Rebels 4x13-14
Jan. 24th, 2022 09:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jedi_of_urth posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
tori_reviewsRebels 4x13 – A World Between Worlds
Yeah, I should definitely have treated these as a two-parter, although I quite possibly have even less to say about this one. Or at least, fewer things in the story itself to comment on, I have plenty about the story I’m going to get into.
Because, as a concept, the World Between Worlds needs some talking about. I don’t hate it; I kind of wish I did and I suspect a lot of people do, but in concept I think it has potential.
However, I hate that it was introduced on this show. Because this show can’t even scratch the surface of the potential and implications of such an ability.
I can see how it could make sense within the Star Wars verse and with the Force to have a transcendent plane of existence where one can move to any time and place. I don’t love creating that space, I dislike how high the magic system of the Force has gotten over the years, but there is a certain logic to how it fits into this universe.
But if they’re going to do that, *do something* with it. Spend more than five minutes discussing the huge potential this place offers. How many people could they theoretically save? And that’s just pulling people out of Time before they die; what about changing the past? They certainly imply that it can be done from TWBW but then don’t really ask the question if the Force can abide a paradox like that.
Also, I don’t buy the explanation for not being able to save Kanan. Properly timed, they could totally do it. It’s just Ezra isn’t that smart and Ahsoka’s pretty depressed right now (and much more accustomed to the idea of Jedi she cares about dying).
The threat of Palpatine gaining access to TWBW should have been a primary part of the plot. It should have been what put a timer on figuring out more of what’s possible in the space between spaces. That would have made the choice to not save Kanan less of a lesson, and more furthering the sacrifice. Because they don’t know if they’ll ever be able to try again, but they have to choose the future over the past.
Speaking of that; apart from throwing in a few lines of OT dialog, TWBW seems to mostly stretch backwards instead of covering all time. Now, a place like this should be infinite and Ezra can be only seeing a small portion of it, but it doesn’t set up its rules very well; which might be fine if the story was more focused on how incomprehensibly vast *EVERYTHING* in time and space is. But…it’s not about that. It’s very structured; and also badly designed, but I blame that on the art team and this being a show for children. But it’s not even really expressed three dimensionally, when it requires at least fourth dimensional reasoning.
I’m also very confused by what happens to Ahsoka. When she went back through the portal, what time did she arrive in? The minutes or hours later than she spent talking to Ezra (during which Anakin/Vader presumably looked around with a very confused look on his mask); is she back in the ‘present’ of the series (in which case I have a lot of questions about where she is during the OT and why she and Luke don’t meet up); does she end up missing the whole OT timeframe and jump a decade into the future? I’m reading a very fun fanfic where she ends up in the past and ends up creating a whole alternate universe (there probably a lot of such fanfics out there).
Tied in with that, Ahsoka just about has to miss the OT, and Ezra might have to now too; because Ahsoka knows about Anakin, and she kinda sorta told Ezra, although he probably didn’t pick up on it.
What does Vader think happened? It would be an interesting dramatic irony, if Ezra reaching in and pulling Ahsoka out of a locked room, was how the Emperor learned that there was a world beyond worlds with a power he wanted to gain access to, and so ended up prompting this very encounter (look, I like time loops, it’s kind of my jam).
This may be one of the clearest uses of Ezra as an audience surrogate that we’ve had in a while. Only, in doing so, what the show seems to be telling the audience is ‘don’t think about it too much.’ They wanted to change Ahsoka’s apparent fate and brush off thoughts that Kanan can come back. And while they technically accomplished that much, I don’t think they did either very well, and they didn’t do any of the literally infinite other things that could be done with this thing they concocted.
Also…I have questions about how the Temple actually works. I’ve always hated how magic the Temple is in ways that I don’t think make sense with the Force. But this is going even farther with it, so I still don’t like it much. Also, tying it to the depiction of the Mortus family I find…awkward. In a way, this is giving Dark Brother a power within the Jedi Temple, and I don’t think that works conceptually. This takes me back to how much the Mortus arc seems to be very pro grey-Jedi, which I could say allows for Brother to be part of the equation, but this show hasn’t been very pro grey.
And, to circle back to Kanan…I don’t like this explanation for the Dume wolf unless there is a lot more to the story. Because there is still a non-linear time aspect to what would have happened, and there are still all those previously mentioned weird things around how Kanan’s story wrapped up. Also, I feel like Hera gets very short-changed here. She’s very much been the emotional core of the death of Kanan story, but there’s not any resolution for her.
I have a lot of conflicted feelings towards this episode/pair of episodes. Beyond how lackluster the introduction of TWBW was, I can’t put my finger on just what the problem is; and TWBW problems aren’t really connected to how…flat the rest of the story seems. At this point I don’t think it’s going to come to me either, but I got some of my gripes out I guess.
Rebels 4x14 – A Fool's Hope
Well, this is clearly just a lead-up to the finale, but since that is already a two-parter, I might as well review this one at least a little bit.
This is something of an episode where I kind of wish I could turn my brain off and enjoy the action a bit more, because it’s basically all pretty brain-dead action. Even baring that, I’m sure I could enjoy it more if I could enjoy anything Ezra does, but because I have such a low opinion of his character, I can’t enjoy this.
To start with, Ryder’s betrayal was almost too obvious a red herring. In the middle of the episode I actually wondered if I was tripping over my genre savviness, because if this was luring Pryce into an ambush, it was looking like a really terrible plan. And it was a terrible plan that really shouldn’t have worked, but we’ll come back to that. At the moment I’m just annoyed because using Ryder to draw Pryce and co. into a fight doesn’t make the Rebels look smart, it’s such an obvious play that all it does is make the Imperials look extra stupid. And I get that Pryce has always been pretty stupid and just riding Thrawn’s abilities to rise to the level of mildly competent, but the victory isn’t worth anything if it comes against such a terrible opponent.
To divert topics a bit, this shows how uninteresting this show’s heroes are. Because I don’t care whether the villains in a good superhero movie make any sense, because I care about the hero and what the antagonist does to them. But here, at best I don’t care about the heroes, and sometimes I actively hate them. So without making the characters suddenly more interesting, the story really needs to make the conflict interesting and this is not.
Because I don’t see how this plan worked, or was supposed to work, or could be expected to work. Or even what the ultimate point of it would be; since Pryce is such an idiot that leaving her in place would probably drag Thrawn down when the big fight comes. So really, removing her from that side of the board makes Thrawn stronger. And then the plan hinged on two deus ex machina (what would be the plural of that?); Hera being able to get back at just the right time, and the wolves turning up through the magic tunnel when the episode even establishes that Ezra doesn’t really command them or even have much in the way of communication with them.
Also, I think I hate the loth-wolves too. Admittedly that may be heavily influenced by my opinion of Ezra who they are mostly used with, as I didn’t hate them so much when Kanan was the one working with the wolves more. They’re poorly established creatures and not at all characters in their own right; the most interesting thing the show could do is show them in conflict with Ezra, or make it suspicious that they’re using him as much as he thinks he’s using them. But instead they’re just magic tools the writers cooked up to use when a deus ex machina as needed.
This show is allergic to anything that hints at complexity. And there’s no time left for them to learn.
Yeah, I should definitely have treated these as a two-parter, although I quite possibly have even less to say about this one. Or at least, fewer things in the story itself to comment on, I have plenty about the story I’m going to get into.
Because, as a concept, the World Between Worlds needs some talking about. I don’t hate it; I kind of wish I did and I suspect a lot of people do, but in concept I think it has potential.
However, I hate that it was introduced on this show. Because this show can’t even scratch the surface of the potential and implications of such an ability.
I can see how it could make sense within the Star Wars verse and with the Force to have a transcendent plane of existence where one can move to any time and place. I don’t love creating that space, I dislike how high the magic system of the Force has gotten over the years, but there is a certain logic to how it fits into this universe.
But if they’re going to do that, *do something* with it. Spend more than five minutes discussing the huge potential this place offers. How many people could they theoretically save? And that’s just pulling people out of Time before they die; what about changing the past? They certainly imply that it can be done from TWBW but then don’t really ask the question if the Force can abide a paradox like that.
Also, I don’t buy the explanation for not being able to save Kanan. Properly timed, they could totally do it. It’s just Ezra isn’t that smart and Ahsoka’s pretty depressed right now (and much more accustomed to the idea of Jedi she cares about dying).
The threat of Palpatine gaining access to TWBW should have been a primary part of the plot. It should have been what put a timer on figuring out more of what’s possible in the space between spaces. That would have made the choice to not save Kanan less of a lesson, and more furthering the sacrifice. Because they don’t know if they’ll ever be able to try again, but they have to choose the future over the past.
Speaking of that; apart from throwing in a few lines of OT dialog, TWBW seems to mostly stretch backwards instead of covering all time. Now, a place like this should be infinite and Ezra can be only seeing a small portion of it, but it doesn’t set up its rules very well; which might be fine if the story was more focused on how incomprehensibly vast *EVERYTHING* in time and space is. But…it’s not about that. It’s very structured; and also badly designed, but I blame that on the art team and this being a show for children. But it’s not even really expressed three dimensionally, when it requires at least fourth dimensional reasoning.
I’m also very confused by what happens to Ahsoka. When she went back through the portal, what time did she arrive in? The minutes or hours later than she spent talking to Ezra (during which Anakin/Vader presumably looked around with a very confused look on his mask); is she back in the ‘present’ of the series (in which case I have a lot of questions about where she is during the OT and why she and Luke don’t meet up); does she end up missing the whole OT timeframe and jump a decade into the future? I’m reading a very fun fanfic where she ends up in the past and ends up creating a whole alternate universe (there probably a lot of such fanfics out there).
Tied in with that, Ahsoka just about has to miss the OT, and Ezra might have to now too; because Ahsoka knows about Anakin, and she kinda sorta told Ezra, although he probably didn’t pick up on it.
What does Vader think happened? It would be an interesting dramatic irony, if Ezra reaching in and pulling Ahsoka out of a locked room, was how the Emperor learned that there was a world beyond worlds with a power he wanted to gain access to, and so ended up prompting this very encounter (look, I like time loops, it’s kind of my jam).
This may be one of the clearest uses of Ezra as an audience surrogate that we’ve had in a while. Only, in doing so, what the show seems to be telling the audience is ‘don’t think about it too much.’ They wanted to change Ahsoka’s apparent fate and brush off thoughts that Kanan can come back. And while they technically accomplished that much, I don’t think they did either very well, and they didn’t do any of the literally infinite other things that could be done with this thing they concocted.
Also…I have questions about how the Temple actually works. I’ve always hated how magic the Temple is in ways that I don’t think make sense with the Force. But this is going even farther with it, so I still don’t like it much. Also, tying it to the depiction of the Mortus family I find…awkward. In a way, this is giving Dark Brother a power within the Jedi Temple, and I don’t think that works conceptually. This takes me back to how much the Mortus arc seems to be very pro grey-Jedi, which I could say allows for Brother to be part of the equation, but this show hasn’t been very pro grey.
And, to circle back to Kanan…I don’t like this explanation for the Dume wolf unless there is a lot more to the story. Because there is still a non-linear time aspect to what would have happened, and there are still all those previously mentioned weird things around how Kanan’s story wrapped up. Also, I feel like Hera gets very short-changed here. She’s very much been the emotional core of the death of Kanan story, but there’s not any resolution for her.
I have a lot of conflicted feelings towards this episode/pair of episodes. Beyond how lackluster the introduction of TWBW was, I can’t put my finger on just what the problem is; and TWBW problems aren’t really connected to how…flat the rest of the story seems. At this point I don’t think it’s going to come to me either, but I got some of my gripes out I guess.
Rebels 4x14 – A Fool's Hope
Well, this is clearly just a lead-up to the finale, but since that is already a two-parter, I might as well review this one at least a little bit.
This is something of an episode where I kind of wish I could turn my brain off and enjoy the action a bit more, because it’s basically all pretty brain-dead action. Even baring that, I’m sure I could enjoy it more if I could enjoy anything Ezra does, but because I have such a low opinion of his character, I can’t enjoy this.
To start with, Ryder’s betrayal was almost too obvious a red herring. In the middle of the episode I actually wondered if I was tripping over my genre savviness, because if this was luring Pryce into an ambush, it was looking like a really terrible plan. And it was a terrible plan that really shouldn’t have worked, but we’ll come back to that. At the moment I’m just annoyed because using Ryder to draw Pryce and co. into a fight doesn’t make the Rebels look smart, it’s such an obvious play that all it does is make the Imperials look extra stupid. And I get that Pryce has always been pretty stupid and just riding Thrawn’s abilities to rise to the level of mildly competent, but the victory isn’t worth anything if it comes against such a terrible opponent.
To divert topics a bit, this shows how uninteresting this show’s heroes are. Because I don’t care whether the villains in a good superhero movie make any sense, because I care about the hero and what the antagonist does to them. But here, at best I don’t care about the heroes, and sometimes I actively hate them. So without making the characters suddenly more interesting, the story really needs to make the conflict interesting and this is not.
Because I don’t see how this plan worked, or was supposed to work, or could be expected to work. Or even what the ultimate point of it would be; since Pryce is such an idiot that leaving her in place would probably drag Thrawn down when the big fight comes. So really, removing her from that side of the board makes Thrawn stronger. And then the plan hinged on two deus ex machina (what would be the plural of that?); Hera being able to get back at just the right time, and the wolves turning up through the magic tunnel when the episode even establishes that Ezra doesn’t really command them or even have much in the way of communication with them.
Also, I think I hate the loth-wolves too. Admittedly that may be heavily influenced by my opinion of Ezra who they are mostly used with, as I didn’t hate them so much when Kanan was the one working with the wolves more. They’re poorly established creatures and not at all characters in their own right; the most interesting thing the show could do is show them in conflict with Ezra, or make it suspicious that they’re using him as much as he thinks he’s using them. But instead they’re just magic tools the writers cooked up to use when a deus ex machina as needed.
This show is allergic to anything that hints at complexity. And there’s no time left for them to learn.
