Star Wars Rebels Season 1 Finale review - Fire across the Galaxy

It's time to look at the final episode of Star Wars Rebels

Fire across the galaxy

And so we have the final battle, filled with epic fight scenes, pivotal moments and familiar faces, this the fire across the… galaxy? The entire battle took place on 1 planet, and the orbit of another, that doesn’t mean it’s the galaxy.

But I digress, another exceptionally enjoyable episode. I just sorta wish the first part didn’t air online 4 weeks ago. The breaks between each part killed the pacing.

So it’s a good job this episode was pretty damned rushed. A lot to cram in and no time to do it, but doing a much better job than Avengers Assemble for a simple reason. The episodes are focused on a singular threat! (I may return to do another rage review of Avengers Assemble when it’s done)

So, Hera’s suddenly completely changed her mind on rescuing Kanan. Saying “We’ve all lost enough family to the empire” which is true enough… for Kanan, Zeb and Ezra, I have no idea about Hera or Sabine, since they continually avoid giving us any origin stories for them.

So, their plan is to steal a ship from an alarmingly under-guarded place, use the TIE fighter they stole in Fighter Flight (nice to connect that in) albeit with some decorations to successfully dock with a fleet of Star Destroyers and rescue Kanan

Of course, not everything goes to plan, as Tarkin is quick to call in reinforcements and of course the Inquisitor is waiting for them. And… It’s a great final fight. Kanan has Ezra’s blaster-lightsaber, and uses it as a distraction to get in close, it’s a clever battle strategy. In the end, Ezra falls and Kanan wields two lightsabers. With that in his favour and his much improved strategy, he backs the Inquistor up into a corner, and destroys his lightsaber, which means sales for that toy will likely decline quickly.

Yeah, killing the Inquisitor may well be an error. Bear in mind the Inquisitor hasn’t been a focal villain of this season, it’s more or less been about the Empire, and the Inquisitor has been a tool of that. He has never much development as a character, we don’t know anything about him other than he has some knowledge of the force, and the goofiest looking lightsaber ever. It also set the stage to Darth Vader being the prominent villain for the next season. I hope they can pull this off, but the issue they have is an issue that came up from time to time in the Clone Wars. These villains cannot be defeated! Vader cannot fall and if he’s captured, the inevitable result is his rescue.

But it’s not the only big reveal for this episode. With Chopper seeing how badly outnumbered they are, he calls in Fulcrum for help, who is revealed to be none other than the Clone Wars’ Ahsoka Tano, which makes sense and provides some interesting possibilities if she becomes a regular character. She and Asajj Ventress (and possibly Darth Maul given how his appearance in Son of Dathomir ended) are unique in the sense that they are force wielders that are not entirely aligned with Jedi or Sith. That’s something that could become interesting…

So ends Greg Weisman’s tenure of executive producer of the series, however, he’s not abandoning it entirely. From what I hear he’s working on a tie-in comic to explain Kanan’s origin. And you’ll bet that once it’s gotten going, I’ll do a 4 issue test on the series.

In the meantime, I will do a TV Retrospective of what I think should be looked at in season 2, but with Spider-man month in the way, it’ll have to wait till April (it actually waited till September, but check the hub page, it'll be under editorials).

Rating 9/10

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Images used in this review are from Star Wars Rebels and belong to their respective owners. All images in this review are subject to fair use.