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I chose to observe Star Wars Day this year by watching Star Wars--that is, A New Hope, the 1977 movie that started it all. I'd been meaning to since watching Andor and since I'd seen many comments from people flatly asserting that Star Wars has no artistic merit and limited entertainment value. Since then, I've been thinking of the reasons why audiences might be losing touch with the franchise.

What are some of the reasons it's hard for people to-day to understand the impact of the first film? One thing that strikes me about it is how much it hinges on Luke finding his way. Luke really is a solidly conceived and executed character. We see his restlessness, his teenage petulance, his longing for escape and something bigger he doesn't quite understand when looking at those twin suns.



It's hard to overstate the importance of John Williams' score which continually broadens the scope of everything we see.

Luke doesn't just want to leave Tatooine, he wants to fight. He wants to join the Imperial Academy like Biggs and it's implied he'll use that as a jumping point to join the Rebel Alliance. Andor makes it clear the kind of daily impact the Empire has on an ordinary citizen but Luke's desire to fight is more fundamental than saving the galaxy or even in acheiving personal validation. He's reckless enough to check out the Sand People after he's already recovered R2D2. He has his big rifle and it seems he's looking for an excuse to fight.

When his aunt and uncle are killed, he's solemn and awed. He doesn't seem to feel much grief, not like he does when Obi-Wan dies.



Obi-Wan and Han Solo present two models for Luke for how he might fit in with society, how he might satisfy his needs while maintaining positive connexions with other people. Obi-Wan dazzles Luke with stories of "crusades" and honourable warfare he embarked upon with Luke's absent father, the original missing male role model. Alec Guinness' performance conveys a profound inner peace Luke knows nothing about but Obi-Wan presents him with a path of wisdom and discipline to achieve it. Meanwhile, Han shows how a man sometimes needs to put his pragmatism ahead of a sense of honour or duty. Ultimately, it's of course Obi-Wan who exerts more influence.

I suppose these things might not connect with younger audiences to-day. The MCU movies tend to be about people who are already grown. But even young Peter Parker is too squeaky clean to have the kind of urges Luke has (Peter Parker in the comics, or the Sam Raimi films, is another story). I suppose it's possible this generation doesn't like stories about a protagonist having a dark side, or stories where such impulses are natural and must be managed and taught to find satisfaction in acceptable ways.



A New Hope is primarily told from Luke's point of view and this is what makes the cantina scene so effective. He'd clearly never seen so many aliens in one place before--not just in terms of species but in terms of people not from his world. The initial audience for Star Wars would have been as bewildered as Luke. Luke has some experience dealing with people. A human from another planet might be mysterious indeed but Luke would have some ready understanding of facial expressions and mannerisms. The cantina drops a sea of new and inscrutable expressions and customs. There are faces he can't read, associations he can't rely on (one guy literally looks like the Devil). Even the humans have peculiar hairstyles and wear strange things.



He calls the Millennium Falcon a piece of junk. How true is that really, though? What is Luke's frame of reference? Probably the equivalent of magazines and catalogues which showcase products in their ideal forms. Han does have a valuable lesson for Luke about what it's like to actually live in the galaxy.

I found myself thinking of Kimetsu no Yaiba, the mega-hit anime franchise. It starts out a lot like Star Wars. The protagonist, Tanjiro, is a teenager who comes home to find his family slaughtered and his sister transformed into a demon. He meets an old master who trains him and he's obliged to go to a world that's culturally alien to him. The substantial difference between Tanjiro and Luke is that Tanjiro is not established with any previous desire to leave home. He was quite content in his domestic lifestyle and now his primary motive is to cure his sister so that they might some day return to a semblance of happy, normal life. It's his sister, Nezuko, who has the violent impulses that must be managed and they're implicitly abominations, causing Tanjiro to feel shame and horror.

Domesticity and creature comforts may be the true religion of Japan but maybe prioritising them is no longer so uniquely Japanese. Maybe people all over the world are more passive than they used to be and the desire to fight and conquer is no longer felt. Or at least, maybe it's no longer consciously acknowledged.

Since it won't be until late August that we get any more MCU or Star Wars shows, I thought this would be a good time to do a ranking of all the Disney+ shows so far (except What If, I still haven't mustered the energy to watch that). I'll avoid heavy spoilers.

Before doing the ranking, I would have thought the MCU shows would rank higher but, for the most part, I realised I still actually prefer the Star Wars shows. The MCU has long been criticised for not being visually interesting while impressive visuals are an essential part of Star Wars. So Star Wars shows with weak visuals tend to rank low on my list. But for both the MCU and Star Wars series, I generally found the shows that worked best tended to focus on character relationships, with an emphasis on focus. When actors and scripts are allowed to build chemistry organically over time, these shows do what television has classically been able to do better than most movies--give you a feeling that you live with these people. The shows that fail often do so because of a lack of this focus, coming across as scattershot and schizophrenic. The problem, in a word, is Disney. Or, in another word, morality. Superhero stories are traditionally stories of very simplistic morality, and so, as Alan Moore has somewhat recently said, they are inherently childish. Although Star Wars is commonly regarded as a story of good versus evil, it really isn't. Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader, the character at the heart of all the George Lucas films, occupies the role of both hero and villain and the films are interesting partly because they explore just what these roles mean. The Disney Star Wars shows have worked better the more they've drifted away from simplistic morality while the MCU shows have faltered the more they've steered closer to simplistic morality. Since this morality is likely composed of corporate memos, it's likely the kind of shallow morality more concerned with how one is supposed to feel than with how one actually does. The Star Wars shows have benefited from Jon Favreau's creative control, even though Faveau himself is not perfect. He does, however, show a good ability to recognise his own mistakes and improve.



12. Falcon and the Winter Soldier

Although the chemistry between the two leads on this series showed some promise early on, and Wyatt Russell's U.S. Agent was outstanding for his moral murkiness, this is easily the worst of the Disney+ shows. Its lack of focus could partially be blamed on rewrites forced by the pandemic (though, in retrospect, having a plot relevant to current events seems like it would have been more of an asset). But the confusing tangle of motives for the characters, particularly the villains, is likely due to more than that and, worst of all, the show was a really bad introduction to the Falcon's new role going forward.



11. Ms. Marvel

This is another one that started well--it started even better than Falcon and the Winter Soldier--but then got completely lost in ridiculous and sterile plot territory. A truly charming lead character is drowned in waters of meaninglessness by the end.



10. The Bad Batch

It's never as interested as Clone Wars was under George Lucas' creative control but certain episodes established and nicely built on the character of Omega. However, many episodes ran into the same problems as Star Wars: Rebels in which formerly lethal threats feel insubstantial, played for broad comedy with characters who don't seem particularly worried.



9. Loki

Once again, this show's biggest asset was chemistry between its characters, in this case between Tom Hiddleston and Owen Wilson. But the show lost focus when it shifted attention to Loki and his female variant. Plot problems that were already apparent early on began to overwhelm the show once Hiddleston and Wilson weren't playing off each other. By the end of the series, Loki's behaviour was wildly out of character for no apparent reason. The scheming Shakespearan character everyone loved from the Thor films was gone with no justification.



8. Obi-Wan Kenobi

The first of the live action Disney+ shows without Jon Favreau's involvement and it shows. The writers don't seem to be particularly interested in Star Wars or the characters and there are many moments of familiar characters doing and saying things that too drastically contradict their previously established personalities (why the hell would Obi-Wan Kenobi give anyone a blaster holster?). A weak sense of stakes established by characters shrugging off fatal lightsabre wounds is only one of the more vivid examples of weak writing. But it did have some strong performances and some late script contributions from Andrew Stanton elevated the final two episodes.



7. WandaVision

I have to admire the boldness of this show's premise and the performances from most of the leads were terrific. Some of the stuff related to the series' villain is great though Monica Rambeau failed to establish herself as interesting enough to be the lead for an MCU film. The show also had the infamous "Boner" fake out, for which it loses a lot of points. But there was some genuine insight into how it explored Wanda's psychology in the end.



6. Moon Knight

Here's an example of great character chemistry that's even more admirable when you consider it's one actor in both roles. The penultimate episode exploring their relationship was truly great. Ethan Hawke gives a nicely nuanced performance as the villain and Konshu is one of the best cgi creations in recent years. Sadly, the female lead is weakly established and the plot is jerked artificially in too many directions by corporate mandates.



5. Hawkeye

Of all the MCU shows, this is the one that most felt like it managed to do what it set out to do. It didn't aim as high as the others maybe, but that's perfectly all right, especially when you've got that great chemistry between Hawkeye and Kate Bishop. The only real complaint I have about this show is in how it took a previously interesting and complex villain and turned him into a simplistic thug. But I'm far from alone in complaining about that so hopefully Disney will listen this time. Otherwise, this is a sweet, cosy little Christmas series.

4. The Mandalorian, season one

There are a lot of problems with how this show conceptualises the Star Wars universe but by the end it does manage to establish truly good characters with interesting relationships. Favreau's interesting casting decisions--particularly Werner Herzog, Bill Burr, and Carl Weathers--pay off big time. Taika Waititi's direction of the series finale elevated it considerably and cinematography by Greg Fraser in a few episodes gave this show the kind of beauty essential to giving Star Wars the sense of awe it ought to have.



3. The Mandalorian, season two

And here's what I'm talking about when I say Favreau is good at learning from his mistakes. He completely abandons the silly "bounty hunter guild" from the first season and a lot of the simplistic morality. This was a season focused on giving us action and adventure in a distant galaxy and at times it was even breathtaking. Robert Rodriguez's episode reintroducing Boba Fett reminded us why Rodriguez is one of the great action directors to come out of 1990s indie cinema.



2. Star Wars Visions

Although this series is a mixed bag, it's altogether a triumph. Unfettered for the most part by Disney's creative mandates, this series truly explored new territory in Star Wars, visually and thematically. "The Elder" is the only piece of Star Wars fiction under Disney that truly reflects an understanding of what the Jedi are supposed to be while "Lop and Ocho" has the kind of pairing of family relationship and pulp adventure that was integral to the original films. This is Star Wars. Although, ironically, it's essential to watch Visions with the Japanese language track. A lot of people discovered for the first time by watching Star Wars: Visions just how bad English dubs of anime tend to be, even with celebrity voice actors.



1. The Book of Boba Fett

This show had heart and made a truly interesting character out of Boba Fett. His integration into a Tusken Raider tribe and the changes it wrought in his personality truly fulfilled the promise of Spaghetti Western via Star Wars that Favreau had teased from the beginning of The Mandalorian. The relationship between Fennec and Boba was nice and subtle, too. I only wish there'd been more time to develop a relationship between Boba and Jennifer Biels. And once again, Robert Rodriguez brought the right kind of attitude for the material. I only hope he returns for season two after internet users orchestrated such a vigorous campaign against him for reasons that had nothing to do with the quality of his work.

It's called "Massacre" but I'd forgotten how nuts this fourth season episode of Clone Wars was. Featuring absolutely no "good" characters, it's the story of a single battle and rout, of the droid army laying seige to a whole civilisation. And not just your average goofy Star Wars alien civilisation, this is the Nightsisters of Dathomir who employ witches and zombies in their defence. Like so many episodes of Clone Wars, it keeps you captivated with the sensation that anything can happen.



It's very cinematic, too, I can imagine it looking great on a movie screen. Directed by Steward Lee and written by Katie Lucas, it returns us to the ongoing troubles of Asajj Ventress (Nika Futterman), former apprentice of Count Dooku (Corey Burton). After failing in her attempts to get revenge on him, Ventress returns to her home world Dathomir to join the fold of the Nightsisters.



She's baptised in a special ceremony before feasting begins. Meanwhile, General Grievous (Matthew Wood) is marshalling his forces for an onslaught. It seems like a one-sided battle until an ancient member of the Nightsisters (Kathleen Gati), hidden safely in a secret chamber, raises an army of zombies.



The Nightsisters are so impressive in this episode it strengthens the impact when they start to lose. You come away from the episode with a new sense of the strength of Grevious and his droids as well as a surprising sadness for the Nightsisters, even if they are a whole population of murderers. Even before the Disney acquisition, making both sides villains was likely the only way the show could get away with something like this. It's a liberating concept, as Quentin Tarantino showed with several of his films.

Clone Wars is available on Disney+.

Twitter Sonnet #1436

The av'rage trek was deemed a lofty myth.
Behind a veil of glowing bugs we dance.
The whispers claimed the nervous ghost's a Sith.
But something mild took the polished chance.
The endless show would never roll the cast.
The thought of broken legs preserved the sea.
A clutch of words was nailed against the mast.
In neutral waters, stronger fish can see.
An easy trap for air was just a can.
The building's height was built around a fall.
The watcher turned to be, of course, a man.
And something moved the mind to build a wall.
Escaping sides create the boundless square.
A billion eyes reflect the Devil's stare.

The final episode of Clone Wars is a great visual treat with pacing that appropriately lingers on its painterly images. From the destruction of the ship's reactor to Ahsoka jumping across falling debris to that lovely snow-swept epilogue. Director Nathaniel Villanueva delivered the goods in spades, it almost didn't matter how empty Dave Filoni's teleplay was.

Beginning immediately after the previous episode, we find Ahsoka (Ashley Eckstein) and Rex (Dee Bradley Baker) fighting their way out of the medbay against their former comrades. Surprisingly, Ahsoka spares a moment to tell Rex to put his blaster on stun because, after all, they don't want to kill any of their friends if they don't have to. When Ahsoka tells Rex that she let Maul (Sam Witwer) free to cause a distraction, Rex's reaction is astonishment. He clearly can't understand why Ahsoka thought this was a remotely good idea.



I think we can all agree with Rex in this reaction. Later, the nonsensical nature of Ahsoka's decision is referred to again in the form of Maul's taunt, reminding her she wanted "chaos". Along with a mention of the fact that Ahsoka is no longer a Jedi, so why should Order 66 even apply to her, a lot of the episode felt strangely like replies to fan criticism. Obviously the whole episode couldn't have been written and produced in one week so it seems to me someone screened the previous episode and then handed Filoni a bunch of notes long before the final season aired. The trouble is, he doesn't seem to have realised that acknowledging the problems isn't enough, especially with a mistake as big as Ahsoka setting Maul free.



There could have been a good scene of Ahsoka realising, in horror, what she'd done. Wondering to herself what she could have expected in sicing one of the galaxy's deadliest, most ruthless Force users on her friends. As it is, her motives are totally ambiguous and her strangely muted emotions make her come across as kind of dumb. We sympathise more with Rex, just as Anakin and Obi-wan seemed more sensible a couple episodes earlier when Ahsoka made that weird argument about how trying to prevent the Separatists from attacking Coruscant and kidnapping the Chancellor was just "playing politics". Again, the basic impression I have is that Dave Filoni has no idea how to write Ahsoka. Which is hardly surprising--before this final season of Clone Wars, he was a credited writer on only one episode, the finale of season two, which was co-written by Drew Z. Greenberg. Why is it, exactly, Dave Filoni has come to be seen as the great talent on Clone Wars and the potential saviour of the franchise?



My suspicion is that, before Disney bought Lucasfilm, Lucas promoted Filoni in order to downplay his own creative involvement. A heavily edited interview between George Lucas and Dave Filoni was released on YouTube last week and it makes clear what a hands-on approach Lucas took to the series.



A key point is when Filoni recollects advice Lucas apparently gave him multiple times:

FILONI: . . . you [Lucas] would watch stuff we did all the time and go, "What are you trying to say? What does that mean?" And I would explain it you and you would say, "That's great. Everything you said, do it there [pointing at the screen] because you're not going to be in people's homes to explain it to them."

Lucas constantly pushed Filoni to do better. Maybe without Lucas around, he doesn't see any reason to go that distance.

Filoni directly mocks Lucas' desire for a story arc about banking regulations, possibly referring to the season three episodes "Heroes on Both Sides" and "Pursuit of Peace". Filoni suggests this is something children can't relate to. I would argue that great children's fiction is often filled with things children have absolutely no frame of reference for. Think about the bank scene in Mary Poppins or the stuff about college and mortgages and taxes in the original Ghostbusters. If kids don't understand it, there's still stuff going on that they can understand--and then, the great part is, as they get older and find themselves confronting these problems, they can think back and maybe the stories they loved as a kid gave them a model they can still look to as adults. And by the way, those are two great episodes--with some terrific action sequences.



Whatever problems the final season may have, it is visually splendid and it will always have years of incredible television behind it.

Rarely has so very little been animated so very well. We already knew the outcome of the conflict on Friday's new Clone Wars. Rebels has already established who lives and dies. That doesn't mean the story can't be interesting--Better Call Saul and, indeed, the Star Wars prequels and earlier episodes of Clone Wars have shown just how great prequels can be. Unfortunately, Dave Filoni sticks mainly to connecting dots in an episode with a distinctly fan-fiction-ish vibe.



The episode begins without narration for once and the opening music sounds very little like Star Wars and quite a lot like the work of the recently deceased Krzysztof Penderecki, best known for his music's inclusion in the scores to The Shining, Twin Peaks, and other films. This gives the episode an eerie tone right off the bat and adds to the ominous quality of Maul (Sam Witwer) hinting at the impending Order 66. Something, again, which would be more effective if Rebels hadn't established Ahsoka's clones as having resisted the order. I hope at least some of the clones she relied on turn.



The question to ask is, what does this story add to what's already in Revenge of the Sith? Obi-Wan (James Arnold Taylor) tells Ahsoka (Ashley Eckstein) about Anakin being asked to spy on the Chancellor and she's angry on Anakin's behalf. She's still loyal to him, which is certainly tragic, but we know she won't have a real confrontation with him until the very unsatisfying episode of Rebels where she meets Darth Vader. She and Maul make an interesting pairing because they're both disillusioned apprentices who have turned their backs on their respective orders. Maul reaching out a hand to Ahsoka seems as though it was meant to evoke Kylo Ren and Rey in Last Jedi--it would have been interesting to see Ahsoka work with Maul for a while. Certainly a lot more interesting than seeing them engage in a fight that goes nowhere and proves nothing. But it sure was well animated.



Even better than Ahsoka and Maul teaming up would be Vader and Ahsoka teaming up. In fact, that would be a great premise for the live action series. Why should Ahsoka be so sure the Empire is the wrong way to go? She doesn't like the Jedi Order. Vader slaughtered the Jedi Order and that's much farther than Ahsoka would go. But what if Vader and Ahsoka were stranded on a planet together or had to work together for some other reason? Maybe Ahsoka would start thinking the Empire makes life more safe and secure for people than the constant volatility of the Clone Wars. She can't redeem Vader, that's Luke's job. She and Vader need another kind of conflict to chew on.

But spare us Maul's undergrad thesis on how "justice is a construct." Oof. Star Wars dialogue is infamously bad but that's pathetic.

Last night's new Clone Wars ended the Bad Batch arc satisfyingly enough with Echo making himself useful and Anakin starting to look a bit more like Vader.



The two stories are an interesting juxtaposition with Echo (Dee Bradley Baker) using his partly mechanised body to assist our heroes while Anakin's (Matt Lanter) decent into the Dark Side will be symbolised partly by the exchange of flesh for machine, becoming "more machine now than man".

Interestingly, last night's episode, "Unfinished Business", featured a moment where Mace (Terrence C. Carson) randomly decides to offer a legion of battle droids the opportunity to surrender. A reply from one of them of the familiar line, "Blast them!" suggests the machines have no such capacity for free will. However frequently we see the battle droids comically bemoan their obvious fates, they're apparently hard wired to take the punishment. It's no wonder Echo has to struggle to prove himself.



Anakin, showing more anger in the kind of ruthless interrogation tactics we've already been seeing him employ, interestingly chooses to cut off the spider alien admiral's mechanical arms--this character, Trench (Dee Bradley Baker), had appeared in a previous episode where he evidently lost half his body in a battle with Anakin. Considering what happens to the clone troopers, as far as free will goes, the series more and more seems to be blurring the lines between the two factions.

Clone Wars is available on Disney+.

The second episode of the new Clone Wars season aired last night and was a puzzlingly severe drop in quality. "Distant Echo" feels unfinished, featuring a suspiciously similar opening shot to the previous episode and weakly choreographed action scenes. The subtextual conflict, though, between independent thought and mindless following remains interesting.



Poor Anakin (Matt Lanter) never learned how to spot early pregnancy.

A clandestine transmission between Anakin and Padme (Catherine Taber) gives the episode a strong feeling of connexion to Revenge of the Sith, something that has generally not been present in previous seasons. It makes sense given how much closer the show is drawing to the final prequel film. The very brief dialogue between Obi-Wan (James Arnold Taylor) is amusing as it suggests again how well aware Obi-Wan is of Anakin's secret romance.



My favourite scene in the episode, though, was the argument on a hilltop between the Bad Batch (Dee Bradley Baker) and Rex (Dee Bradley Baker). There was no clear good or bad side in the argument even though Rex's anger is overplayed to make him seem like he's making a mistake. The Bad Batch clearly look down on the "regs", the regular troopers, an interesting turn after how much the clone stories on the show have emphasised the value of teamwork. We know just how right the Bad Batch will prove to be in the events of Revenge of the Sith, something I suppose they won't live to see.



The attack on the droid base was so badly directed it was confusing. One scene had Anakin standing in a thin corridor while two droids gently took turns firing at him from each side. The episode's credited director is Steward Lee but Dave Filoni is supervising director. I'm wondering if the sloppiness of this episode is the first real sign of George Lucas' absence as executive producer.



The episode's conclusion, when Rex finds the mangled Echo with his mind being plundered by machines, was pretty effective, though. The always slightly offputting effect of clones interacting is always even better when a healthy one is talking to a sick or dying one. These guys must think about death a lot.

Rex thought he'd left Echo behind to die, it turns out Echo's fate was even worse than death.

Clone Wars is available on Disney+.

Seven Samurai and The Hidden Fortress aren't the only Kurosawa films that have been translated to Star Wars. I recently watched "Lightsaber Lost" again, a second season Clone Wars episode written by Drew Z. Greenberg based on a film noir directed by Kurosawa in 1949 called Stray Dog. I was also afforded an opportunity to marvel at and ponder over why Clone Wars succeeded so well where Rebels did not (Resistance isn't even worth mentioning).

Unlike Hidden Fortress and Seven Samurai, Stray Dog has a contemporary setting--that's one of the quite remarkable things about it because it features extensive location footage of Tokyo's massive black market amid ruins in the aftermath of World War II. Against this backdrop we have the story of a young cop, Murakami (Toshiro Mifune), whose pistol is stolen by a pick-pocket. His frantic search for the item shows his sense of duty and honour in how urgently he desires to get it back. His youth and inexperience compels him to play rough with suspects or plead with them pathetically. An older cop, Sato (Takashi Shimura), takes him under his wing to show him the value in being friendly with potential informants and in taking a slower and subtler approach.



In "Lightsaber Lost", Ahsoka (Ashley Eckstein) loses her lightsaber to a pickpocket. She partners up with an elder Jedi who shows her the value in slow and careful detective work even when Ahsoka's anxiety compels her to rush pell-mell after her target. The episode features some wonderful chase sequences on Coruscant, including a bit where Ahsoka gets stuck on a massive video screen showing a pontificating Palpatine.

Greenberg, like many of the writers of Clone Wars' best episodes, hasn't written for Star Wars since Disney purchased the franchise. But, while it may be my imagination, I maintain there's a fundamentally different feeling to the stories for more reasons than that. One way I might put it is that Clone Wars has a greater sense of freedom, the feeling that at any moment the story could go in almost any direction. There were clear boundaries on Rebels and so far on The Mandalorian. I don't think Disney would allow a young protagonist make a mistake that she feels so much anxiety about--or be as willing and eager to torture suspects like Ahsoka, Anakin's padawan. The movies are a different matter--one of the reasons Rogue One is the best of Disney Star Wars so far is for how morally grey its protagonists were allowed to be, particularly Cassian Andor. Which raises an interesting question about the upcoming series centred on Cassian. A neutered Cassian Andor would be a particular egregious case of missing the point. The Mandalorian could stand some shadows, too.

The tragedy is that, if Disney institutes this policy under the theory that it's better for children, they're very wrong. I can see kids getting a very valuable lesson in personal responsibility by empathising with Ahsoka in "Lost Lightsaber" along with some potential respect for their elders.

Another chapter of the Star Wars saga drew to a close last night with the series finale of Star Wars Rebels. Coming from much of the same creative team, notably showrunner Dave Filoni, as the beloved Clone Wars, Rebels had its good points but suffered from greater restrictions with regards to depictions of violence due to Disney's apparent desire to market this show to kids too young for the kinds of dismemberment and killing seen in A New Hope. I'm guessing two to three year-olds? Maybe that's also why the writers were comfortable leaving so many plot holes in last night's movie length finale--consisting of two episodes, one a half hour, one over forty minutes. But many of the people who claim The Last Jedi makes no sense or is badly written also happen to be strong advocates of Rebels, a fact perhaps related to the series' much more male-centric stories. The finale certainly doubled down on that premise presenting a world where female characters are motivated by their devotion to boys who would be obnoxious or unremarkable in real life and male characters who are also driven by their devotion to other male characters. And at the centre of everyone's universe is a charmless boy named Ezra Bridger.

Spoilers after the screenshot



Being so used to Clone Wars, which achieved appeal for all ages by drawing inspiration from old adventure movies and serials, it hadn't occurred to me until recently to try to see Rebels from the perspective of what must be its only intended audience: very, very young children. In this context, Taylor Gray's performance as the character's voice actor, which I always found so gratingly whiny, might have been sympathetic to those whose primary means of communicating with other people had been crying for most or all of their short lives. Ezra's expressions of emotional and physical needs are met selflessly and tirelessly by maternal female characters, Hera (Vanessa Marshall) and Sabine (Tiya Sircar).



There'd been a couple episodes, notably in season two, that had focused on Hera, her backstory, and her motivation, written by the series' only female writer, Nicole Duboc. This stood in contrast to the multiple female writers employed on Clone Wars, none of whom were among the several carried over for Rebels. I'm not one of those people who thinks men can't write women and vice versa--I think Rey is a good character, after all. But maybe if there'd been some more gender diversity in the Rebels writing staff it would've helped the show achieve the wider perspective portrayed on Clone Wars. On the other hand, maybe a narrower perspective was precisely the point on Rebels. With Disney going all in on female protagonists in the feature films, maybe Rebels was intended to make sure they also captured the audience uncomfortable with that. There was an attempt made in season three to foreground Sabine a bit more by giving her a sword and involving her people, the Mandelorians, but she never connected the way Ahsoka did on Clone Wars. Partly this is due to Rebels' generally inconsistent character development for nearly all characters, male or female. Ezra, who began season four providing comic relief with broad Jar Jar-ish slapstick, was abruptly arced into being a canny strategist in the finale.



Here a shot, cribbing from the popular Darth Vader action sequence from the end of Rogue One, displays Ezra's deliberate theatricality to inspire terror in stormtroopers who attack the Rebel base on Lothal, Ezra's homeworld. Not that any Imperial need worry; much like the cartoon tiger on Walking Dead, these wolves can distinguish friend from foe and can take prisoners.



Some stormtroopers tossed off-screen presumably died but not so explicitly that young children will get any idea there's anything ugly about killing. The finale does feature a sequence where, Ezra's brilliant plan apparently not accounting for the possibility of Thrawn (Lars Mikkelsen) using the firepower of his Star Destroyers, many civilians are probably killed by turbolaster fire, though no deaths are shown. The only character who definitely dies is one of the aged clone troopers (Dee Bradley Baker).



These characters, who were the titular clones of Clone Wars, are brought in to help the Rebels in their attack on Lothal's Imperial base along with another carry over from the old series, the pirate Hondo (Jim Cummings), who now expresses a zealous devotion to Ezra. Why this shady character, who seems a prototype for Benicio del Toro's character in Last Jedi, has suddenly found himself so committed to the Rebel cause isn't explained. Maybe it's something Disney has left open for tie-in media. Many of the plot holes in last night's episodes made me wonder if the company has taken a page from EA, the video game company who has gained notoriety lately by generating profits in Star Wars video games via charging for extensive downloadable content. Any plot hole or unexplained element could be a canon book or comic Disney can sell.



A good candidate for such tie in media would be the bounty hunter Ketsu Onyo, Sabine's former partner introduced in season one. Voiced by Gine Torres, she's a very welcome boost to the show's otherwise mostly lacklustre acting talent. She's brought in for the finale with even less explanation than Hondo, her conflicted feelings about the cause Sabine had subscribed to apparently having been tidily resolved at some point.



The finale also brought back Mart Mattin (Zachary Gordon). A character introduced in a second season episode with peculiar emphasis, intended to be a charming rogue type, he was then oddly shunted to a non-speaking background part for season four until the last episode when he's sent off to enlist the aid of the giant space squids Ezra had befriended in season two.



How Mart is able to lure the beasts to Lothal without Ezra's Force ability to communicate with the animals is left unexplained.



Ezra, meanwhile, has delivered himself to Thrawn in exchange for Thrawn holding fire on the civilian population. Ezra derides Thrawn for stealing art he didn't "earn", an ironic statement coming from Ezra who started the series as a street thief and who is currently in league with the pirate Hondo. Thrawn then takes Ezra to the hold of the Star Destroyer where there's stashed a fragment of the Jedi Temple which in a previous episode had allowed Ezra to reach back in time to save Ahsoka Tano. Here Emperor Palaptine appears via hologram, voiced by Ian McDiarmid himself, who's so good you almost don't notice what he's doing doesn't make any sense. It seems similar to Palpatine's tempting of Anakin to go to the Dark Side by promising the power to save Padme from death but no connexion to the Dark Side is made when the Emperor shows Ezra a portal through which his dead parents can be brought back to life. What exactly was the plan? "Phase 1: Get Ezra on the ship. Phase 2: Show him how he can resurrect his parents. Phase 3: Something something Dark Side." In any case, Ezra refuses to save them because "letting go" is more important than saving their lives. I'm not sure how the two to three year-old target audience would take that.



In the end, the show moves forward in time to after Return of the Jedi when we see Hera has given birth to a child she'd conceived with Kanan. Apparently she and Kanan had had sex before she told Kanan she loved him. Was Disney promoting the idea of a kinky, purely physical relationship between Kanan and Hera? Well, given the target audience I suppose it's more likely we're to assume a Loth Stork delivered the baby.



Ahsoka shows up with no explanation as to what she'd been up to during the original trilogy (something else for potential tie-in media) and she and Sabine, who finally has a decent haircut, rush off to find Ezra, wherever he is, now that the war is over, fervently clinging to the belief that he's survived somehow. It's too bad Lorca didn't have friends like that on Star Trek: Discovery. Personally I hope they only find that Thrawn is still alive.

Star Wars: Rebels finally returned last night with two new episodes. Excited? Well, although the writing quality hasn't much improved, even surprisingly indulging in several unpopular gender related plot devices, it did at least deliver one plot point I'd been fervently hoping for since the series began.

Spoilers after the screenshot



Kanan (Freddie Prinze with a Z Jr.) is finally dead. I was hoping for something more humiliating, like falling face first into lava while making a bad joke, but the important thing is he's gone. Unless the show again pulls its punch like it did with Sabine's (Tiya Sircar) mother at the beginning of the season.



But obviously Kanan and probably Ezra (Taylor Gray) need to be dead for the premise of Rogue One and A New Hope of a galaxy without Jedi. Then again, I would've thought it would be important for the Rebels not to be destroying a Star Destroyer every five minutes the way they do on Rebels, so who knows. The first of last night's two new episodes, "Jedi Night", did seem to be making an attempt to make things look a little more desperate, though, and the destruction of the fuel for the TIE Defender factory seemed like it was being treated as a miraculous victory. It almost made the show seem like it belonged in the galaxy dominated by a seemingly unstoppable Empire we see in the films.



Of course, it's part of Kanan's whole flattering death package. His martyrdom comes after saving a drugged and physically tortured Hera (Vanessa Marshall) whose humiliating state allows the writers to side step any real development of their relationship until she confesses her love to him. Then Kanan has the awkward line about how it's "the Truth Serum talking"--wouldn't that mean it's true, then? Hera confesses her love and Kanan, as a stoic figure of weirdly retrograde masculinity, doesn't say he loves her back.



Isn't that like Han and Leia in the climax of Empire Strikes Back? Not really. One of the reasons Harrison Ford's performance in both the original Star Wars trilogy and the Indiana Jones films is such a revelation is the vulnerability with which he imbued his otherwise old fashioned heroic characters. In Empire Strikes Back it's in the writing, too--as much as he seems to have Leia pegged when he alludes to her true feelings for him on Hoth, its his preoccupation with her feelings that reveals his. Leia picks up on this and that's why he looks hurt when she kisses Luke. When he's put in carbonite on Bespin, she shows herself to have more strength by being honest with her feelings while Han hides behind his cockiness--"I know"--which has the gutpunch effect of making his fate seem all the more horrible. He's not ready to die, he's at least as much of a kid as he's accused her of being.



The relationship between Hera and Kanan depicted in "Jedi Night" is downright creepy by comparison. He almost takes paternal custody of her while she's loopy from the drugs, something that becomes even more uncomfortable with suggestive shots like this one:



It's less about a relationship than it is about Kanan winning her with his chivalry.



The second of last night's two new episodes, "Dume", features the return of the wolves from Princess Mononoke, called "Loth Wolves" on Rebels because they're native to Lothal, much like Loth Cats and presumably Loth Blue Whales and Loth Praying Mantises. One of them seems to be a reincarnation of Kanan. The sequence, with all the trappings of spiritual revelation, turns out to be all about giving Ezra a new quest.



Meanwhile, Sabine and Zeb (Steven Blum) have a fight with Rukh (Warwick Davis). They first spot him from a distance and have some strange dialogue where they refer to him as an "it" and a "thing", which is odd considering Zeb looks way more alien than he does and regular encounters with much stranger looking people seem to be fairly normal in the Star Wars universe. It takes on disturbing connotations when one considers the Noghri, Rukh's species, have a history as an enslaved people in the old Expanded Universe. The fight itself is okay except Sabine can't seem to hit him when he's standing still in front of her and she's using two guns. And for some reason both her and Zeb think it's a good idea to send him back to the Imperial base unharmed but covered with paint. Obviously we're dealing with a very different wing of the Rebellion than the one Cassian Andor belongs to.



The lighting was pretty nice in these two episodes and as usual Vanessa Marshall gives a standout performance as Hera. Hopefully she has a much better role on the show going forward. I'll keep watching hoping for that and I'm looking forward to hearing Ian McDiarmid back as Palpatine. But I really hope the multiple Star Wars series Disney reportedly has in development will have better writers.