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What do I know about this series going into it?
I’m generally familiar with the Star Wars universe and Star Wars lore. I’ve watched about half of the movies, the first season of Andor, isolated episodes of The Clone Wars… and the series finale of The Bad Batch.
I know nothing about this series.
Recap
A man sits in a tank looking at a picture of his parents. He tells the picture that he and his team – we see a Twi’lek listening in bemusedly – are going to “finish what [the parents] started.” His name is Ezra; the Twi’lek is Hera.
Outside the tank, three people approach. One is from the Empire, gloating and condescending, but it turns out she’s being held hostage by the other two. She’s the Governor of Lothal, and they need her help for their plan. She refuses, but gives in when Ezra sets an enormous dog named Pryce upon her.
The rebels’ demand: “transmit the victory code” and then bring them into her base as fake hostages. I think this means she set out to fight them and lost, and they need to pretend she won in order to infiltrate her headquarters. They get on board the tank – actually a spaceship – and fly to the “command center”, where they plan to “launch the dome”.
Once they land on the Standard Precarious Outdoor Landing Platform (SPOLP), they are greeted by stormtroopers from inside the command center. The handover of the prisoners is when they reveal themselves: a giant purple gremlin rebel tackles the stormtroopers; most of the other rebels take cover and start firing blasters; at least one of them is a Force user who throws enemies around telekinetically. Inside the base they start to close the doors against the attack, but Purple Gremlin holds the door open so a few of them make inside, and from there they hack the door to open it for the others.
While the rest of the rebels make their way through the base, Purple Gremlin goes back outside and throws a tiny creature named Hondo onto the skylight of the command center. This distracts the people in the command center so they’re not looking at the doors when the rebels burst in and take over.
They finally reveal their plan: they plan to activate “Protocol 13”, under which every Empire agent on the planet returns to the dome of the base to prepare for evacuation. Then they’ll launch the dome into space with everyone in it, to get the Empire away from the planet.
Meanwhile, a few other rebels are back in the canyon where the tank-spaceship was. While preparing for their part of the plan (not explained), they’re attacked by a humanoid pachycephalosaur. It knocks them all out, steals a ship, and calls up a blue alien, revealing the rebels’ plan and the fact that they’ve captured Governor Pryce.
Apparently Blue Alien hasn’t forwarded the info to the base yet, though, because the rebels order Protocol 13 (they have someone formerly from Imperial Security on their side to confirm the order) and the Empire troops dutifully enter the dome. Unfortunately, the pachycephalosaur enters the dome too.
The rebels are about to launch the dome when a triangular spaceship appears above them. It’s “Thrawn”, the blue guy. Ezra calls up Thrawn: We have all of your troops hostage in the dome! Leave Lothal (the name of the planet, I assume) alone and we’ll let them go. But Thrawn has a counteroffer: all my troops are safe inside the bomb-proof dome. If you don’t surrender, I’ll start bombarding the planet.
Rex is told to raise the planet’s shields, but the pachycephalosaur is in the generator room, disabling it.1 And Thrawn begins firing.
Immediately, Ezra surrenders. Thrawn says to come alone.2 Initially Hera refuses to let Ezra surrender, but he sneaks away while they discuss a plan to raise the shield. He flies up to the Star Destroyer and is brought before Thrawn.
Thrawn gloats about the philosophy of the Jedi, then says he’s going to destroy Lothal.3 He brings Ezra before (a hologram of) the Emperor.
Meanwhile, the three guys (Vizago, Wolf, and someone else) who were attacked by the pachycephalosaurus are woken up by their pet wolves. They get in a transport. The unnamed guy reveals that Ezra gave him a backup plan to call for help on “Frequency Zero”, which nobody uses.
With Stormtroopers outside the command center doors – it turns out the command center is inside the same dome that all the Empire troops retreated to, which makes their plan incredibly stupid – the other rebels prepare to retake the generator room. I don’t catch the plan, though, because I’m too focused on learning names: Hondo is the auteur director with a German accent. Sabine is a generic human woman who Thrawn said used to be an artist. Melch is the tiny guy. The names come a little too fast, so I don’t even yet know Purple Gremlin’s name, much less the half-dozen interchangeable humans.
On the Star Destroyer, the Emperor shows Ezra a Jedi Temple he took from the Lothal. Inside, through a portal, there is a vision of Ezra’s parents, still alive, calling him to dinner. The Emperor says that Ezra can choose to make it real, and Ezra enters the temple.
The rebels break out and head to the generator room. There’s a long and tedious firefight between the rebels and dozens of stormtroopers, but the breakthrough happens when Purple Gremlin (named Zeb) leaps forward and tackles a random stormtrooper over the edge of the railingless gangway that all generator rooms in Star Wars have. This was apparently the one guy out of the two dozen that they needed to get out of the way, and they take the generator.
In the Jedi Temple, the Emperor tells Ezra he just needs to activate the portal. Ezra is tempted, but instead uses the opportunity to say goodbye to his parents, and uses the Force to destroy the temple. In response, the emperor summons three red ninjas, who use laser trident forcefields to hold Ezra in midair while Stormtroopers fire blasters at him. Ezra uses the Force to defeat them as well.
Thrawn fires on the planet, but the rebels reactivate the generators and shields just in time. He tries to call Rukh – the pachycephalosaur – but Rukh is already dead. Ezra then shows up at the command cnter, having apparently fought his way singlehandedly through the entire Star Destroyer.
Just then, the cavalry arrives: hundreds of flying squid named “purrgils”, who come out of hyperspace to attack and destroy the entire Imperial fleet.
“You could’ve told the rest of us,” complains one of the rebels to Ezra over the radio. “I wanted it to be a surprise,” Ezra answers, because the best thing to do when going on a dangerous mission with very little chance of success is not tell your allies about your resources.
Having destroyed all the other ships, the purrgil grab the Star Destroyer and leap into hyperspace with Ezra and Thrawn on board. There is no explanation as to why Ezra needs to go with them; he leaves the other rebels on the planet to handle the rest of their rebellion alone.
The rebels call up “Mart” – I assume the guy who called the purrgil, as he’s the only one left unnamed – and tell him to pick them up. They launch the thrusters to send the dome with all the Imperial troops into space, then blow it up to kill everyone on board. Then they climb out the window to get onto Mart’s escape craft. There’s a pointless and drawn-out battle with stormtroopers just to pad the time, but hooray! Lothal is free! Until the next Star Destroyer arrives to replace them!
Mart plays for the others a recorded message from Ezra, in which he says he’ll explain why he left with the squid… then proceeds not to explain at all, merely saying, “this was my path”. But I regain a bit of respect for the show as one of the rebels acknowledges reality: “The Empire won’t let us keep this planet.” They have to prepare to fight.
Sabine gives a voiceover: the Empire never did end up coming back to the planet, because it had its hands full with the Rebel Alliance elsewhere in the galaxy, and anyway the Emperor died in the battle of Endor. Kallus (whoever that is) discovers to his relief that he hadn’t after all destroyed the Lasat people (whoever they are). Hera and Rex fought in the Battle of Endor. And Hera had a baby… with the droid? I’m sure that’s not what they meant to say, but somehow that’s what I understood.
And Sabine puts on a Mandalorian helmet and goes to search for Ezra to bring him home.
Unresolved questions
Why did Ezra leave?
Is Thrawn dead?
What happens to Lothal in the First Order era?
Ratings
Story: 6/10. A typical plot for a modern animated series. The deus ex machina with the squid was pretty stupid, but the scenario was set up nicely and the heroes’ plan (while foolhardy) made sense in context
Writing: 5/10. Normally a 5 means average writing. But in this case a 5 means an equal balance between terrible writing and excellent writing. I was impressed that the show acknowledged certain inconvenient facts that most shows of this type don’t: that kicking the Empire off the planet probably won’t be the end of their struggle, or that defeating an enemy necessarily involves killing their soldiers by the thousands. And the first conversation between Thrawn and Ezra, in which they go into detail about the differences between Jedi and Empire philosophy, was excellently written.
But at the same time there was plenty of stupid. Ezra and Mart tell nobody about the space squid plan because they “want it to be a surprise” (for the audience, not their allies) - forget about telling the others about the contingency plan in case the two of them get hit by errant shots in the firefight. One character closes a blast door between the heroes and their pursuers, then tells the heroes, ”You should have a clear path to the shield generator now” – even though they already did have a clear path, in that the pursuers were behind them. And while I should hope the previous episodes with the space squid explained why Ezra had to go off with them, the reactions of the others characters (and the lack of explanation from Ezra himself) signal that the real reason was because the series was ending.
Production: 4/10. I referred in last week’s review to a certain type of animation voiceover that sounds a little too eager, too scripted. Where The Bad Batch didn’t suffer from that flaw, Rebels did. In particular Hela, Sabine4, and Mart’s voicework fell well short of the mark, as did several other minor characters. Ezra and Thrawn were fine, and Hondo’s voice was recognizably the great Jim Cummings, who never takes a misstep.
There was nothing particularly noteworthy about the editing or the music. The animation was noticeably more primitive than that of The Bad Batch, but that’s a function of advancing technology, so I don’t mark against it. However, there were a few missteps – like the crowd of Lothalians attacking stormtroopers after they all had supposedly left the planet – that the continuity coordinator or the directors or the storyboard artists should have caught.
Characterization: 4/10. Probably more than it deserves, but the conversation between Thrawn and Ezra was so well-written I can’t help it. Everyone else was a non-entity.
Clarity: 3/10. Plotwise, I understood everything (after a number of false starts, like trying to figure out what was and wasn’t part of the dome). Characterwise, I still don’t know who anybody is, with the exception of visually distinctive characters such as Thrawn and Hondo. I not only don’t know theirnames, faces, and personalities; I’m not even sure how many rebels there are. Could be anywhere from 8 to 20.
Also, I have no understanding of the nature of the portal in the Jedi Temple. Is it a parallel universe? A time machine? A portal to the land of the dead? What exactly was the Emperor offering him, and what did the Emperor have to gain had Ezra said yes?
Closure: 8/10. The decisive victory, accompanied by the destruction of an entire army, makes this a natural end to the story. But the extra closure provided by Ezra’s departure was blatantly tacked on, not to mention the niggling feeling that the Empire is still out there and liable to return in enough force to defeat them. That’s where the final voiceover comes to the rescue: to the show’s credit, it addressed the question of the Empire’s return head-on, not just by avoiding the issue (“Oh, conveniently they never came back”) but by preparing for the issue with some trepidation (“We’ll have to fight them off again”) and only then revealing that it all turned out okay. In contrast to Good Trouble’s finale, the writers put in the effort to make the viewer nervous about the future before announcing the happily-ever-after.
Do I want to watch the series now?
As I said in my The Bad Batch review, I’ve never been too interested in Star Wars. And Rebels is of noticeably lower quality. If I do decide to delve into the Star Wars universe, I’ll be watching that before this.
How did he get there? Wasn’t he in the dome?
What? He’s just letting the other rebels go?
You owe me ten bucks.
After writing this, I looked up the actors and was surprised to discover Sabine was voiced by Tiya Sircar. Sircar was excellent playing two essentially opposite characters in The Good Place. So either she’s much better at in-person acting, or her performance in Rebels is merely the result of bad direction.
great one as always.
thanks for making this too, I admit I suggested this just because I hoped to see how chaotic it could have gotten with all the characrers they end up having in the final battle and subplots being resolved in rapid succession, turns out, a lot of it!
the only reason why Ezra has to leave is that he is stuck on the space ship, this way they defeat the bad guy without killing him (Ezra).
Last thing, Hera didn't (thankfully) have a kid with the droid, she got him with the only main character from the series to have died (a few episodes before the finale), but I was hoping for that too to also be a source of confusion, which it was.
this was a fun read for the finale of a great series, thanks again and see you next week.