Well, we’re back? After a disappointing return with last week’s midseason premiere that wasted two whole episodes on a story that amounted to very little development, this episode features… a bottle episode! Where Zeb, Chopper and AP-5 are left alone on Chopper Base and get up to some hijinks!
Oh boy, there’s going to be some complaining about this one, so let’s just get to it. As always, there are major spoilers for the episode discussed below.
1. Opening With An Empire Strikes Back Reference
I actually really enjoyed the central conceit to this episode and how it’s essentially a tweaked reference to the opening of The Empire Strikes Back. The idea that Thrawn would use this tactic to flush the Rebels out of hiding only for it to blow up (literally) in his face and then, years later, be modified by Vader in his hunt for the Rebels is fascinating to me.
It’s not specifically part of the story, but it’s a connection made by the visual nod in the beginning of the episode that, despite how weak I found this episode overall, made me smile at its inclusion.
2. The Dreaded Bottle Episode?
This episode was off to a wrong foot with me pretty much immediately as it revealed that it would focus solely on Zeb, Chopper and AP-5 with the rest of Ghost crew and Phoenix Squadron doing stuff off screen. This might have flown a couple episode from now, to balance out some larger story arcs, but after how devoid of content that two-part midseason premiere was, I was really hoping for something meatier this episode.
I’ll get into this more in a later point, but this was an episode that barely stretched itself past its initial concept and it showed. This was twenty minutes of hijinks from characters that generally only work in small doses. Especially Zeb. This was, apparently, a chance to bring Zeb back to his days as a Captain and commander, but his innate character traits make him so aloof and Generic Muscle Character that it’s hard to take him seriously in this episode. He’s either supposed to be the capable leader defending the base with little support or a belaboured comic relief character who accidentally jeopardises the whole operation through his bumbling and needs to fix it before the others get back and the writing can’t decide which it likes better.
3. AP-5 Finally Comes Back
That being said, it was nice for some of these side characters Rebels has been folding into the cast to actually get some time to shine. I think, outside of one or two bit appearances, this is the first we’ve really seen of AP-5 since the start of Season 3 and it genuinely made me wish to see more of him. While I don’t expect him to be a part of away missions, his banter with Chopper, reminiscent of a meaner version of R2-D2 and C-3PO, actually makes Chopper a more tolerable character as it focuses the Mean Girls-style cattiness on the other characters and allows them to have genuinely funny moments.
I’d like to see more of AP-5 whenever episodes feature Chopper Base and integrate him more into the regular cast if only because it retroactively makes his introductory episodes seem worth it in the long run.
4. This Is Just The Iron Giant, Except… Y’know, Less Giant
Oh boy, have you ever seen a piece of media try to reference another piece of media only for that reference to be so obvious that it basically signals how the entire story is going to play out? As soon as I saw the dent in the Imperial droid’s head, I saw this whole episode play out in my mind, from the Imperial droid being mistaken for a friend to the sudden turnabout to the fact that his limbs and chest extend when he’s in attack mode.
Because it was just The Iron Giant. And I think what frustrates me about this is that it didn’t really have much to say other than “Hey, this droid is like the robot from The Iron Giant! Isn’t that neat?” And like, sure, it’s neat, and once that second act of the episode gets going, it becomes a genuinely tense thriller as Zeb and co. hunt down the droid, but I was expecting for the episode to have more to say than that.
Continued below5. Waiting For A Twist That Never Came
Which brings me to the same point I’ve had throughout this entire series: what was accomplished by this episode? Not a whole lot. I spent the entirety of the last five or six minutes of this episode waiting for something, anything to happen that would surprise me. Any kind of twist, any kind of revelation that would deepen the story being told. But nope, this most this episode amounted to is that Thrawn’s search for the Rebels has been narrowed down to 97 planets. It’s almost like when they were coming up with this episode, they sketched out a good ten minutes of content after realising they hadn’t put Ralph McQuarrie’s original C-3PO concept in the show yet and then decide to just pad that out with slapstick comedy and tack on a scene at the end to make it seem important.
Jesus, I know I must sound like a broken record by now, but what is happening to this show? This season was supposed to be the one that saw the spark of war flame into the fully fledged Galactic Civil War. It was supposed to take our small band of Rebels and place them into a conflict with the Empire on a Galactic scale. Instead, we get an animated bottle episode. Does this show just not have the budget to support that scale of story? Because I wish they’d just give up pretending, revert back to a Season 1 style and stop stringing us along with this promise of a grand conflict with Thrawn.
