Pretty cool.
Season 1 Clone Wars is awful, so if you are enjoying it at all you have a lot to look forward to!
Rebels starts at like Clone Wars season 2/3 quality, but season 2 of Rebels hit the best of Clone Wars quality.
Been catching up on this. Have watched Season 1 and the first 2 episodes of Season 2.
Let me talk about the crates. The goddamned crates.
Time to crate in the pilot episode was maybe two minutes, and almost every action sequence has people pew-pewing from behind crates. Crates often serve as the MacGuffin for a particular episode or sequence. What is with this show and its crate fetish?
My biggest issue is the stilted animation, which pales in comparison to the only other animated shows I’ve watched for the past few years (Avatar and Korra). The action stuff is just so leaden. I wish they would give some thought to better action choreography and environments. Instead, they just make sure to load up every scene with crates, or have people shooting at each other from a few feet apart, which looks ridiculous.
In fact, I present to you a sample scene:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nr2GeWiDrdY
Still, there’s some nice bits, and seeing the Star Wars ships ambling about sure is fun. It feels very much like someone’s home-brew Star Wars tabletop RPG campaign.
I have been catching up on this and really liking it. About to begin season 2…thinking how much the cartoons do the lore much better than Force Awakens did.
I like the animation in this! Also this is Star Wars Firefly which is obvious.
I’m about halfway through S2. So good. The end to season 1, last 2 episodes, are as good, or better, than anything Star Wars since 1980.
So this is a series on the Disney channel? i guess I’ll wait until it’s on a streaming service at some point. Maybe when Disney launches their own streaming service that they announced.
It started out ok but they have really delved into the Star Wars mythos and the series is getting more serious and less Disney as they move forward. They had a pretty good Enemy Mine type episode that showed the Empire as not completely some dark force. There are people in the Empire who believe in what its doing and not everyone in the Empire is some evil bad guy.
So the season 3 premier was yesterday, and was a double episode as is their norm. For all the action the primary focus seemed to be establishing the threads for the season, and setting out what character changes were in store. Overall solid, sets up some potentially rewarding threads, but not quite as good as last seasons opener.
Thrawn was fine. Small role this time, but given series history I’d expect much more. Jan Dodona gets name checked, so I’d expect some of the big players from the original trilogy start to filter in. Mon Mothma anyone?
So has anyone else been watching season 3? There have been some top tier episodes, and a few let downs cough YT-2400 cough but man have they delivered some good stuff. Thrawn has, I feel, lived up to the ‘legends’, and has been used judiciously.
One thing that the show has done particularly well is have a recurring stable of villains that they add depth to, while not turning them in to stooges. Sure, generally, the heroes ‘win’, but frequently of late ‘win’ changes mid mission from objective to simple escape. The villains have some teeth, development, and Thrawn especially you get a sense of what goals he has, and how he is advancing them even in ‘defeat’.
Which is a delicate line for sure. We all know how this story ends, and the timeline is only 3 years BBY (Before Battle of Yavin) right now, we know that the crushing blow never lands. However, despite this, they have managed to make credible threats by managing stakes, and having the Rebels experience setbacks.
Plus I love every time they bring Hondo back. The interactions with Ezra are great. So far the last two episodes have been the best of the season IMO.
But really, I’m excited because of this
Oh yeah
Back in cannon
EDIT: seems spoilers aren’t allowing image links. View this link at your peril then (It’s just a ship)
Saw Gerrera is coming to Rebels and he’s being voiced by Forest Whitaker.
Guess who’s back?
Yeah, as soon as the mid season wrap ended, I knew where this was going. And there is so much there that has me giddy.
Also super glad the Defender wasn’t just a schematic cameo. How terrifying will that be? I hope the answer is: very.
I do wonder how much longer the series is planned for. It seems to be running right up Rogue One’s tailpipe time wise. Of course due to some easter eggs they planted in Rogue One, the series could continue running concurrently with Rogue One and the original trilogy.
Well at their current pace, 1 season roughly translates to 1 year in universe, and given the series is currently at 3 BBY (Before Batle of Yavin), that means they could do 3 seasons before hitting Rogue One.
We also know, definitively, that Hera Syndula, Chopper, and the Ghost make it to at least Rogue One (with some promotions along the way). So another 3 seasons easy. Beyond that it could get dicey, but it is a big universe. Whose to say that the Ghost isn’t doing its own thing elsewhere.
But ending where the series began makes as much thematic sense as anything, as the series really is about the formation of the Rebel Alliance.
So I just got to The Wynkahthu Job, and the moment where this happens:
I was basically in tears. The pacing, the music, the camerawork, it’s like the show finally came together for me. My god it was glorious.
Man that episode was great wasn’t it. Honestly any episode with Hondo or Lando has been top tier.
Oh yeah, I super duper love Hondo so very much.
Hmmm.
Ohhh man. I can’t believe he just pulled her through. I was like, they are going to that thing where the hero can’t save someone because it would wreck the timelines, and she dies all over again. But he just went for it!
Well then you are in luck!
Super spoilers, for the record, but at the end they give like a 30 second preview of the finale, and it’s all Hondo.
So there is only 1 hour left. And a lot of things I expect they’ll tie together. Some we know how it ends, Rogue One tips a few hands, but the big question is one Ezra Bridger. Palpatine called him out by name, which can’t be good for him. Thrawn also is an unresolved ending, that I wonder if we’ll see terminate his relationship to the Empire.
As for this episode? It definitely expands the fore mythos. It also begs a lot of questions about the nature of that temple, since it really seems like it probably is beyond the scope of the Jedi. It also gets closed off. But it brings another aspect to the Emperor, it expands the Force mythos, gives a lesson for Ezra, and has one of the more interesting one shot antagonists in the series.
The episodes definitely gave me a Raiders of the Lost Ark vibe from how Palp is trying to collect and explore various lost artifacts. Which I approve of, it’s an interesting and very plausible aspect for him to have.
Now to see how they land it.