Last night, a few episodes ahead of where I’m at in the podcast A More Civilized Age, I finished Season 2 of Star Wars: Rebels. At this point, I’ve finally caught up to the latest episode of AMCA and will now need to slow down my watching speed to match the podcast’s pace. Which is incredibly tough given where Season 2 ends and how badly I want to immediately stop writing this blog post so I can watch another few episodes at least. Maybe a whole season. Wouldn’t be the first time I sat down to dip my toe into something and wound up watching the whole season instead. I can’t really afford to do that, in terms of my need for sleep and mental, emotional, and physical rest, so it’s probably a good thing that I have something preventing me from diving into season 3. Even though I really want to just turn the show on and keep watching until I’m out of seasons to watch. Honestly, I’m not sure if I’m going to be able to stay strong and pace myself alongside AMCA like I originally planned to. I haven’t been this invested in a show in ages, not with the same level of emotional investment and burning curiosity, anyway. I mean, I’ve watched plenty of anime over the last couple years by sitting down each week to watch the newest episodes as each of them was released, but I was mostly just enjoying the ride. This time, with Star Wars: Rebels, I’m dying to know what happens next. Waiting is a genuine struggle and that’s saying something because I rarely struggle with impatience.
To put it plainly, you should watch this show if you’re a fan of Star Wars. If I hadn’t already watched the first season of Andor, this would be my favorite Star Wars media. It’s so well done, on average, that I can’t think of a single episode that felt like a let-down during the second season. Sure, it doesn’t have the towering peaks that The Clone Wars had, but it also doesn’t have the fathomless valleys. It is consistently good, consistently interesting, and does the unfortunately rare work of taking the time to do justice to all of its major characters (with one major exception, but that’s hopefully going to be fixed in future seasons with future Sabine arcs). If you think this show is interesting and want to check it out, I advise going to do that immediately and not reading past this point because there will be spoilers. There can’t not be spoilers. Too much happened for there to not be spoilers.
I was surprised to see the two Inquisitors we’d met in Season 2 get so ruthlessly and abruptly cut down. I mean, I get it. It really highlights the power of Maul, who reappears for the last two episodes of the season, as he is able to swiftly strike down foes that gave our more light-aligned friends, Kanan and Ahsoka, so much trouble. Not that either of them really gave Ahsoka trouble, I supposed, when she first met them. It just so effectively highlights the differences in style between Jedi and Sith. A Sith will absolutely go for the kill as quickly as possible while a Jedi rarely will. A Jedi would rather get their foe to surrender or, at worst, remove a limb. Only when they have no other option do the Jedi seem to accept actually killing someone. So when Maul teams up with our light-sided crew, it was both surprising and not that surprising to see him quickly cut down the foes that had been giving our heroes so much trouble this season. Honestly, I was more surprised that Ahsoka and Kanan didn’t say anything when Maul killed the Fifth Brother. Maybe they knew he was probably about to betray them, or maybe they stayed focused on the last Inquisitor to avoid in-fighting while their common enemy was still around. Regardless of the reason, the unceremonious nature of the Inquisitor’s deaths felt brutal and shocking after we spent so much time with them over the course of the season.
What these last two episodes of the second season of the show do is firmly establish that one of the major stakes of the show is what will ultimately happen to Ezra. We’ve seen him tempted by the power offered by the dark side of the force multiple times in the past, along with the fear and anger he feels that continues to grow throughout the show. We get a very close look at it in season 2 especially, after he learns that his parents died in a prison riot that allowed many others to escape imperial capture. In the episodes leading to that moment and in the episodes following it, we see Ezra’s growing power and competence as they are brought to bear against foes that stand between him and his goals, almost always as he expresses some form of frustration, impatience, or anger. In the finale, we see that all bear fruit as the temptation Kanan sees in Ezra is teased out by Maul (Formerly Darth Maul but still very much aligned with Sith philosophy despite the implication that he no longer counts himself among their number) who offers Ezra easy access to the power and knowledge the young padawan seeks. By tapping into his anger, Ezra is able to give himself a boost in power and then begins to trust the former Sith Lord who cleverly positions himself as being on Ezra’s side until the very end of the second episode, when he reveals to Kanan and Ahsoka that he is working to recruit Ezra to be his Sith apprentice just as he moves to betray the two older force users.
It’s a powerful and interesting sequence, especially given how the episode ends with Kanan blinded (a thing I knew was about to happen thanks to a spoiler-filled show-header on Disney+ and the fact that the last thing Kanan said to Hera was that they’d see each other again soon), Ezra still exploring the power and knowledge available to him through the dark side and the Sith Holocron he has held onto, and Ahsoka missing in action after her fight with Vader. We catch a glimpse of her in the closing montage, disappearing into what looks like the depths of the Sith Temple these last two episodes took place in and around, and the rebellion is left not knowing her fate. Which seems troubling, given that she was a central figure in it during the early days when it was still a bunch of isolated cells rather than an out and named rebellious force. In retrospect, it almost seems like she knew her time with the rebellion was going to be cut short and had the protagonists go recruit Captain Rex so they’d have another veteran commander around to help out once her support was no longer available, but that just might be me looking for intention amidst the mess that is the decision to take the show where it is. Only time will tell if it was well-plotted and laid out.
What is most troubling about this idea, though–Ahsoka essentially leaving the rebellion behind–is the same topic that the last episode before the two-part finale focuses on: the rebellion has leaned heavily on the power and support of their Jedi allies, so what will the rebellion do when they no longer have Jedi to help them out? In this episode, as Kanan and Ezra prepare themselves to follow up on a recommendation given to Ezra by a vision of Master Yoda and then to track down the Inquisitors who keep finding Kanan and Ezra no matter what they do, Hera makes a point of telling the rest of the crew that they need to prepare themselves to work without the group’s two Jedi companions at their side. This goes poorly quite quickly, given that the non-Jedi and the Jedi split up while trying to find Captain Rex who’d been kidnapped by some strange giant spider beasts and that blasters were only effective if you managed to hit the spider-creatures in the eye. In fact, the non-Jedi crew gets completely trapped and only manage to escape once the Jedi show up to cut a path out. The whole episode would have ended with our heroes getting eaten if they didn’t have the Jedi to help them out. This doesn’t bode well for the crew, a point that gets somewhat ignored at the end, in favor of an emotional farewell between Kanan and Hera.
This also doesn’t bode well for the whole rebellion, since we’re going into season 3 with Ahsoka missing, Kanan likely still blinded, and Ezra now shouldering the burden once shared by three force-sensitive champions, of which he was the least experienced, as he begins to flirt more heavily with the temptations of the dark side. I really can’t imagine how its going to turn out and I’m dying to find out. I’ll just have to keep waiting, though, for AMCA’s episodes that release every-other week. If they cover a mix of two and three episodes at a time, that’s eight to ten episodes, which is another four or five months. That’s a long time to be patiently waiting… I guess I’m just glad that I’m this excited about the show. It’s nice to feel this invested in something, even if its an animated show that started airing almost a decade ago. It’s bittersweet to be waiting like this and yet I kind of missed having something like this in my life.