Star Wars: Rebels - The First Half of Season 4

I had it in mind to review this final season of Rebels episode by episode, but the Sky box had other plans and I barely managed to grab the first half - the nine episodes prior to the mid-season break - before the early episodes would have been vanishing from the On Demand lists.

Who wears Stormtrooper armour by choice?

We open with 'Heroes of Mandalore', which is the traditional two-part 'event' opener, for what that means in a season which turns out to have a lot of serial storytelling. Ezra, Kanan and Chopper are helping Clan Wren in their struggle to free the Mandalorians from Imperial rule, which is currently administered by Tiber Saxon. The brother of Gar Saxon, who was killed in a duel with Sabine last season, Tiber is a douchebag of the first water, determined to suck up to the Empire and abandon the distinctive Mandalorian customs. Representative of this, he has swapped his Mandalorian armour for that of a stormtrooper, and when Clan Wren come to rescue Sabine's father, Alrich Wren(1), he deploys 'the Duchess', the weapon whose creation caused Sabine to turn from the Empire and which she thought she had destroyed.

Accused of treachery by many of her allies, including the near-legendary Lady Bo-Katan Kryze(2), Sabine leads a perilous mission to take out the Duchess once and for all. The opportunity to do so turns out to be a trap, intended to force her to perfect the design which Tiber had to reconstruct from the wreck of the prototype. She seems to capitulate, but instead recalibrates the weapon to home on stormtrooper armour, and is only persuaded to refrain from killing the entire garrison by Kryze, who reminds her that she destroyed the weapon not just because it would be used against her people, but because it was a cowardly way to fight: The Imperial way.

 

"Today we celebrate our Independence Day!"

Sabine sabotages the Duchess, which explodes with enough force to scuttle the Star Destroyer it is sitting in. She then hands off the Darksaber to Kryze, effectively making her the leader of traditional Mandalore, before returning with her new family to the Rebellion.

As Ezra last season, it's Sabine's turn for a follicular upgrade, swapping out the punky yellow and pink hair of past seasons for a more sober magenta in recognition of her ascension to a true leadership role. There's also a shift in the relationship between Sabine and Ezra, with the latter frequently protesting - protesting, one might say, too much - that he isn't 'with' Sabine. Kryze has a conversation with Fenn Rau about Sabine's growing confidence and ability, and of course the resurrection of her own horror weapon knocks that a bit, but overall the growth in these characters is impressive for any show, let alone an animated series.

Ezra's hat collection has long been a thing in this series, and I respect that
kind of continuity.

'In the Name of the Rebellion' - another two-parter - takes our heroes home to the Rebel base on Yavin-4. Soon after their arrival, Hera leads the remains of a squad of Y-wings home, critically damaged after a failed supply mission. Mon Mothma and General Dodonna are forced to accept that Saw Gerrera's intel was right: The Imperials have a new relay station which allows them to react too fast to Rebel activity. The crew of the Ghost are thus tasked with hacking the relay to allow the Rebels to listen in on Imperial comms, although Ezra is disappointed to neither be sticking it to the Imperials more directly by blowing up the relay, or better yet going back to liberate Lothal.

The relay mission goes tits up, however, when first an Imperial cruiser and then Gerrera turn up halfway through. Saw shoots up the cruiser in his U-wing and drops explosives onto the relay dish, while the rest of the crew dogfight with TIE Defenders. Ezra - impressed by Saw's 'get shit done' attitude - and Sabine agree to accompany him to try to find out why the cruiser is making deliveries to deep space. Saw turns out to be on the trail of the same thing that was hinted at on Genosis, and believes that the key to unlocking the mystery lies aboard the cruiser. They board, and find a bunch of prisoners and a huge kyber crystal. Saw wants to learn what the Empire are doing with the crystal, and failing that to use it to destroy the ship, but Ezra and Sabine are more focused on saving the prisoners, causing a break between them.

 

Death Troopers.

Saw blows the crystal and Ezra and Sabine flee with the prisoners. Unable to escape into hyperspace, Sabine puts their shuttle on the far side of a star destroyer, which is itself destroyed by the blast from the destabilised crystal(3). The shuttle's engines are blown, but fortunately the Ghost turns up to get them, and Ezra has an object lesson in the perils of direct action.

An interesting side-note on this episode is DT-F16, a female Death Trooper Commander who leads the boots on the ground opposition in the story. She's tough and competent, and I honestly expected her to become a recurring enemy moving forward. It was only after she was killed in the denouement that I realised that I had parsed her as more relevant than she was purely because she was a woman, and female voices tend only to be cast in specific, rather than generic roles. This brought home the realisation that it's been a strength of the series that it has not only had far more than the average number of female roles of substance, it is also willing to kill off both these characters, and female generics, as easily as their male counterparts.

Funny hat day was a mixed success.

The remaining five episodes of this half of the season are essentially five parts of a single story, beginning with 'The Occupation'. The crew finally return to Lothal in response to a distress signal, aboard a freighter owned by dodgy 'entrepreneur' Visago. The planet is in near-total lockdown, but Visago swears he can get them in. Despite his promises, they are almost picked up in a customs scan, and Visago is arrested going back for his cargo. 

They try to contact the local rebels at the formerly-friendly tavern Old Jho's, only to find that Jho has been executed for aiding rebel fugitives. The bar has been given to Valen Rudor, Imperial ace pilot and comedy foe from the original animated shorts and first season. They are, however, contacted by a resistance member; one of Ezra's classmates from Stormtrooper School in Season 1. Say what you will about this season, it's doing a lot to pay off series-long set ups regarding the Rebels' ties to Lothal.

Loth-cats.

Escaping into the sewers, the Rebels are led to former Governor-turned-Rebel cell leader Ryder Azadi(4), who in turn take them to witness a test of a new, more advanced TIE Defender prototype in - surprisingly - 'Flight of the Defender', in which they watch a test flight from a ridge, despite the attentions of the local Porg-equivalents: Loth-cats. Determined to get their money's worth from the high-risk insertion onto Lothal, Sabine decides to steal the Defender's flight recorder as well as providing eye witness accounts of its speed and manoeuvrability. Unfortunately, this is when Thrawn and Pryce arrive for a test flight, forcing the Rebels to improvise by blowing shit up and stealing the Defender itself. They strafe the landing ground before leaving, and Ezra takes down three pursuing Interceptors(5) before Sabine recognises a kill-switch and they are able to ditch before all the wings fall off. 

I'm really worried bad things are going to happen.

Trapped in the desert, they hide the Defender's hyperdrive, intending to come back and use it to allow Azadi's clapped out old U-wing to fly them home. They hide themselves in a cave which Ezra finds by following a white Loth-cat. Ezra has been seeing a Loth-wolf - thought to be extinct - all day, and finally it approaches them and puts Sabine to sleep by breathing on her and saying 'sleep', because things are about to get trippy, yo. It carries them to the Rebel camp and drops them off with a cryptic message 'Dume'(6).

And then we have 'Kindred'.

This guy.

Fleeing from Governor Pryce and - far more importantly for EU fans(7) - a gangly master hunter and assassin named Rukh, the Ghosts split up. It's is a major burn for Pryce, for so long the 'competent one' in Thrawn's inner circle, to be shuffled off pursuit duty in favour of an assassin, and that will likely come back to bite the Empire later. It's increasingly apparent - in last Season's finale, here, and in 'Rebel Assault', that one of Thrawn's greatest weaknesses is a failure to take account of his underlings egos. Thus, while Rukh is able to track his quarry across the desert, but not capture Ezra and a resistance fighter single-handed, Pryce dismisses him and takes over herself. The concept of 'horses for courses' is apparently lost on her.

Badass.

Hera and Chopper take a U-Wing loaded with the Defender's hyperdrive to get word to the Alliance of the threat posed by the new fighter, while the rest of the group buy time. Hera escapes the Imperial blockade by punching into hyperspace through a hangar, because she's awesome, but guided by Rukh's unerring nose, the Imperials close in on the remaining Rebels. At the last, a group of Loth-wolves appear and lead them to a tunnel. As Imperial bombs begin to pound the mountains above them, the wolves seem to lead their charges through what might be hyperspace, or something, because that is a thing that Loth-wolves can do. The Rebels emerge to realise they have travelled to the far side of the planet.

Dances with Loth-wolves.

Ezra helps Kanan to explore the cave they have emerged into, which shows visitors from space - possibly Jedi - and Loth-wolves working together. They speculate on the past of Lothal, and also that the Empire may be doing something far worse to Lothal than merely building factories. Kanan, having previously pondered with Hera the way in which the Ghost's crew seem repeatedly to be drawn back to Lothal - meeting Ezra, working with Azadi, escorting princesses and scoundrels, even adopting a Lothal design as the emblem of the Rebellion - feels that the Loth-wolves are strongly tied to the Force, and in particular to the larger energy system of Lothal. He is also surprised when the wolf repeats 'Dume, which it turns out is his real name: Caleb Dume.

Magic space wolves. Of course.

Kindred is a weird episode, I'm not going to say otherwise. There's a dramatic shift to the hardcore mystical which the show, indeed the franchise, has typically avoided. There has always been that element, except when someone tries to write it off as 'midichlorians', but it was always in the background. There's something about it that almost feels more in keeping with Avatar: The Last Airbender than with Star Wars, although it jibes surprisingly well with past developments on Rebels itself, in particular Kanan and Ezra's experiences in the Lothal Jedi temple. In addition, Kanan gets to be wise and intuitive, and Hera gets to be a total badass, which it turns out is a great division of labour for them.

"Nice piece of heavy plant you've got here. Shame is someone were to... set
fire to it."

We're on sounder footing with 'Crawler Commanders', in which the crew once more cross paths with the Galactic Mining Guild. Needing to get a message out to coordinate with Hera's attack on the TIE Defender factory, they hijack a mining crawler for its long-ranger transceiver. Unfortunately, the crawler's captain is a jobsworth on the scale of oft-dynamited railway employee Woodcock in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and chooses to make a fight of it. Kanan and Zeb free the crawler's slaves - including Visago - and defeat the captain and his foreman, as well as weathering an Imperial inspection.

Badass space battles.

This leads into 'Rebel Assault', in which the Alliance launches its doomed attack on Lothal(9). The ground team take out the air defence towers, and the X-Wings carve a path through the standard TIE Fighters. The Defender presents a bit more of a challenge, cutting down a pair of X-Wings, but despite the Defender Elite's greater agility and armament, Hera is able to deftly destroy her opponent after luring the enemy ace in front of a Star Destroyer's turbolasers. Unfortunately, on entering the atmosphere the strike force encounters a vast second wave of TIEs, leading to an unexpectedly harrowing scene in which the ground team watches the entire strike force plunge in flames from the sky. Thrawn sends Rukh to hunt down any surviving pilots, and especially Hera.

Big ass wolves.

Kanan sends the rest of the ground team on, while he turns back to help Hera, only to be blocked by a Loth wolf. Hera, meanwhile, joins up with Mart Mattin, the late Commander Sato's nephew and erstwhile leader of Iron Squadron. They are able to elude Rukh once - after Hera manages to actually go a few rounds with a Noghri, absorbing enough of his focus for Chopper to taser him - and destroy a scout walker guarding a sewer hatch, but the hunter attacks again and Hera is forced to send Chopper and Mart away before being captured. The midseason finale closes with Kanan swearing to rescue Hera.

Star Wars: Rebels goes from strength to strength, and looks set to go out on a high note, although I admit to some concern about the upcoming season finale. We know from Rogue One that at least Hera and the Ghost will make it to the Battle of Scarif, but I'm concerned that the series might go for a TPK to make way for the status quo of the original trilogy. While Rogue One established that you can kill all of your characters in a Star Wars movie and still turn up a good un(10), I am firmly set against an ending which kills the characters of this story in the service of someone else's.

(1) Voiced by Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, Alrich is an artist who adopted the surname of his more martially adept wife on marriage. I like this guy.

(2) Nerd favourite Katee Sackhoff, returning from The Clone Wars.

(3) Killing Cham Sindulla's nemesis, Slavin.

(4) Clancy Brown. Man, this voice cast...

(5) Thrawn notes that if Hera were flying the Defender, she would have made much shorter work of the Interceptors; the first, but by no means last time in this run of episodes that he reiterates his recognition of Hera's skills.

(6) Or, if you're watching and not reading, the altogether more pessimistic: 'Doom'.

(7) The ones who aren't too busy complaining that the Empire shouldn't have TIE Defenders, nor the Rebel Alliance(8) A-Wings this early on.

(8) I'm sorry; 'Alliance to Restore the Republic.'

(9) Doomed because that the events of the end of Rogue One constituted their first significant victory in the field is literally the first thing we ever learned about Star Wars.

(10) YMMV.