Ok ok, so without spoiling itThrawn and Ezra were taken off the board in Rebels in a way that doesn’t inspire the same ugh that would happen with Palpatine. It makes complete sense they’d be alive, but man they’ve mucked it up so much with the death fakeouts in Obi Wan and TRoS so I can get how that’s where it first goes.
As for casting: Hera is great. Also it seems like they’re setting up a whole other galaxy? Did I read that wrong?
Seconding that Rebels made Thrawn and Ezra’s fates clear in a vague way, if that makes sense. Ambiguous in-universe, but for everyone watching and knowing how stories work... less so. And while it makes sense that if someone disappeared in intense circumstances for 9 years and haven’t come back, they are “dead”, this premiere didn’t explicitly said any of that.
Especially unambiguous for the viewers considering Rebels ended with a flash-forward to a scene from the first of these two episodes. Even at the time it was clear that the fates of Ezra and Thrawn were designed to be a loose end that would get a follow up someday. They were designed to be "dead" in a "either they didn't survive or were hyperspaced so far away that they functionally ceased to exist to their friends" kind of way, which intentionally leaves the possibility of a return open.
Most of the actor’s performances aren’t very animated (no pun intended). Don’t know how much of that is the darker tone, the change from animation to live action, or the direction their given.
Happy to have you on the beat, Josh! I did watch Rebels (mostly out of completionism, though I learned to enjoy some of its charms), and glad you recognized Tiya Sircar who I was very sad wasn’t carried over. Clancy Brown was, though! Like with Sackhoff, I do get a little dopamine from a voice actor reprising their role in live action.
Even as expositiony as these episodes where... yeah. Hinging the emotional and plot stakes on characters this show hasn’t established is an off move, that could be balanced out by deeper character work. But also this show needs the pew pew and (fun!) lightsaber fights, so we don’t get that. Going from the highs of Andor to the lows of Obi-wan, this will have to sit by being in the middle. Also this is definitely part of streaming’s loss of the episode as a unit, couldn’t tell you what either was about. Just what happened in them.
If found the eps thrilling as a Rebels fan, but did find myself wondering what it would be like to watch without having that story knowledge. This feels like a show that's leaning to heaviest on the animated story history so far! It is worth noting, though, that in the Rebels finale (SPOILERS) Ezra and Thrawn basically get shot off into the unknown by space whales, so no one could really check if they're dead!
I watched this without having watched any of the prerequisites except for the Mandalorian and it sure wasn't great! But honestly I couldn't tell whether the problem was my not understanding the characters well or the weird stilted dialogue at times
My only disappointment with this review is that you didn't take the opportunity to quote the Mel Brooks classic Spaceballs (a parody of the original trilogy) and say that "Evil will always triumph, because good is dumb."
I honestly kind of love how this and The Mandalorian have taken that approach to the New Republic. The Force Awakens didn't really delve into the creation of the First Order and Rise of Skywalker didn't even try to explain the Final Order (I have a Grand Unified Theory of JJ Abrams as a storyteller but the short version is that he's too concerned with creating thrills to take time to fit backstory to his plotting), so for these shows to answer the question "how did two gigantic Imperial offshoots get created right under the New Republic's nose?" with "because the New Republic is a bunch of ineffectual boobs more in love with the idea of governing than the actual duty of governing and who thought that Operation Paperclipping the entire Imperial bureaucratic apparatus was a super swell idea" is darkly amusing and certainly goes a long way towards spackling over some of the Sequel Trilogy's sloppier storytelling elements.
A solid opening, good character interactions between the main three and even a suggested mass murder by Chopper. Hera saying that the bad guys had abilities like Ahsoka and not mentioning Kanan at all was a little awkward but understandable, there's only so much lore you can shoehorn in without starting the show with a chyron that just says "WATCH REBELS BEFORE THIS". My only worry is that the entire show will be about the journey to find Ezra and Thrawn and we'll only get them in the finale, but the main characters are engaging enough, and it's Filoni so I'm sure we'll be meeting back up with many old friends along the way.
It's a simple and nice bit of world building (that pretty much all of the star wars shows like to do) to include people like the former-imperial workers still being loyal to the empire. Whenever a big bad is defeated in a lot of tv shows and movies, it's as if the head vampire was killed so all of the people under him died too or everyone left just submits to the new good guy order right away. All the way back in ROTJ, they killed the emperor and had a huge fucking party across the galaxy like everything was alright now, but all of those soldiers and other generals would obviously still be out there. Peter Jacobson's line basically saying "what did you expect, those people all worked here beforehand, were we just supposed to fire them?" is exactly the kind of stuff that happens after a war.
My guess is they'll at least get to Ezra before the finale since the actor who plays Ezra is credited with the main cast. I'm sure weirder contractual/billing things have happened in the past, but it would be odd to have him on that kind of contract to appear as nothing but a 30 second holo-recording for most of the season
I finished a rewatch of the last few episodes of Rebels season 4 and I’m glad I did! One scene is episode 2 is a direct lift from the Rebels series finale. I’m in this for the run because I’m a completionist. I’m cautiously optimistic.
This show seems pretty beholden to Rebels so far -- way more than any of the other live-action Star Wars shows have been to any of the other animated series -- so it'll be interesting to see how that lands for a viewer coming from your critical perspective, Josh! I was never even a huge fan of that particular cartoon, but I still got a thrill to recognize familiar elements like the characters or the Lothal setting (and lothcats!) here. Wonder if we'll get to see the other surviving main character Zeb this season, as he's already popped up for a cameo on The Mandalorian.
For as much as people complain about technobabble in the sci-fi genre, I've long felt that a key weakness of the various Star Wars titles is a reluctance to ever provide a satisfactory degree of exposition. Why exactly would that map device identify where Thrawn and Ezra are? Why isn't Morgan able to access it herself before now, if she's able to tell Ahsoka how to do it? A couple more lines of dialogue could have cleared all that up, but as is, it's just a macguffin that doesn't make much sense on the face of things. (Your own confusion about where Thrawn is and why he's a big deal is another instance of this -- these episodes at least make a point of underlining Ezra's connection to his former crew, but they're relying entirely on people coming into the show with prior background on the off-screen villain for the stuff about him to land.)
Just like the knife in rise of skywalker, the million year old artifact that explains what happened last Wednesday.
It can be activated only on that open air temple on that one planet over there, so of course it tells you where a Jedi will go, from Lothal, in an emergency no plan warp jump using wild space animals.
Better they not try to explain that. The first Indiana Jones scene looked kind of cool but the Macguffin cannot make any sense
There’s a great Star Wars video game called Knights of the Old Republic that sees you looking for the Star Forge. The map is broken up across different planets.
It’s done in a way where it makes sense that this map would exist. By comparison I don’t understand why there’d be a map to Thrawn given how sudden his disappearance was along with the fact that no one knew where he was taken.
And yeah it was dumb in Rise of Skywalker and a bummer the show didn’t learn from it.
One thing that baffled me: why is there no traffic on the highway Sabine goes speeding back and forth on? What is it for? Is it there just so she can drive on it and look cool?
Aside from the fact that it is 100% functioning as season five of Rebels, the thing that really jumped out at me was how much this feels like a remake of The Rise of Skywalker. I know that Star Wars loves its recurring motifs, but already we've got a presumed dead Imperial leader who might be trying to rebuild the Empire, a mysterious star map leading to his location, a fallen Jedi trying to find him and bring about a new order, and a Jedi with incomplete training getting her old gang together to jump from location to location on what is basically a fetch quest to try and unravel the mystery before it is too late. The difference is that Ahsoka is directly building on four seasons (and really, 11 seasons) of established storytelling to do that whereas The Rise of Skywalker threw out all its established storytelling and tried to cram all of that background into the length of an opening crawl.
Dating back to his work on The Clone Wars, Dave Filoni's thing has always been finding the elements that work in even the most flawed Star Wars films and bringing them to the forefront of his series, thereby making the films play better as a part of the whole (which is still going on here with the continuing portrayal of the New Republic as being ineffectual, in over their head, and too in love with their own righteousness to consider maybe stamping out the remnants of the Empire still existing in government), but this is the first time that it feels like he's just straight up going to try to take something that was flawed and do it better the second time around. Him being listed as the sole writer for all eight episodes is exciting since I don't think there's anybody out there who gets Star Wars quite like he does and who is in a position to highlight those positive elements of flawed works to retroactively improve them, and these two episodes (the second one in particular) really got me excited for the season to come.
I see so much ‘watch these episodes to understand Ashoka’s whole deal’ and that’s fine, I already watched them, I loved her early stuff, she used to kick ass and be very interesting.
I cannot fathom why Sabine Wren, a very competent Mandalorian warrior and materials scientist (who once threw down to be the leader of her people and won), who has no force sensitivity, would take a mid-life traineeship she is not qualified to succeed at, with her people’s traditional worst enemies, and when that fails become a cat lady on a planet that is not her own, mooning over a boy she did not even like that much.
Not why Ahsoka, who left the Jedi order for good reason, would take a 25 year old Mandalorian as apprentice Jedi and call her a ‘padawan’. Anakin was too old as a 5 year old engineer.
I am happy there is a series, but (just like Picard 1), of all the possible ideas to throw these characters at, why repeat these tired threads.
I'm not super impressed with it so far, but the action scenes already feel more vibrant and exciting than all of the non-Vader ones in Obi-Wan. The story is clearly in set-up mode still, but my biggest worry is that I haven't been given much reason to care for our trio of heroes. As another person who hasn't watched Rebels, I feel like I'm missing some character beats that don't land the same when someone just says the situation out loud. I'm still excited for Thrawn though, if only for the Lars Mikkelsen of it all.
Also, the witches of Dathomir have a whole bunch of offworld temples scattered throughout the galaxy now? Until yesterday their whole history dates to 600 BBY, and one planet
One thing I liked about Rebels was how much it DIDN'T require me to dive into the Clone Wars. It diligently did the work of getting you invested in the core cast while finding ways to smuggle in connections to the wider universe. When they brought in Ahsoka they established who she was and how she related to the existing cast without endless exposition or flashbacks.
I'd frankly be OK with this being such a sequel if it didn't take Disney five (!) years to pull this together. I know some of that is COVID and some of that is switching to live action and some of that is a multitude of other complications but... still.
This show probably would play better if it was animated and owned up to being a Rebels follow-up. By trying to appeal to both experts and newbies, I fear that’s going to wind up pleasing no one.
It’s Star Trek Into Darkness all over again. This guy is dangerous because of stuff from non canon material not anything he says or does in the current story.
Dammit, Josh, spoilers: I had no idea Rey was a Skywalker all along.
Noel, I’m just fooling. They confirmed a totally different last name years ago! https://twitter.com/mousterpiece/status/1235409496110854146?s=46&t=tOwBj8PVu2nt44hCkjUgqA
Oh, whew, OK. That's on me then.
Ok ok, so without spoiling itThrawn and Ezra were taken off the board in Rebels in a way that doesn’t inspire the same ugh that would happen with Palpatine. It makes complete sense they’d be alive, but man they’ve mucked it up so much with the death fakeouts in Obi Wan and TRoS so I can get how that’s where it first goes.
As for casting: Hera is great. Also it seems like they’re setting up a whole other galaxy? Did I read that wrong?
Seconding that Rebels made Thrawn and Ezra’s fates clear in a vague way, if that makes sense. Ambiguous in-universe, but for everyone watching and knowing how stories work... less so. And while it makes sense that if someone disappeared in intense circumstances for 9 years and haven’t come back, they are “dead”, this premiere didn’t explicitly said any of that.
Especially unambiguous for the viewers considering Rebels ended with a flash-forward to a scene from the first of these two episodes. Even at the time it was clear that the fates of Ezra and Thrawn were designed to be a loose end that would get a follow up someday. They were designed to be "dead" in a "either they didn't survive or were hyperspaced so far away that they functionally ceased to exist to their friends" kind of way, which intentionally leaves the possibility of a return open.
I'm assuming it's Thrawn's galaxy of origin, which has been detailed somewhat in Zahn's new-canon novels.
I always interpreted it as the same galaxy because there was travel between the empire and his race.
No disrespect intended, but if you watched Rebels, I do t know how you could like this version of Hera. So passionless imho.
Most of the actor’s performances aren’t very animated (no pun intended). Don’t know how much of that is the darker tone, the change from animation to live action, or the direction their given.
Happy to have you on the beat, Josh! I did watch Rebels (mostly out of completionism, though I learned to enjoy some of its charms), and glad you recognized Tiya Sircar who I was very sad wasn’t carried over. Clancy Brown was, though! Like with Sackhoff, I do get a little dopamine from a voice actor reprising their role in live action.
Even as expositiony as these episodes where... yeah. Hinging the emotional and plot stakes on characters this show hasn’t established is an off move, that could be balanced out by deeper character work. But also this show needs the pew pew and (fun!) lightsaber fights, so we don’t get that. Going from the highs of Andor to the lows of Obi-wan, this will have to sit by being in the middle. Also this is definitely part of streaming’s loss of the episode as a unit, couldn’t tell you what either was about. Just what happened in them.
If found the eps thrilling as a Rebels fan, but did find myself wondering what it would be like to watch without having that story knowledge. This feels like a show that's leaning to heaviest on the animated story history so far! It is worth noting, though, that in the Rebels finale (SPOILERS) Ezra and Thrawn basically get shot off into the unknown by space whales, so no one could really check if they're dead!
I watched this without having watched any of the prerequisites except for the Mandalorian and it sure wasn't great! But honestly I couldn't tell whether the problem was my not understanding the characters well or the weird stilted dialogue at times
My only disappointment with this review is that you didn't take the opportunity to quote the Mel Brooks classic Spaceballs (a parody of the original trilogy) and say that "Evil will always triumph, because good is dumb."
I honestly kind of love how this and The Mandalorian have taken that approach to the New Republic. The Force Awakens didn't really delve into the creation of the First Order and Rise of Skywalker didn't even try to explain the Final Order (I have a Grand Unified Theory of JJ Abrams as a storyteller but the short version is that he's too concerned with creating thrills to take time to fit backstory to his plotting), so for these shows to answer the question "how did two gigantic Imperial offshoots get created right under the New Republic's nose?" with "because the New Republic is a bunch of ineffectual boobs more in love with the idea of governing than the actual duty of governing and who thought that Operation Paperclipping the entire Imperial bureaucratic apparatus was a super swell idea" is darkly amusing and certainly goes a long way towards spackling over some of the Sequel Trilogy's sloppier storytelling elements.
A solid opening, good character interactions between the main three and even a suggested mass murder by Chopper. Hera saying that the bad guys had abilities like Ahsoka and not mentioning Kanan at all was a little awkward but understandable, there's only so much lore you can shoehorn in without starting the show with a chyron that just says "WATCH REBELS BEFORE THIS". My only worry is that the entire show will be about the journey to find Ezra and Thrawn and we'll only get them in the finale, but the main characters are engaging enough, and it's Filoni so I'm sure we'll be meeting back up with many old friends along the way.
It's a simple and nice bit of world building (that pretty much all of the star wars shows like to do) to include people like the former-imperial workers still being loyal to the empire. Whenever a big bad is defeated in a lot of tv shows and movies, it's as if the head vampire was killed so all of the people under him died too or everyone left just submits to the new good guy order right away. All the way back in ROTJ, they killed the emperor and had a huge fucking party across the galaxy like everything was alright now, but all of those soldiers and other generals would obviously still be out there. Peter Jacobson's line basically saying "what did you expect, those people all worked here beforehand, were we just supposed to fire them?" is exactly the kind of stuff that happens after a war.
My guess is they'll at least get to Ezra before the finale since the actor who plays Ezra is credited with the main cast. I'm sure weirder contractual/billing things have happened in the past, but it would be odd to have him on that kind of contract to appear as nothing but a 30 second holo-recording for most of the season
We see him briefly via hologram recording in the second episode.
I finished a rewatch of the last few episodes of Rebels season 4 and I’m glad I did! One scene is episode 2 is a direct lift from the Rebels series finale. I’m in this for the run because I’m a completionist. I’m cautiously optimistic.
This show seems pretty beholden to Rebels so far -- way more than any of the other live-action Star Wars shows have been to any of the other animated series -- so it'll be interesting to see how that lands for a viewer coming from your critical perspective, Josh! I was never even a huge fan of that particular cartoon, but I still got a thrill to recognize familiar elements like the characters or the Lothal setting (and lothcats!) here. Wonder if we'll get to see the other surviving main character Zeb this season, as he's already popped up for a cameo on The Mandalorian.
For as much as people complain about technobabble in the sci-fi genre, I've long felt that a key weakness of the various Star Wars titles is a reluctance to ever provide a satisfactory degree of exposition. Why exactly would that map device identify where Thrawn and Ezra are? Why isn't Morgan able to access it herself before now, if she's able to tell Ahsoka how to do it? A couple more lines of dialogue could have cleared all that up, but as is, it's just a macguffin that doesn't make much sense on the face of things. (Your own confusion about where Thrawn is and why he's a big deal is another instance of this -- these episodes at least make a point of underlining Ezra's connection to his former crew, but they're relying entirely on people coming into the show with prior background on the off-screen villain for the stuff about him to land.)
Just like the knife in rise of skywalker, the million year old artifact that explains what happened last Wednesday.
It can be activated only on that open air temple on that one planet over there, so of course it tells you where a Jedi will go, from Lothal, in an emergency no plan warp jump using wild space animals.
Better they not try to explain that. The first Indiana Jones scene looked kind of cool but the Macguffin cannot make any sense
Oh, and please don't forget to include THREE multi-minute scenes of characters silently interacting with it.
There’s a great Star Wars video game called Knights of the Old Republic that sees you looking for the Star Forge. The map is broken up across different planets.
It’s done in a way where it makes sense that this map would exist. By comparison I don’t understand why there’d be a map to Thrawn given how sudden his disappearance was along with the fact that no one knew where he was taken.
And yeah it was dumb in Rise of Skywalker and a bummer the show didn’t learn from it.
One thing that baffled me: why is there no traffic on the highway Sabine goes speeding back and forth on? What is it for? Is it there just so she can drive on it and look cool?
Aside from the fact that it is 100% functioning as season five of Rebels, the thing that really jumped out at me was how much this feels like a remake of The Rise of Skywalker. I know that Star Wars loves its recurring motifs, but already we've got a presumed dead Imperial leader who might be trying to rebuild the Empire, a mysterious star map leading to his location, a fallen Jedi trying to find him and bring about a new order, and a Jedi with incomplete training getting her old gang together to jump from location to location on what is basically a fetch quest to try and unravel the mystery before it is too late. The difference is that Ahsoka is directly building on four seasons (and really, 11 seasons) of established storytelling to do that whereas The Rise of Skywalker threw out all its established storytelling and tried to cram all of that background into the length of an opening crawl.
Dating back to his work on The Clone Wars, Dave Filoni's thing has always been finding the elements that work in even the most flawed Star Wars films and bringing them to the forefront of his series, thereby making the films play better as a part of the whole (which is still going on here with the continuing portrayal of the New Republic as being ineffectual, in over their head, and too in love with their own righteousness to consider maybe stamping out the remnants of the Empire still existing in government), but this is the first time that it feels like he's just straight up going to try to take something that was flawed and do it better the second time around. Him being listed as the sole writer for all eight episodes is exciting since I don't think there's anybody out there who gets Star Wars quite like he does and who is in a position to highlight those positive elements of flawed works to retroactively improve them, and these two episodes (the second one in particular) really got me excited for the season to come.
But more Chopper moving forward, please.
I see so much ‘watch these episodes to understand Ashoka’s whole deal’ and that’s fine, I already watched them, I loved her early stuff, she used to kick ass and be very interesting.
I cannot fathom why Sabine Wren, a very competent Mandalorian warrior and materials scientist (who once threw down to be the leader of her people and won), who has no force sensitivity, would take a mid-life traineeship she is not qualified to succeed at, with her people’s traditional worst enemies, and when that fails become a cat lady on a planet that is not her own, mooning over a boy she did not even like that much.
Not why Ahsoka, who left the Jedi order for good reason, would take a 25 year old Mandalorian as apprentice Jedi and call her a ‘padawan’. Anakin was too old as a 5 year old engineer.
I am happy there is a series, but (just like Picard 1), of all the possible ideas to throw these characters at, why repeat these tired threads.
I'm not super impressed with it so far, but the action scenes already feel more vibrant and exciting than all of the non-Vader ones in Obi-Wan. The story is clearly in set-up mode still, but my biggest worry is that I haven't been given much reason to care for our trio of heroes. As another person who hasn't watched Rebels, I feel like I'm missing some character beats that don't land the same when someone just says the situation out loud. I'm still excited for Thrawn though, if only for the Lars Mikkelsen of it all.
Also, the witches of Dathomir have a whole bunch of offworld temples scattered throughout the galaxy now? Until yesterday their whole history dates to 600 BBY, and one planet
I appreciate your deep knowledge of Dathomirian history. I will simply hope that Merrin shows up and sets Filoni straight
One thing I liked about Rebels was how much it DIDN'T require me to dive into the Clone Wars. It diligently did the work of getting you invested in the core cast while finding ways to smuggle in connections to the wider universe. When they brought in Ahsoka they established who she was and how she related to the existing cast without endless exposition or flashbacks.
I'd frankly be OK with this being such a sequel if it didn't take Disney five (!) years to pull this together. I know some of that is COVID and some of that is switching to live action and some of that is a multitude of other complications but... still.
This show probably would play better if it was animated and owned up to being a Rebels follow-up. By trying to appeal to both experts and newbies, I fear that’s going to wind up pleasing no one.
Tbh I never thought it was clear from just Rebels why Thrawn reappearing would be such a huge blow to the New Republic.
It’s Star Trek Into Darkness all over again. This guy is dangerous because of stuff from non canon material not anything he says or does in the current story.