation gets better as the show goes on.
A note about the wolves... Rebels turns the force mysticism up past 11. Forget just being precog space monks with laser swords; as far as Rebels is concerned the Jedi are craftworld eldar without the racism. Rebels picks up the torch of the Clone Wars “Force Gods” and mixes in some of the straight-up fantasy shit from the Lucas era novels and the KOTOR/Old Republic Jedi philosophy schools and heresies beyond just “Light good, Dark bad”.
The Bad
- Since this is a Disney cartoon, the bad guys spend a large amount of their on-screen time (though not all, mind you) losing. This changes the Imperials (other than Thrawn and Vader) from an imposing force to cartoon villains, although Rebels villains manage to stay intimidating more than Grievous did in Clone Wars.
- Battles slower paced than a Death Guard movement phase. Enjoy characters having conversations in cover-based shooting when everyone has Stormtrooper aim, including the main characters
- Helicopter lightsabers.
- Complete bipolarity in tone. This can create some great moments, but invariably ruins the mood episode by episode, or between the A and B plots.
- Iron Squadron. Just...fucking Iron Squadron.
- Star Destroyers take some getting used to, mostly due to their bridge towers being way taller than they should be.
- Space Squid-whales annihilating a maximum strength Imperial Blockade in under 30 seconds.
- The changes to Hondo Ohnaka's character.
Imperial Incompetence?
Especially in early seasons the Empire comes off rather poorly as they are easily tricked and befuddled by our heroes, it is however it is worth remembering:
- The primary setting in the early seasons, Lothal, is a backwater world and these are not front line troopers here.
- Based on the Academy episodes some of them may be as young as 16 with two months of training. The Academy episodes also show why Stormtroopers seem so crap compared to the Clone Troopers from The Clone Wars: where the Clones were trained to fight together as actual comrades in arms, the morons in charge of the Lothal Academy decided it was more important to train Stormtroopers to actively sabotage each other for personal gain.
Of the Imperials appearing in the early seasons, the Inquisitor (his title was later revealed to actually be Grand Inquisitor) was the only one who didn't seem like an incompetent. Agent Kallus was allegedly an elite Imperial Security Bureau agent, but the Rebels generally ran rings around him. Minister Tua was basically a glorified secretary who was in over her head, and all things considered was actually somewhat sympathetic.
However, whenever a more notable (i.e. movie) Imperial shows up, they are almost certainly played completely straight. Tarkin shows up towards the end of the first season and quickly demonstrates he's there to Get Things Done by having the Inquisitor behead the aforementioned idiots in charge of the Lothal Academy and subtly warning Kallus and Tua their heads were next on the chopping block. In the finale, Tarkin is defeated and the Inquisitor killed, but that causes the Emperor to send Tarkin some backup in the form of Darth Fucking Vader, and every encounter with him left the rebels thanking the force they simply got away alive.
Of course, both Vader and Tarkin have Plot Armor since they both have to live to see Episode IV, so they don't stick around. New Imperial characters get introduced in the form of Governor Pryce (the actual governor of Lothal who apparently spent most of the early seasons mucking around on Coruscant instead of actually doing her job), a couple of new Inquisitors eager to take the now vacant title of Grand Inquisitor, and Grand Admiral Thrawn. Unfortunately, despite being shown to be threats at first, fans noticed they became less and less of a threat as time went on. In fact, even the heroes seemed to not take the new Inquisitors seriously as time went on as they got better at dealing with them. Neither Kannon nor Ezra ever manage to beat the second set of inquisitors, Fulcrum can take them both but, given who she is that is not surprising. It isn't until the old master returns that the inquisitors are.... removed.
This was one of the biggest criticisms of the series, in fact. The heroes have plot armour, and worse at times seemed to know they had plot armour. At several points, they even dismiss the presence of Stormtroopers as being nuisances at best. Again, it was implied that the Stormtroopers assigned to Lothal are just crap, but when later in the series it's revealed Lothal is actually pretty important to the Imperial war machine it makes it strange that more competent troops aren't rotated in.
Thrawn
Forget all that noise about Imperial incompetence, because the real bad of Rebels doesn't disappoint. Grand Admiral Thrawn is in peak form in Rebels. He's observant, he's ruthless, he plays the long game, and he's fucking ripped for a guy who's into art and strategy.
Thrawn's first spotlight moment is on Ryloth, when Hera attempts to steal back her family's Kalikori heirloom. Thrawn (understanding the artifact's significance) instantly realizes her identity as the daughter of Ryloth's renegade leader, while his aide struggles to put the pieces together. Taking an interest in the actions of Hera's band of rebels, Thrawn begins collecting Sabine Wren's graffiti.
His next big moment came when Agent Kallus, now a double agent for the rebels, assisted Ezra in hacking the records of Thrawn's search for the rebel base and then reprogramming some combat training droids as assassins (which Thrawn beats down like a boss). Kallus attempts to pin the incident on another officer, effectively enough to throw Wullf Yularen, but not enough to fool Thrawn, who deduces that Kallus switched sides and uses him to leak false intelligence. The giveaway? The helmet Ezra was captured with, which Thrawn immediately recognizes as Sabine's handiwork, confirming that its owner was the young Jedi, and the fact that Kallus withheld this information proved he was no longer loyal to the Empire. Amazing.
In Imperial politics Thrawn is a pragmatist standing in opposition to the Death Star project as it draws resources away from his own projects. He sees it as a waste on big dumb object when the Empire would have an enormous advantage over the rebels once the TIE Defender is mass produced.
Thrawn's only mistake was his dismissal of the supernatural despite knowing about the Force, Jedi and Sith. When he found the rebel base on Atollon, the only reason the Rebels escaped was the intervention of the godlike Force entity Bendu. In the final episode Thrawn admitted to Ezra that he didn't know much about the Force. But Thrawn had the Resistance on the ropes and was only beaten by Ezra's use of the Force and a pod of giant space whales (which Thrawn had no way of knowing would show up).
| Star Wars | |
|---|---|
| About: | The Franchise, The Setting, The Movies, The Video Games |
| Television Shows: | The Clone Wars, Rebels, Resistance, The Mandalorian, The Bad Batch, Disney + Originals |
| Star Wars Games | |
| Miniature: | X-Wing, Armada, Legion |
| Tabletop: | Rebellion |
| Roleplaying: | FFG, WotC (d20), WEG (d6) |