We’re back! With Rogue One out of the way, it’s time for the third season of Rebels to begin its second half by going back to where it all began in a two part, double-sized premiere. Well, where the Death Star began. I’m talking about Geonosis.
Last we saw of Geonosis, it was even more of a desolate wasteland than normal and seemingly without life. Here, the Ghost crew goes to investigate just what happened to Geonosis and encounter some interesting faces along the way.
As always, there will be spoilers discussed below so make sure you watched the episode before reading any further. Strap yourselves in, people, the one is a doozy.
1. Closing In On Rogue One
This season has been a bit… iffy. To me, there’s been a major lack of an ongoing story arc and more a focus on single, one-and-done episodes that didn’t really accomplish much other than having the Ghost crew get some new equipment for Chopper Base or a new recruit. Despite Thrawn being touted as the season’s Big Bad, his tendency to wait and plan has left the first half with some time to fill.
I also felt like the show was holding something back, and now we know why. The further Rebels progresses, the more it will come in line with the timeline of Rogue One and this episode was the first links to that. Not only did we see Saw Gerrera team up with the Ghost crew, but we got more information (kind of) about what took place on Geonosis when we last saw it in Season Two.
I can only hope that with Rogue One out of the way, Rebels can finally let loose and become the show we were promised.
2. Bridging The Saw Gap
Saw Gerrera’s appearance here was… interesting, to say the least. While I think many of us were expecting an explanation as to how he went from noble freedom fighter to paranoid delusional extremist, I don’t think I expected the explanation to be that he was always unhinged. Maybe it’s something to do with Forest Whittaker’s incessant chuckling or the way the writing had Saw change motivation roughly eight times per scene, but it was hard to get a handle on him even here.
I think the most egregious example was in the second part, when they finally get Click Clack on the Ghost and Saw proclaims that he and the Jedi have a deal to take “The Bug” back to Chopper Base to interrogate him, I guess, for… killing Saw’s team? Somehow? Then, off screen, Saw suddenly decides to take Click Clack hostage and steal the Phantom in order to… take Click Clack somewhere?
I applaud bringing in Forest Whittaker to reprise the character and he did a great job with the voice work, but the writing was all over the place and the character’s motivation so scattered that it was hard to get a read on him.
3. A Friendly Geonosian
Speaking of Click Clack, this was super weird! I honestly expected more to come from this character than an explanation of why there was a new Geonosian Queen in the “Darth Vader” comic, but I guess not. This was another incredibly weird plot thread and one where I’m not sure what the message was. Click Clack supposedly wiped out Saw’s entire squad (which was, like, a lot of people judging by the discarded helmets) somehow, but the episode kind of just forgot about that in order to have Click Clack become the most red herring character I’ve seen in a long time.
I feel like this kind of bait and switch where the viewer thinks he’s drawing the Death Star in the sand, but he’s actually drawing the queen egg (or the pesticide containers, I guess?) only to just fuck off underground would have worked better before Rogue One had come out and we hadn’t found out exactly what had happened on Geonosis in Catalyst.
This had a lot of potential, especially over two episodes, that just never amounted to anything.
4. Fighting Vertically
I’ve been hard on this episode, and I’m going to get a lot worse in the next point, but I did want to highlight something I really enjoyed: the fight down the vertical shaft. It was a really inventive action scene that made use of a unique setting and showed off the different characters’ abilities in that kind of a situation. It especially allowed Sabine to show off her skills with the a jumppack in a way that we haven’t seen in a while and allowed her to go toe to toe with a whole squadron of Jumptroopers largely singlehandedly.
Continued belowIt’s scenes like these where Rebels really shines and I only wished there had been more actual action throughout these two episodes as opposed to one major setpiece (not including the escape) and a whole lot of walking and talking.
5. The Pacing Of Rebels
So, I’ve been rewatching The Clone Wars over the past year as I’ve shown it to my girlfriend, and one of the things that’s struck in seeing that and Rebels concurrently is the difference in pacing. Clone Wars operated under the philosophy that a 20 minute episode should feel like a short Star Wars movie. They would contain action, drama and often furthered the characterisation of its main cast of characters while exploring new parts of the galaxy and the conflicts there within the scope of the Clone War itself. On a season level, the scope of the story was broken down into different perspectives: the Jedi, the Clones, the Droids, the Senators and the Bounty Hunters. It was expansive and so each episode was incredibly fast paced, cramming in as much content as they could into just 20 minutes. This lead to episodes like ‘Jedi Crash’ rivaling even the movies for excitement.
Rebels seems to want to continue that philosophy, but doesn’t know how to make it work. For one, the cast of characters is incredibly slimmed down. There’s five main characters the show follows and, outside of Ezra and Kanan, they’re pretty much the same people they were in the first season. They’ve had their own episodes every now and then, but they mostly explored their backstory instead of pushing their development. Hera, especially, feels stagnant despite being the highest ranking member of the team. For two, the placement of the show puts the stories just before the break out of the Galactic Civil War meaning the Rebellion is little more than a collection of fighter squadrons hoping to disrupt Imperial operations more than a fleet of capital ships taking the fight to the Empire. For three, it doesn’t utilise its time well. This was a two-part, 40 minute premiere that spent the entire first half stalling in order for the one interesting thing in the episode to happen right at the cliffhanger.
This double-sized mid-season premiere exemplified all the problems holding Rebels back. It was forty minutes of nothing. Sure, seeing Forest Whittaker reprise the role of a younger Saw to see the in between of his days on Onderon and his fight on Jedha, but, like I said, he’s too scattered to really feel connected to. The mission to actually discover what happened on Geonosis was a bust on both a story and a viewer level. On a story level, the Ghost crew failed in their mission to bring back evidence of Imperial genocide against the Geonosians while failing to answer the mystery of what was being built on the construction platforms they found back in ‘The Honorable Ones’. On a viewer level, we know because of Catalyst, the Rogue One prequel novel, that the Death Star was what was being built and that the sterilization of Geonosis occurred when the project was moved to Scarif. This is frustratingly mostly because this forty minutes amounted to little more than a filling in of the gaps where nobody learned anything and nothing was accomplished.
To end this episode with a character literally saying “I guess that will have to do” was lazy at best and insulting at worst. I expect better than this.
