It’s here! The mid-season finale of Star Wars: Resistance is upon us! At least, I think. Information about when the show is airing isn’t exactly the easiest to come by and there’s no episode scheduled for next week that I can find so I’m just going to assume this is the end for now and if you see me here next week talking about a new episode of Resistance, just know that I have thoroughly eaten crow for my assumption.
1. Rendezvous With The Resistance
For a show called Star Wars: Resistance, the episodes that actually deal with Kaz working with the Resistance directly have been few and far between. It’s part of why I couldn’t work out the show’s identity going in because it was called Resistance, but the marketing focused so much on the racing and the Aces of the Colossus over the espionage and the whole war thing.
As much as I enjoy the setting of the Colossus and the racing aspect of the show, there’s just something that feels right about Kaz and Poe and BB-8 and CB-23 going off to fight stormtroopers and dogfight with TIE Fighters. I hope we get more than a few episodes per half season dedicated to this side of the show in the future.
2. A General Makeover
Before Resistance aired, Rachel Butera announced via Twitter that she would be voicing General Leia Organa in the series and she had some rather larger boots to fill. Then she filmed herself mocking the voice of Christine Blasey Ford during the time when Ford was testifying that then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her when they were teenagers. That… didn’t go down well. It’s a bit hard to imagine someone who would mock the voice of someone baring their past trauma to the world in order to stop a man who did horrific things in his past from gaining power to then portray Leia Organa.
There was an assumption, despite Butera’s subsequent erasure of her entire online platform, that it was too late to re-record her lines as Leia for the show’s airing. Then, surprise surprise, the name Carloyn Hennesy shows up in this episode’s credits as Leia. Hennesy voices Leia LEGO Star Wars: All-Stars (which is, apparently, a show that exists) and so long as she doesn’t make some heinous video of herself on the internet, I’m hoping she’s here to stay.
3. Kaz In Action
I’m what you might call a fan of Kazuda Xiono in that I am, surprisingly, not one of those people who hate every fiber of the character’s being for being a bumbling idiot who screws up almost every task set to him. By all rights I should, but I think I’m just so glad that Kaz doesn’t feel like early-Rebels Ezra that I’ll take anything I can get.
That being said, there’s something about this episode that really highlights just how incompetent Kaz is to a comedic level. He’s a good pilot, sure, and relatively intuitive, but seeing the slapstick, cartoonish animation of Kaz as he sprinted down the hallway from the First Order droid and fumbled with his blaster juxtaposed with Poe’s cool and collected actions just went to show that it feels like the two of them are from completely different shows.
With how this episode ends, I hope part of the rest of the season (or, at least, the show overall) becomes about Kaz training to be a better, more competent spy because I’m sure there’s only so far you can take this.
4. Prepare To Engage, Or Two Hell Of A Pilots
A few episodes ago, I talked about how Resistance felt a might toothless in its action because of how bloodless it was. It wasn’t the kind of Star Wars show to have its main characters chased down a corridor amidst blasterfire by a squad of stormtroopers. Oh, how wrong I was. Well, maybe not about the episode in question at the time, but this episode certainly had more of that Star Wars flair.
And I appreciate just how varied the action was here. From sneaking onto a seemingly deserted asteroid base and dealing with its lone droid protector to being hunted by stormtroopers to the dog fight and then to escaping the explosion, the latter half of this episode just had no brakes. And honestly? It’s set the bar for episodes to come. I know that’s typical of mid-season and end-of-season finales, but this is really Resistance firing on all cylinders.
Continued below5. A Growing Resistance
Something that I think is often overlooked in regards to the Sequel Era of Star Wars is the fact that, prior to the Hosnian Cataclysm and the Battle of Starkiller Base, the conflict between the Resistance and the First Order is considered a cold war. It stands in marked difference from the all out, Galactic conflicts of the Clone Wars and the Galactic Civil War and allows for stories with more of a focus on espionage and sabotage. The Resistance and the First Order are painted as roughly similar in scale and so you don’t have two juggernaut factions like the Clone Wars or an oppressed underdog fighting back against an Empire like in the Galactic Civil War, you have two growing ideologies trying to undercut one another before they gain too much power.
We know exactly where both factions end up by the end of The Last Jedi and, a tad disappointingly, the conflict does turn into one reminiscent of the Galactic Civil War, but seeing the two factions in their earliest days here is fascinating. From this episode’s last scene, I certainly hope the rest of the season brings Kaz’s Resistance duties more to the fore and for their to be more of a recruitment angle to his spying missions. Not just to spy on the First Order, but to spread the message of the Resistance as well.
