Rebels: 3x03-04
Dec. 3rd, 2021 11:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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tori_reviewsRebels 3x03 – The Antilles Extraction
Well, I’ve managed to scale back on the habit, but this time I have to say that I don’t know quite how to feel about this one. Mostly positively, but enough of my positive feelings are of the ‘at least it’s not Ezra’ variety that I’m not sure quite how I feel about the episode itself.
It’s funny, because while I am glad we got a fairly good episode with Sabine at the center of it, I don’t know that this episode actually did much for Sabine’s character. She’s still basically just there and happens to fit the needs of this plot, not because there’s a story actually about her. It’s not like she’s confronting something about her past with the Imperials, it just serves as a justification why this is her mission.
Me during the escape scene: so let’s see, we have a main character of this show, a very well known movie/EU character, a familiar name from the movie, and an unknown; gee, I wonder which of those pods is going to get shot at? Though that would be less of a problem (I think) if the show itself didn’t act like it was such a foregone conclusion; nobody seems surprised or upset about Rake’s death, and the guys have to have known him fairly well to have gotten into this conspiracy together. Hobbie does at least bring it up, but it doesn’t have any weight to it; maybe if Wedge had been the one to mention it then it would at least have some implication that this is a significant moment to a long lasting character. As is, it has no weight.
Which is kind of what I’m saying about the episode as a whole. It’s weightless, it’s just a thing that happens.
It puts me at a bit of an impasse with my opinion of Sabine. I kind of think if she did get more time as the focus character, she’d feel like as much of a Mary Sue as Ezra is a Gary Stu. But she doesn’t get enough focus for to the larger narrative to bend around her the way it does him. But even when she is the episode’s focus (sort of), she’s kind of an especially competent plank of wood, so she’s not *not* a Mary Sue; she just doesn’t get enough focus to actually be one. I’d love to see her actually challenged, and preferably not prove to be an irredeemable dumbass the way Ezra repeatedly does.
In fact, I think Ezra still somehow gets more character work here than Sabine does, and I don’t like that. Even if it does reassure me that I’m not supposed to like him that much right now. He actually gets a lesson (much as I think it’s delivered poorly, and makes me aware that the helmet on Kanan is a bad choice because I want more expressiveness from him when he’s giving dumb Jedi advice so I know if he’s actually the dumbass or if he’s faking it because he thinks he should) and to play the hero, Nobody has to actually think they’re way though the problem it just kind of works itself out, so I have no idea how any of these characters actually think and weight decisions, they just succeed blandly.
I say that, but the final fight was done well enough to carry some tension in spite of everything (in spite of itself I suppose). Maybe I was hoping on some level they would be captured and there would be a second episode where we got more of a character study. I also kind of expected them to end up with more than two pilots coming with them somehow, they lost six in just this episode, two does not make up those numbers. So basically I wind my way back around to saying this episode is good on the surface, but I’m not finding the depth to really hook into as if it was a good episode.
Rebels 3x04 – Hera's Heroes
I think…I may have liked this one. I’m not sure if I should say that’s surprising or not, I have enough problems with the show that it’s always kind of surprising when I come out pretty sure that I liked something; but this one does check a lot of boxes for the version of this show I prefer to the average episodes.
This episode is a touch misleading, as it seems like a Hera episode, but it’s really Thrawn’s story. So that people who aren’t familiar with how Thrawn works get a clearer picture of this season’s big bad. I mean, *I* put the pieces together fairly quickly that the Imperials had more competent commands this time and the plot involved art stuff that we were on course for Thrawn, but I wouldn’t expect much of the target demographic here to know that.
While this is still a Thrawn who’s been reimagined somewhat to work in a kids show, it does seem that a good chunk of his character remains intact. So far. If you think about it, he was only the active villain for the one trilogy of books so they didn’t have to keep contriving reasons for him to lose but survive. And him letting the Rebels go at the end because they ‘deserved the win’ could easily just be a portent of contrivances to come.
I found this episode sort of confusing in places, because I feel like we’re missing an episode. As I recall, things didn’t exactly end well between Hera and her father the last time he was in a plot, and now they just seem real chummy. How did they get here? How did they patch things up enough to have a trusting working relationship? Hera never exactly seemed super happy with him as a father even before he used them last time, so why does family seem so much more important now? I think there’s probably a fascinating episode that covers all that, but the show didn’t seem to think it was an important one to show the audience.
It's kind of a subtle thing that Sabine is now the second pilot instead of Kanan. Which makes sense, and in some ways I even approve of keeping it subtle; but then I think how little we’ve gotten of Kanan dealing with his blindness, or others having to change the way they act with him, that I wish we would have seen a bit more overt acknowledgement of how things have had to change.
As often happens when I mostly like an episode, I end up without a ton to say. I don’t have a character or relationship that I’m so invested in that I’ll spend ages talking about what the story does with them whether I like it or not. In this case, if I don’t have anything to complain about regarding Ezra, I can just move on.
Well, I’ve managed to scale back on the habit, but this time I have to say that I don’t know quite how to feel about this one. Mostly positively, but enough of my positive feelings are of the ‘at least it’s not Ezra’ variety that I’m not sure quite how I feel about the episode itself.
It’s funny, because while I am glad we got a fairly good episode with Sabine at the center of it, I don’t know that this episode actually did much for Sabine’s character. She’s still basically just there and happens to fit the needs of this plot, not because there’s a story actually about her. It’s not like she’s confronting something about her past with the Imperials, it just serves as a justification why this is her mission.
Me during the escape scene: so let’s see, we have a main character of this show, a very well known movie/EU character, a familiar name from the movie, and an unknown; gee, I wonder which of those pods is going to get shot at? Though that would be less of a problem (I think) if the show itself didn’t act like it was such a foregone conclusion; nobody seems surprised or upset about Rake’s death, and the guys have to have known him fairly well to have gotten into this conspiracy together. Hobbie does at least bring it up, but it doesn’t have any weight to it; maybe if Wedge had been the one to mention it then it would at least have some implication that this is a significant moment to a long lasting character. As is, it has no weight.
Which is kind of what I’m saying about the episode as a whole. It’s weightless, it’s just a thing that happens.
It puts me at a bit of an impasse with my opinion of Sabine. I kind of think if she did get more time as the focus character, she’d feel like as much of a Mary Sue as Ezra is a Gary Stu. But she doesn’t get enough focus for to the larger narrative to bend around her the way it does him. But even when she is the episode’s focus (sort of), she’s kind of an especially competent plank of wood, so she’s not *not* a Mary Sue; she just doesn’t get enough focus to actually be one. I’d love to see her actually challenged, and preferably not prove to be an irredeemable dumbass the way Ezra repeatedly does.
In fact, I think Ezra still somehow gets more character work here than Sabine does, and I don’t like that. Even if it does reassure me that I’m not supposed to like him that much right now. He actually gets a lesson (much as I think it’s delivered poorly, and makes me aware that the helmet on Kanan is a bad choice because I want more expressiveness from him when he’s giving dumb Jedi advice so I know if he’s actually the dumbass or if he’s faking it because he thinks he should) and to play the hero, Nobody has to actually think they’re way though the problem it just kind of works itself out, so I have no idea how any of these characters actually think and weight decisions, they just succeed blandly.
I say that, but the final fight was done well enough to carry some tension in spite of everything (in spite of itself I suppose). Maybe I was hoping on some level they would be captured and there would be a second episode where we got more of a character study. I also kind of expected them to end up with more than two pilots coming with them somehow, they lost six in just this episode, two does not make up those numbers. So basically I wind my way back around to saying this episode is good on the surface, but I’m not finding the depth to really hook into as if it was a good episode.
Rebels 3x04 – Hera's Heroes
I think…I may have liked this one. I’m not sure if I should say that’s surprising or not, I have enough problems with the show that it’s always kind of surprising when I come out pretty sure that I liked something; but this one does check a lot of boxes for the version of this show I prefer to the average episodes.
This episode is a touch misleading, as it seems like a Hera episode, but it’s really Thrawn’s story. So that people who aren’t familiar with how Thrawn works get a clearer picture of this season’s big bad. I mean, *I* put the pieces together fairly quickly that the Imperials had more competent commands this time and the plot involved art stuff that we were on course for Thrawn, but I wouldn’t expect much of the target demographic here to know that.
While this is still a Thrawn who’s been reimagined somewhat to work in a kids show, it does seem that a good chunk of his character remains intact. So far. If you think about it, he was only the active villain for the one trilogy of books so they didn’t have to keep contriving reasons for him to lose but survive. And him letting the Rebels go at the end because they ‘deserved the win’ could easily just be a portent of contrivances to come.
I found this episode sort of confusing in places, because I feel like we’re missing an episode. As I recall, things didn’t exactly end well between Hera and her father the last time he was in a plot, and now they just seem real chummy. How did they get here? How did they patch things up enough to have a trusting working relationship? Hera never exactly seemed super happy with him as a father even before he used them last time, so why does family seem so much more important now? I think there’s probably a fascinating episode that covers all that, but the show didn’t seem to think it was an important one to show the audience.
It's kind of a subtle thing that Sabine is now the second pilot instead of Kanan. Which makes sense, and in some ways I even approve of keeping it subtle; but then I think how little we’ve gotten of Kanan dealing with his blindness, or others having to change the way they act with him, that I wish we would have seen a bit more overt acknowledgement of how things have had to change.
As often happens when I mostly like an episode, I end up without a ton to say. I don’t have a character or relationship that I’m so invested in that I’ll spend ages talking about what the story does with them whether I like it or not. In this case, if I don’t have anything to complain about regarding Ezra, I can just move on.
