Summary
Rebels gets a meaningful wrap up.
Whilst Kathleen Kennedy lives out her days proving South Park right and thinks that forcing another chapter in the much hated sequel trilogy is the right way to go with a director who wants to make a large part of the audience ‘uncomfortable’, Dave Filoni proves that he is the one sane voice left in Star Wars.
I will admit this isn’t a perfect series, the pacing is really all over the place and it takes far too long to get good but once it does it really does. I think it is nice to see the Rebels family back together again and I think seeing Ezra, Eman Esfandi, is still carrying on with the force in his self-imposed exile is a nice parallel to Luke, Mark Hamill, who wanted the Jedi to die.
I think that Rosario Dawson did an okay job as Ahsoka, I am still not sold, but her scenes with Anakin, played by Hayden Christensen, where interesting and compelling especially if you have watched a lot of the previous animated material. However, I thought the best characters here by a country mile are Mary Elizabeth Winstead as Hera and Natasha Liu Bordizzo as Sabine. Winstead plays Hera with the right amounts of maternal feeling but also military prowess that both aspects of the character are realised well, I think the scene in the finale where she gets to meet Ezra again is particularly touching. Bordizzo’s Sabine on the other hand really is the anchor of the series, I think she is a great audience surrogate character and you really buy her quest to save Ezra, I also thought that turning her into a Mandalorian jedi, padawan for now, was a nice touch. I would be interested to see if the show keeps Sabine and Ezra as just friends, I have a feeling there may be another force baby on the way in the coming seasons.
The villains are strong, Thrawn, Lars Mikkelsen, is probably the least strong of the bunch maybe it was just because I didn’t get to see much of him but I thought that he just didn’t have the same menace he did in the shows. Elsbeth, Diana Lee Inosanto, was cool it is night to see more from the Nightsisters hopefully we get to see more of them in the next season. Baylan, played by Rey Stevenson, and Shin, played by Ivanna Sakhno, were both very interesting, I found Baylan’s quest to be very interesting and it is a shame we didn’t get a more definitive answer as to what he was looking for in the final episode. I would like to see flashbacks to his time in the order in the next season, they could do that to get around the tragic real world passing of Stevenson. Shin has a lot of potential to rise to be a Sith Lord in the post original trilogy pre sequel trilogy era, though I think they will have her turn to the light instead.
The plot is mainly just a quest to find Ezra and then to find Thrawn which really isn’t very much, hence the need to pad it out, but I think the season ends off on an interesting note.
Overall, there is still some hope left out there in the Star Wars universe
4/5
Pros.
Hera, Sabine
Seeing the characters reunited
Where the season ends off
More Nightsisters
Cons.
Pacing
Bad costumes/effects at times
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Another Millennial Reviewer 