Well this situation is just getting more and more uncomplicated by the second!
Um, Star Wars rant incoming I’M SORRY!
So I enjoy Star Wars Rebels, but oh man, is it hard to feel like the Empire is much of a threat in the series! Obviously from a narrative point of view, the Empire needs to be at least one step behind the main cast so that they can keep being rebels, but whenever the Empire catches up to them, which has been frequently, they escape again pretty darn easily and it kind of cheapens the drama of fighting a huge galactic super power. In the films, even when the Rebels are winning, they’re bleeding casualties like nobody’s business, and it feels like a real struggle. To be fair, I did love the ‘Siege of Lothal‘ two parter where Vader takes a crack at the main cast. They still escape, but the small rebel fleet supporting them takes a serious beating, and it feels like a major loss and a narrow escape, unlike the most recent episode. In ‘Always Two There Are‘, Ezra, Sabine, and Zeb get ambushed by TWO Sith Inquisitors. Although it is revealed that the Inquisitor from season 1 was their leader, these two are still played up as super intimidating. In the end, though, the Inquisitors do a hilariously sloppy job of securing their prisoners and blunder into an obvious escape plan setup, allowing Ezra and company to just kind of get away without much effort. Yet after their escape, Ezra, Zeb, and Sabine act exasperated, as if escaping from the Inquisitors was as harrowing an experience as escaping from Vader. No it wasn’t, guys! You made the inquisitors look like total chumps, and have, for the time being, at least, robbed this season’s big bads of any intimidation points they’d built up!
Normally I’d just let it slide, but Rebels is making a bad habit of this type of scenario. I think what these big confrontations are hurting for are some casualties, even temporary ones! If the inquisitors had heavily damaged the rebel’s ship as they’d escaped, or if they’d taken one of the main cast out of commission, and the following episode would require our protagonists to seek medical treatment or mechanical support, then at least it would feel like the rebels couldn’t just run into an Inquisitor without incurring some losses. I still dig Star Wars Rebels, and I look forward to each episode. I just really want to LOVE Rebels, but its inability to hold on to the tension between its most dramatic scenes kind of bums me out!
Published on by Alex Kolesar
