Welcome back to another Five Thoughts roundup on Star Wars: Imperials. This week, the crew of Chrimaera run into a bump in the road on their hunt for those criminal Rebels: one amongst them is a spy!
Okay, I don’t know how much longer I can keep that up so let’s just dive right into our Five Thoughts on this great episode, shall we? Spoilers below.
1. A New Perspective, Literally
This was an episode was, supposedly, people had be asking for since Season 1 and I have to admit that I did not realise that this is something I wanted. To have an entire episode focus on the Imperial characters is a great change of pace for the series and really illustrated the contrast between them and the rebels they seek. Doing this episode now, with the threat of Kallus’ treachery almost found out, made the tension all the more… intense?
But the icing on the cake was that opening shot from Kallus’ perspective. Apparently Dave Filoni wanted to animate the entire episode this way because he’s a madman and I don’t think that would have necessarily worked. But that first shot literally showcasing the title is the kind of experimental move I wish this show would take more often.
2. Jailbreaking An Imperial Defector
For most of this episode, I thought were really were going to see Kallus defect from the Imperials and join the Rebels. There’s still time for that to happen before the end of the season, mind you, but I genuinely believed this episode was going to conclude with Kallus getting away pretty much scot-free which, admittedly would be a little too easy.
By having Kallus have to dance around Thrawn’s ever closing net, he may have set up the Lieutenant to take the fall, but he’s only gone and exposed his actions to Thrawn. I’m going to talk more about Thrawn’s use in this episode in a bit, but having him orchestrate all of this to expose and manipulate Kallus was a real showcase of his tactical genius.
3. Thrawn In Action
Speaking of Thrawn, this was easily his best episode yet. While I understand why he’s been play this long con cat-and-mouse game with the Rebels which is finally building to a conclusion, I feel like it ran the risk of making him feel actively behind the Rebels in the early part of the season. His threat, in the audience’s eyes, amounted to a sense of dread and foreboding as we knew something was chasing the Rebels. However, allowing the Rebels to continually win in order to gather information on them is something that might work in a novel, but in a TV show it was hard not to see him as ineffectual.
Thankfully, this episode went a long way in turning that around and making him a much more active antagonist. He still has the charm and wit and tactical genius that makes him a foreboding presence, but we saw that he’s a physical threat as well and that he’s able to play this long game and get exactly what he wanted. If this episode was a microcosm of the season’s structure as a whole, I cannot wait to see how the finale plays out.
4. Tinker, Tailor, Rebel, Imperial
As I mentioned, seeing an episode from the Imperial perspective and watching Kallus try to outthink Thrawn and pin the Lieutenant as the Rebel spy all the while dodging Governor Pryce and Colonel Yularen (who had a nice cameo tying his Clone Wars appearance to his original appearance in A New Hope) was really cool. This is the kind of episode that really needs to be tightly scripted and structured to work so the audience clearly knows every characters’ stance, allegiance and how they’re all playing each other.
It’s an elaborate cat-and-mouse game and I’m really glad the episode pulled out all the stops to make it work. If this episode had fallen back on some of the lazier writing we’ve seen crop up this season, I think it would have made for a massive disappointment. As it stands, I think this will go down as a highlight of the show just for how different an episode it was.
Continued below5. What Season 3 Should Have Been
I’ve been, let’s say, somewhat harsh on Season 3 and I think a lot of that comes down to how much of a step up I found the second season of Rebels. I recently rewatched the entire show up to the current episodes with my girlfriend and I was reminded of how large the jump in scope and scale was. It would have been, admittedly, hard to follow that up, but with how good the last three episodes have been, I find myself wondering just what the hell happened?
As opposed to the constant threat of the Inquisitors, this season traded up for two iconic villains, Thrawn and Maul, only for them to have very little presence. Maul will have had a grand three appearances by the time the season is over and we’re only just about to get to see Thrawn actually face off with the Rebels. With no real constant physical threat to the Rebels, this season mostly consisted of wee one-offs that didn’t really amount to anything because it didn’t further the larger narrative. Episodes like ‘The Wynkathu Job’, ‘Iron Squadron’, ‘Warhead’ and even ‘Ghosts Of Geonosis’ came and went and felt so flat.
Hopefully these past three episode mark a return to quality for the show going forward. Because I can’t hack another ‘Ghosts Of Geonosis.’
