Star Wars: Rebels - 'Jedi Night', 'DUME', 'Wolves and a Door' and 'A World Between Worlds'

This is going to hurt, isn't it.

Having finished The Librarians, we're now winding up to the series finale of Star Wars: Rebels, although in this case it's not due to a cancellation, but the natural conclusion of the series in time for Rogue One to pick up the story.

'Jedi Night' follows from 'Rebel Assault', with Hera in Imperial custody and facing off against Grand Admiral Thrawn before being handed off to Governor Pryce for torture. Kanan, Ezra and Sabine infiltrate the Imperial compound using gliders, the younger Rebels securing transport while Kanan - sporting a severe new do - rescues Hera and steals back her kalikori. For the first time, if not ever then certainly in a while, they declare their feelings for one another, and the audience start to get sinking feelings. It's all looking pretty slick, but they reckon without Pryce, who opts to order her AT-AT to fire into an Imperial fuel depot rather than allow them to get away. As the tanks rupture and the fuel ignites, Kanan draws on the Force to hold back the flames, and to push the others into the transport and away from the blast. Kanan, however, is consumed by the blast, leaving the rest of the team bereft.

"You're very tall."

In 'DUME', the Rebels are basically in shock. Hera retreats into herself and Ezra is eaten up by guilt and despair, while Sabine and Zeb decide to head into the city when they realise that the Imperials are throwing a parade. Ezra is contacted by the Loth-wolves, in particular a gigantic wolf that speaks, calling itself Dume, which tells him to return to the Jedi temple. Hera, meanwhile, beats back her own grief by adding to the kalikori, symbolically bringing Kanan into her family. At the city, Zeb and Sabine encounter Rukh, and after a bad start are able to knock him out and send him into the city tied to his own speeder. They also realise that the destruction of the fuel depot has shut down the TIE Defender plant; they have lost many comrades and a dear friend, but their mission succeeded (and indeed, Thrawn angrily contacts Pryce to make it clear that the death of Kanan does not make up for delaying his programme, which may lead to his funding being reallocated to 'Project Stardust'.)

Apparently early Jedi art had some sort of Eastern Orthodox influences.

In 'Wolves and a Door', the team return to the temple, with the aid of the Loth-wolves, and find the site being excavated by Imperial engineers. The doors of the temple are long gone, but a great mural of the Mortis Gods(1) - the Father, the Son and the Daughter - stands on the wall, and Ezra recognises an owl that was often present when Ahsoka was around. Sabine works out that the hand gestures and star patterns in the mural form a kind of lock, which Ezra is able to manipulate using the Force. Sabine is captured but the Imperial Minister in charge of the dig, while Ezra is able to escape through a portal made of art, because that's the sort of thing you expect in Star Wars if your awareness of fantasy culture is such that you think it's fundamentally indistinguishable from Harry Potter.

Huh.

Which leads us to 'A World Between Worlds', in which Ezra finds himself in a strange, extra-dimensional space full of paths and portals, in which he can hear the voices of Master Yoda, Obi-Wan, and also Rey and Kylo. Shit has officially got weird, and I mean weirder than when giant wolves started talking to people and running through hyperspace. While Hera and Zeb rescue Sabine from a heated academic debate with the Minister, Ezra follows an owl and finds a portal which opens onto the climactic fight between Vader and Ahsoka, allowing him to pull Ahsoka away from the fight. Ezra at once sets out to try to save Kanan, but Ahsoka helps him to see that if he does so, all of the Rebels will have died in the fuel dump.

Or Force flames.

The Emperor starts throwing Force lightning into the void after Ahsoka and Ezra, but with an effort they are able to escape; Ahsoka to the aftermath of her duel(2), promising to come and find Ezra, and Ezra to the temple, where Sabine is able to guide him in sealing the void once more. The temple itself collapses into nothing, and the Rebels, their sense of purpose reaffirmed, determine to continue their fight on Lothal.

With three more episodes to go, Rebels has hit us hard in the feels and just got so... goddamn weird. I mean, Star Wars can be a little floaty-mistic sometime, and the Force clearly transcends space-time with its instantaneous communication and prophecies, but damn this was some next level shit. I don't know how well it meshes with stuff from The Clone Wars, but it's pretty left field for a primarily movie fan. I think I like it, but I confess I'm not entirely sure. In the more mundane arena, however, Rebels continues to excel. The team emerge from a tragic loss bloodied but unbowed, while the Imperials are undone once more by their reliance on an absolute command structure and the personal failings of their leadership, in this case Pryce's viciousness and tunnel vision.

I'm going to be so sad to see this series go. I wonder what, if anything, will follow it? I may also try to catch up on The Clone Wars after all this time.

(1) Deistic religion in Star Wars; who knew?

(2) Which explains her seeming appearance after the duel back in Season 2.

The Librarians... - '...and the Hidden Sanctuary', '...and a Town Called Feud', '...and Some Dude Named Jeff', '...and the Trial of One' and '...and the Echoes of Memory'

It is with a heavy heart that I turn to this review, of the final five episodes of The Librarians. The word is out and the series has been cancelled, but at least it got a suitable send off.

Normal.

'...and the Hidden Sanctuary' sees Cassandra taking a sabbatical in the safest town in America, to ty out what a normal life feels like and decide if it might be for her if she had to quit the Library to prevent a civil war. Unfortunately, while the town is almost impossibly safe, her arrival seems to coincide with a breakdown of its perfect order. With the help of a young boy who has realised since moving to the town that something is very wrong, but all the adults too scare to speak about it, she discovers that the town is protected by a bound faerie. Unfortunately, her arrival by magic door has fractured the binding, releasing the now heartily pissed of faerie. Only Cassandra has any chance of stopping the rampage, but first she'll have to convince the town that stoning her won't solve their problems.

"Does it say 'colonel' anywhere on my uniform?"

Then it's time for Jake and Ezekiel to explore the threat of civil war, as they travel to a town called Feud in '...and a Town Called Feud'. Feud is a town that thrives on Civil War tourism, especially around the bloody rift between two brothers, one a Rebel and the other a Union man. The owner of the local museum is determined to reunite the two halves of a locket symbolising their broken fraternal bond, but the ghosts of the dead seem set on perpetuating the struggle. Yet as the Librarians are caught up in the hauntings, all may not be as it seems. Meanwhile, back in the annex, Cassandra treats Jenkins to high tea and they look for more information on the Library civil war, which convinced Cassandra that there truly can be only one.

"Clean up, aisle seven."

Before we hit the big finish, it's Jenkins' - and John Laroquette's - time to shine, in '...and Some Dude Named Jeff'. Jenkins wakes up in a basement room, while his place in the annex has been taken by a slacker named Jeff. Jenkins discovers that Jeff has been studying the Librarians and idolising Jenkins for months, before finding a spell book on the internet which allowed him to Freak Friday his hero. Unfortunately, the book is also one of the most dangerous in existence, and Jenkins must call on the courage and resourcefulness of Jeff's D&D group to aid him in penetrating the Library's back door, in order to find Jeff and reverse the spell, before a monstrous force can destroy... well, pretty much everything.

This could be going better.

With the critical equinox closing in and no decision as to who will anchor the Library to humanity alongside Baird, the Librarians enact a spell to cause the Library to choose in '...and the Trial of One'. Unfortunately, this trial is to the death, and the three Librarians are forced to face their worst nightmares. Escaping these requires them to surrender the memory of their friends, thus allowing them to fight to the death. Baird is able to break out of her own nightmare to aid them, but the Library - perhaps already drifting away from humanity, because it's being a real dick about the whole business - has decreed that the trials will be completed, two Librarians will be killed, or else Jenkins will die. Despite their best efforts, the Librarians can not overcome the Library, and the enacting of this penalty ultimately drives all three to resign.

The Librarians?

Finally, '...and the Echoes of Memory' (and to an extent the final scene of '...and the Trial of One') reveals that Nicole Noone has been playing a long game all along. She kidnapped Flynn and faked his resignation, as well as engineering the loss of Jenkins' immortality to provoke the others to leave, so that she can rule a world in which the Library never was. Such a world is a dystopian mehhole of conformity and bureaucracy. In this monochrome nightmare, Baird struggles to hold onto enough memory of the Library to recruit the three Librarians, find Flynn and somehow undo what Noone has done before it becomes irreversible.

And so, it ends. It ends, in fact, with a reversal of time which undoes most of this season's action, although I like to think that most of it plays out anyway, and especially that Jenkins is still DMing for Jeff and his mates, because that shit was adorable. I also like to think that they were able to convince Derrington Dare that he was full of it, tweak the nose of the Saint of Thieves, and just straight up punch Rasputin in his face. I kind of want to write the revised events as fanfic now, because... I won't deny it, I'm going to miss The Librarians, in all its whimsical and closely plotted glory. It's been a highlight of the television calendar for the last four years, and now it's gone. On the other hand, at least it didn't outstay its welcome and fade away into something I wasn't sorry to see end.