Chopper take the wheel
(This review contains
spoilers!)
The Rebels have arrived at the
mid-season finale disappointingly early, as Hera leads a strike team to try and
rid Lothal of the Empire for good. Things go awry very quickly however, as
Thrawn plays everyone right into his hand yet again.
If there’s one thing this episode does
right, it’s the action. The opening sequence with the X-Wings is awesome, as is
Hera and Chopper running through the streets of Lothal trying to remain
undetected. The tension they created was great, as with Hera essentially by
herself you felt the Empire was actually a threat, unlike when she’s with the
rest of the Rebels and they just steamroll over them like nothing.
I’m still not feeling Rukh, though. He
seems like such a non-entity villain since we have no background for who he is
and what he does. And it’s not like Rebels
hasn’t done a great job at introducing new villains before. Even if you didn’t
know him from Phantom Menace or The Clone Wars, Darth Maul entered the picture as a force to be reckoned with by
robbing a main character of his sight permanently. More recently, Thrawn was
quickly established as a major strategic powerhouse and an Imperial officer to
be feared. Rukh just feels like a fancy looking baddie with no actual character
or background as to why we should be intimidated by him.
Kanan also had a small but significant
part this week. After the rest of the Rebel squadron crashed into the Lothal
city, Kanan went to help instead of following Ezra and crew to safety. Along
the way he met with the white lothwolf again, who repeated “Dume” to him. Only
this time people on the Star Wars Rebels subreddit
who watch with closed-captioning on are saying it said “Doom” instead. Is the
wolf foretelling Dume’s doom? Or was this a misspell by the closed-captioning
team? Or maybe the lothwolf is really excited to play DOOM on Nintendo Switch? Only time will tell, I suppose.
The episode ends with Hera captured by
the Empire, but Kanan able to get Chopper back in time. Overall, I felt this
mid-season finale really suffered from not being a two-part episode like we’ve
been having since the premiere. It felt way too short overall. Why couldn’t we
get one episode of the squadron fighting Thrawn in space and one episode of
Hera hiding in the streets? It would’ve made things feel a lot less rushed for
me personally. I would’ve much preferred more of this instead of the stupid
Mandalore episode getting two parts or the random sandcrawler episode last
week.
In any case, I was satisfied with what
we got. The action especially was on point this week, and I was also glad they
didn’t shy away from inserting some new details on the season’s arching mystery
in here too. I still think this episode would’ve benefitted from a little bit
of extra time (22 minutes to be precise) to really give it the depth and
quality a mid-season finale deserves.
FINAL SCORE
7/10
Good
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