Star Wars Rebels - Season 2 and 'Twilight of the Apprentice'

It's that man again.

So, I've now made it all the way through Season 2 of Star Wars Rebels, and holy crap is it a step up from Season 1. Season 1 wasn't terrible, but... damn.

Season 2 opens after the Siege of Lothal movie, in which Darth Vader handed our heroes their asses in a sack, and much of it follows the small rebel fleets attempts to find refuge and supplies. It also develops the non-Jedi characters a lot. Zeb encounters a group of Lasat refugees and becomes an almost messianic figure from the folklore he has abandoned, while Sabine has a run in with an old partner from her bounty hunting days and Hera is forced to ask her staunchly planetarist father for assistance with stealing a carrier he would rather see destroyed.

We get some new characters as well, as Ahsoka sends the crew of the Ghost to recruit three aging clone troopers who refused Order 66 back in the day. On another return trip to Lothal, the crew even run into a certain royal diplomat from Alderaan. On the other side of the line, with the Grand Inquisitor gone, several of his associates, in particular the hulking Fifth Brother and predatory Seventh Sister take up the chase. There is even character development among the Imperials, as Agent Kallus gets caught in an enemy mine situation with Zeb, revealing much of his background, including both an early run in with a Lasat who massacred his squad, and that his bo rifle was given to him by a Lasat he defeated in single combat, not seized as a trophy from the fallen.

Hell, the astromech droid Chopper even gets his own hero for a day episode in which he gets left behind and befriends an Imperial inventory droid every bit as surly and gleefully sociopathic as he is.

Back in the days of the Old Republic, when everything was shiny.

And this is not to say that the Jedi get no development. Kanan continues to train Ezra, who also begins to find his own way, with a particular gift for contacting the minds of animals. Concerned that the Inquisitors keep finding them, they travel to a Jedi temple to meditate, where Ezra encounters Master Yoda and is told to seek out Malachor and Ahsoka realises the true identity of Vader. Most importantly, perhaps, Kanan confronts a Jedi Temple Guard who tells him that if he fights Vader and the Inquisitors, he will fail and Ezra will fall to the Dark Side. When Kanan ultimately submits to the Guard he is declared a Jedi Knight and the Guard reveals that he is the Force Spirit of the Grand Inquisitor.

This leads on to the final double episode, 'Twilight of the Apprentice', in which Ahsoka, Kanan and Ezra travel to Malachor and find a subterranean complex where the participants in a great battle have been turned to stone, leaving only their lightsabers. As Kanan and Ahsoka pursue an Inquisitor named Eighth Brother, Ezra encounters an old man who gives his name as Old Master. He leads Ezra to the Sith temple at the heart of the complex, and encourages the boy to embrace his passions to give him the strength to lift its doors. As they travel, he constantly assures Ezra that the only way to defeat the Sith is to think and act like them. Once Ezra reveals his own name, the Old Master gives his: Maul.

Kanan and Ahsoka battle the Inquisitors, reaching the temple just as Ezra and Maul emerge with the temple's treasure, a Sith holocron holding all knowledge of the Sith and acting as a key to activate the temple. In uneasy truce, they set out to the temple summit. Ezra and Maul are separated from the others. Maul force chokes Seventh Sister and encourages Ezra to strike her down, killing her when Ezra refuses. Maul then sends Ezra on while he returns to help the others. He kills Fifth Brother and Eighth dies when he tries to use his damaged lightsaber as a helicopter (because apparently they can do that.)

Symbolism!

Naturally, at this point Maul declares Ezra his apprentice and turns on the Jedi even as Ezra activates the temple, in actuality a Sith battle station of vast power. Ezra tells the temple's intelligence that he seeks knolwedge. What is knowledge? this presence asks rhetorically. Knowledge is power.

Maul blinds Kanan and duels Ahsoka. Kanan dons the mask of a fallen Temple Guard, however, and although fighting blind sends Maul toppling off the temple. In terms of Jedi intuition vs. Sith aggression, I reckon this one counts as a score draw.

Vader comes to take control of the station, effortlessly repelling Ezra's assault. Ahsoka fights Vader and Kanan and Ezra deactivate the station together before retreating to the ship. Ahsoka sends them away as the temple seals, vowing not to leave Anakin again. Vader, half his mask destroyed, tells her that she will die then.

As we close out the season, Vader leaves the temple ruin and we seem to see Ahsoka pass within it. Maul flees Malachor. Kanan and Ezra return to their friends to mourn, but in the last moments the Sith holocron, that no Jedi could access, opens in Ezra's hands.

Season 2 is a huge improvement over Season 1, as I said, but with 'Twilight of the Apprentice' Rebels really knocks it out the park again. It's hard-edged, brutal and dark, but with a touch of the humour and humanity that lifts the main season.

Arrow - 'Blood Debts' and 'A.W.O.L.'

"This is not my happy face."

So, Arrow is back from the mid-season break (has been for a while, I know, but I have a daughter, so screw you,) following up the brutal murder of Felicity Smoak with the shock (unless you'd seen the trailers or noted the SMOAK logo on the former Palmertech building in 2046) not deadness of Felicity Smoak. Instead, she's undergoing rounds of surgery while Ollie is punching badguys only for them to leap to their death rather than betray Damien Darhk.

Ultimately, Ollie plays his last card, tapping Quentin Lance for the location of his meetings with Darhk, only to find it abandoned after a vicious assault by Anarky, the burn-faced revolutionary psychopath once known as Lonnie Machin. Machin represents a particular quandary to Thea, the one who burned his face, and seeing her as his liberator is determined to drive her to embrace her darkness. He's also out for revenge against Darhk.

Once more, full disclosure; he may not actually be referred to as Anarky at
all, but he is using the symbol and the first version of the mask, so I'm
going to go with  it.

A combination of tracking Anarky and Diggle finally connecting with his brother leads to a location, where Machin is about to kill Darhk's family. Team Arrow swoop in to save them. Thea confronts Machin and he escapes when she refuses to kill him. Ollie fights and is once more whupped by Darhk, but spared for saving his family (an action that Mrs Darhk later criticises.)

It turns out that we are still four months short of the grave and Ollie's promise of vengeance, at which point Felicity is very much alive, and only absent the graveside because it is apparently non-wheelchair accessible, so someone else is going to die.

ARGUS Prison Blues

'A.W.O.L.' brings a new threat to Star City in the form of Shadowspire, the Blackwater-esque PMC who recruited Andy Diggle into drug trafficking. They kill a deep cover ARGUS operative trying to contact Lyla, drawing Team Arrow into Amanda Waller's off-books investigation into their activities. As a potential source of information, Andy is moved to a different cell at ARGUS headquarters. We get some of the first scenes of him and John standing next to each other in flashbacks to their time in Afghanistan, and damn there's a height difference there. It's a little distracting, in fact. The flashbacks clarify that John got Andy into the army to try and straighten him out, but that contact with Shadowspire led him deeper into crime.

Smoak vs. Smoak

Meanwhile, Felicity is having a dark night of the soul. Facing the future in a wheelchair, her confidence has taken a hit and she feels that she may no longer have any part in the mission. Her internal turmoil is visualised as her former goth hacker self giving her an earful about her choices and her masks, accusing her of hiding behind the blonde hair and the geek glasses. When push comes to shove, however, she realises that she got into the mission to help people, to do some good after her early hacker career was just raging against the machine. She returns to the lair and embraces her role as the team's hacker and controller.

Shadowspire dummies ARGUS and Team Arrow by pretending to go for a shipment of railguns, instead attacking ARGUS HQ to try to force Waller to open the central vault. When she refuses and proves willing to let her entire staff be murdered, the lead attacker shoots her and turns to Lyla (whose codes apparently were never rescinded during her retirement.)

This I did not see coming, but mostly because the real Amanda Waller would
just have stopped the bullet with her face.

Andy and John pull a double bluff to get into the control room, while Team Arrow attacks from outside and Felicity blocks the vault from opening until the bad guys can be taken down. Team Arrow renew their mission in a somewhat melancholy mood, while Andy moves in with John and Lyla and meets his niece, Sara.

(The grave looks like a grown up size, but I tell you now, if that's Sara Diggle's grave then this series can fuck right off.)

Interestingly, by reversing the Felicity bombshell, the series has given some teeth back to the threat of death. Felicity seemed obvious and that gave us time to brace, but now who knows? I'm guessing Thea, because she has the bloodlust thing and that weird resistance to Darhk's soul-drain mojo, but I'm not at all sure. Killing off Waller just confirmed that she's the real Amanda Waller's skinny and rather rubbish proxy.

Oh, and in other flashback news, Ollie is spared death when Baron Reiter sees the glowing tattoo of John Constantine's spell on his stomach during a flogging. Then in the Diggle brothers' flashback, we learn that Reiter is also the head of Shadowspire. The plot thickens.

Shadowhunters - 'Malec'

"Can we hurry this up? I have a lounge singing gig."

Okay, this episode is seriously called 'Malec', which is not the name of a place, character or event in the episode, it's the name of the Magnus/Alec ship. I appreciate the openness.

This is the wedding episode. Alec and Lydia prepare for their nuptials, while Magnus makes one final play and then helps Clary and Jace to track down the warlock who created Jocelyn's sleep spell.

Jace and Clary are dealing with the fallout of Valentine's bombshell, Jace in particular very badly; perhaps because he is also trying to work out what's up with his much abused parabatai bond to Alec. Ultimately, Isabelle tricks them into talking as the core of Alec's bachelor party and they clear the air considerably. Clary then shows Jace her mother's box of memories of the on she believed dead, convincing him that he was never abandoned.

Simon is still needlessly gleeful about the whole thing. I really don't like him at the moment.

The wedding is officiated by one of the Silent Brothers. If I ever get married, I want an immense celebrant with a booming psychic voice. Round about vow time, Magnus shows up and - as Simon puts it, apparently just in case the audience missed what the writers were trying for - everything goes a bit The Graduate. Lydia is super cool about the whole thing, and even Papa Lightwood is pretty understanding, although Mama is a little bit 'I have no son!'

Lydia opts to head back to Idris with the Cup, but gets coshed on the head by Hodge, who is - dun dun dun! - in league with Valentine (which might be a shocker if you don't know the source material.)

I want to give a reasoned critique here, but I'm still stuck on that 'Malec' thing. I think it pretty much obviates 90% of criticism outright to rock that sort of self-awareness without ever winking at the camera.

Supergirl - 'Blood Bonds'

HahahahaNo.

Picking up from our cliffhanger, Non handily beats Supergirl, but his forces then retreat taking Hank hostage. They offer a trade for Astra, after a scene in which a telepath hilariously tries to extract information from the Martian Manhunter with exactly the same level of success that he used to enjoy in Justice League*. Non also displays a Darth Vader level of management relations expertise, casually offing the telepath for his failure. I strongly suspect that Non will turn out to be a bit of a Kryptonian supremacist on the side.

Max Lord kicks the DEO out of his building, refusing to let them treat it as a crime scene and insisting he'll protect himself. He rebuff's Alex's attempts at peacemaking, essentially ditching her now she isn't useful to him anymore.

"Even when you're right you're a douche about it."

Astra refuses to help Kara, at which point General Sam 'Douchebolt' Lane turns up with a presidential order to take charge of the DEO and get Hank back. This he opts to do by injecting Astra with a solution of Kryptonite.

"We're better than this!" Kara protests.
"We are; they aren't," Lane retorts, because in this man's army (this particular man, I mean) generals aren't required to make sense or be aware of their own hypocrisy.

Astra gives up a location and Lane sends a team, who are all killed by bombs except for one, who is only saved thanks to Supergirl's unauthorised presence on the op.

Most supportive love triangle/bromance ever.

While Kara fends off Cat's attempts to prove that she is Supergirl, James and Wynn launch their own black op to try to break into Max Lord's place and find out what he's up to, with what appears to be a private anti-Kryptonian solution. James gets nabbed and beaten up by Lord, and they are barely able to talk Kara down from going all Justice Lord on his ass. Kara muses that she is beset by a feeling of powerlessness, and is finally able to confront the core of her turmoil: Her aunt's insinuations that her mother let Krypton die.

Thus armed with truth, she is able to get through to Astra and learn that, while Allura did condemn Non and Astra it was not to silence them, but because their methods involved the deaths of innocents. She was committed to saving Krypton, but not at the cost of what made Krypton worth saving.

Finally, Alex and Kara go against Lane's orders to make the hostage exchange. Lane's troops won't fire on Supergirl because she saved one of their own, and the exchange goes off. Non's double-cross is defused by Astra, but not before Kara overhears Alex telling Hank that he may 'have to transform', thus revealing his secret to her.

"Nice to meet me."

"You're from Mars!?"
"You're from Krypton."

Importantly, this allows Kara to deal with at least one of her problems,appearing in front of Cat as herself alongside Supergirl, ably played by our favourite Martian shapeshifter.

After Batman vs. Superman, it's so nice to see a Kryptonian in bright primaries again. In Maxwell Lord and Sam Lane, Supergirl has all the anti-alien suspicion that the film wanted, without having to descend into grim darkness, and maintains Supergirl as a powerful, aspirational figure without having to pitch her as a distant, alien god. Hell, in his fleeting appearances and text messages to his cousin, this series seems to get Superman better than Zack Snyder ever has.

* Seriously, he had a really low hit rate in that show, partly because he has such an awesome power set he has to be forever getting knocked out and shit.

The Shannara Chronicles - 'Pykon'

When discount Armin Shimmerman smiles, run.

We open with Amberle having a gratuitous sexy dream about Wil. Joy.

In order to shave some time off their vital quest, our heroes decide to cut through the nigh-mythical elven fortress of Pykon, where Cephalo claims his parents were held and tortured. I'm not sure if these were his actual parents or his owners or what; not clear how male Rovers be with their folks. Anyway, there's a blizzard coming in, so Moria... I mean Pykon it is.

Pykon turns out to actually exist, and to be being maintained by a creepy elf who looks like a tall version of Principal Snider from Buffy, and his half-elf daughter Mag. He's all 'hey, you're from the King? Welcome in!'

"What a world!"

Back in Arborolon, the Changeling has hidden the king's body and convinces Prince Grumpus that he has totally changed his mind and hey, here's this book of the Druid's that totally talks about the Dagda Mor killing supersword kept in the dungeons here what Allanon never mentioned. Never mid how the king suddenly reads Druid, Prince Grumpus is off to the dungeons with Catania (who is apparently an expert on the palace topography; who knew?) to get the not-at-all-evil 'Warlock Blade'*. Still; it's just for use on the Dagda Mor, right?

So, yeah; having seen Allanon go all black eyes trying to snap Bandon out of his 'my soul is in a freaking demon cage' coma, Prince Grumpus is easily convinced to stab him up a treat with the Warlock Blade, which I think fairly constitutes bad to worse.

In the Breakline, Prince Smugchops, Captain Twofer and Slanter find a bunch of demon-slaughtered gnomes. Slanter steals a horse and rides off, but returns after the two elves have done some routine relationship maundering to say that he's convinced that demons are worse than elves, yo.

"Pass the rufie to the left-hand side."

Amberle and Eretria share a gratuitous PG-13 hot-tub. Sniderelf treats the travelers to a fine meal of stew and rohypnol. Mag takes a drugged bowl to Wil, but bonds with him before he blacks out. Sniderelf hangs the others on hooks and tortures the remaining extras to death before starting on Amberle, angry that her grandfather set him up as Lord High Executioner during the war and then disowned him afterwards. Pykon was redacted and he's been torturing lost travelers - and occasionally raping them, to judge by the presence of Mag - ever since.

Wil convinces Mag to bust him out and Eretria breaks loose by being awesome. Wil shows up and gets a princess snog for his trouble; Eretria does not. The Reaper, being toxic sludge explosion-proof, kicks in the door and kills Captain Dipshit when he tries to hold the narrow way.

Slanter shows his new elf buddies the demon camp and vast army.

Cephalo escapes by zipline, but then cuts the line so that the love triangle and the demon all fall into an icy chasm. The End.

Not the end? Oh well...

* For the uninitiated, the villain of the skipped first book of the series and historical mastermind of all race wars was called the Warlock King.

Agent Carter - 'Hollywood Ending'

"What brings you back to town, sir?"
"I got a contract for all season finales."

It's time for the big showdown as we hit the season finale of Agent Carter.

Jason Wilkes' big boomeroo turns out simply to have expelled the Zero Matter from his body. He is alive and free of its influence, but all of the Zero Matter is now concentrated in its new and much more amenable prophet, Whitney Frost. Vernon Masters is super dead, but just as Peggy and the team look set to join her, Jarvis and Howard Stark turn up.

Stark: Jarvis, you just hit a woman with my car!
Jarvis: I know.
Stark: She's a two-time Oscar nominee.
Jarvis: Miss Frost is quite resilient. She's fine. Trust me.

As much as I worry about Stark turning up and stealing the limelight, hit repartee with Jarvis is always a delight.

With Frost now completely committed to opening a rift and inviting the Zero Matter in to consume the cosmos, Joseph Manfredi decides that the proper and loving action is to follow his Mama's advice and make a deal with the devil. He shows up at Stark's mansion and briefly holds the team at gunpoint before embracing Howard as an old friend. He agrees to distract Whitney long enough for them to copy the notes papering her walls. With Stark, Wilkes and Samberly working on the project and the industrial might of Stark Industries, they can beat her to the punch and, once opened, the rift will draw her like a moth to the flame. Then it's gamma cannon o'clock, close the rift and home for tea and crumpets.

I'm not wild about Peggy getting romance stuff, but at least
we're out of the triangle.

Mostly this goes off all right. Sousa is almost sucked into the rift, but Jarvis sends Stark's flying car into the rift and detonates it and the day is saved. Bereft of Zero Matter, Frost becomes catatonic. In a painfully melancholic moment, Manfredi is warned not to bring her roses because she'll try to use them to reopen her Zero Matter scar, and he sits with her as she hallucinates planning greatness with her late husband.

Speaking of husbands - or potential husbands anyway - Peggy seems to have settled on Sousa, with Wilkes going off to a high-paying gig with Stark. This seems to entail more holiday in LA, although I'm wary of seeing her end up as Sousa's assistant. I guess there's a possibility that the interim between here and Season 3 - if there is one, fingers crossed - would be a somewhat altered version of the original short, leading into proto-SHIELD work with her and Sousa roughly equal. This is a possibility because the New York office is again down a chief, with the freshly redeemed Jack Thompson getting mysteriously plugged in the chest in the closing moments, leaving the gig free for Bradey Whitford's unmitigated douchebag.

I really hope that we get another series of this, not least because it's fun, and also because it's one of the few female led properties in the current MCU. Despite its ups and downs it's been consistently superior to Agents of SHIELD, doing considerably more with less, and I'll always have time for a period piece with snappy suits and Tommy Guns.

Legends of Tomorrow - 'Fail-Safe'

"My shirtless scenes in Arrow were way more fun than this."

While Valentina Vostok* tries to extract the secrets of the Firestorm matrix from Stein, Mick Roary tries and fails to keep nice-guy pretty-boy Ray from getting beaten up in Soviet supermax. The rest of the team starts to put together a rescue plan by strongarming the Bratva and persuading them to help destroy Vandal Savage's operation. Sensing Stein's flagging hope of rescue, Jax has Kendra cut the message 'we're coming' into his arm to be transferred to Stein.

With persuasion and trickery proving ineffective, Savage turns to torture to loosen Stein's tongue; not of Stein, but of Roary and Ray. Ray takes a beating for Roary by taunting their torturer and is left almost comatose.

Sara and Snart infiltrate the prison. Rip gives Sara instructions to kill Stein if necessary, showing her a future projection of Star City destroyed by an army of Soviet Firestorms if the secret is unlocked. Snart suggests that this is a pretty cold-blooded approach, and when Leonard Snart is calling you for being a bastard, you know you're in trouble. Meanwhile Kendra and Jax smart at not being allowed to take part in the rescue since Savage needs them both.

"For the culmination of my military scientific research, I am thinking tight
leather and a low-cut top."

Vostok realises that Firestorm is a binary entity when she sees Stein's arm, and despite his protests that the result will be unstable, she dresses up all sexy (apparently feeling this is a situation for her best clubbing gear,) exposes herself to the thermal core and forces a fusion with Stein to become the first Soviet Firestorm.

Sara declines to kill Stein and Rip allows Kendra and Jax to join the mission, realising that they need to be a team. Snart finds Roary, and Roary refuses to leave Ray to fend for himself.

"He took a beating for me."
"It's Ray; he'd take a beating for a total stranger."

Jax manages to inspire Stein's consciousness to block Vostok's powers and forces him out of the matrix, while Kendra and Rip blow up Savage and his accumulated Firestorm research. With neither a partner nor a quantum splicer, Vostok goes nuclear, bringing the team's kill score into the triple digits. I'm just saying.

It's (not) that man again.

The team chill and discuss what they were and what they are. Sara is no longer an assassin, and Roary isn't a completely self-centred arse; just mostly. The touching moment is interrupted when Kronus pops up and starts shooting missiles at them in the time stream, knocking them into a crash landing in Star City, c.2046. Here they are confronted by a blasted city dominated by the apparently pristine Smoak tower, and a hooded archer who doesn't know them.

Now, the ending confuses me a little. Sara and Ray are all 'Olly; don't you remember us?' which seems odd given that they've been told it's 2046, which means Olly would be sixty two years old, which this guy clearly isn't. Ah well, I guess they're new to this time travel lark.

'Fail-Safe' scores over 'White Knights' by getting more of the team involved. Once more, Ray is the whipping boy, and I hope he can get some proper hero moments later on. Vostok's Soviet rhetoric is an interesting flashback to Cold War movies (she accepts that launching a Firestorm attack would trigger an American nuclear response, but believes that superior Soviet grit would see them emerge from the nuclear winter dominant,) and I was glad that Stein at least admits that the US of his time is imperfect.

Next week, we get our first future trip, so that should be interesting.

* Soviet ice-maiden named after a subglacial Antarctic lake; subtle