So it is easy to forget that I know like all of the things about Star Wars. Okay not so much now because I haven't been keeping up with the new wave of novels but anyway I go into this knowing nothing about Clone Wars (which Rebels is fundamentally a sequel/successor series to). Except nothing from Clone Wars is really necessary for me because like hell I don't recognize a Jedi Holocron or obvious Force-sensitive luck when I see it. And there's certainly a large amount of pandering for the sort of audience that would actually get stuff like that, and a lot of the set pieces are very note for note with previous Star Wars media.
Also it carries on the proud tradition of Star Wars dialog being soooo bad. Like not the story, the spoken words, they are not quite working. While the VA crew for this has a lot of veterans, they just aren't familiar enough with the characters (shocking, the cast doesn't have a feel for the characters in the pilot) to make those lines work even a little bit.
Everything else is pretty good though. (Except the slingshot seriously guys slingshot?). The surprising this is how well it's done making me care about the cast and drawn me into this new corner of the Galaxy. Theycould easily have gone bad, they have that feel of "we've assembled a Team of Experts in Their Fields" like a heist movie based on the designs, but largely I do find myself interested in seeing more of them. Ezra has some potential and I'll admit "Aladdin but in Star Wars" is something I'd give at least an episode or two just to see if how that worked out. Like a couple episodes in they work in that one of the major villains (it slipped past me while watching, but reading up on the show later it turns out he's with the Imperial Security Bureau, meaning a) he's basically an SS thug and b) holy crap they brought Isard's dad back into canon, meaning COMPNOR beats out things like Thrawn. Huh.) personally ordered the slaughter of Zeb's people, which dovetails a bunch of things quite nicely. They actually pretty subtly build up why this nothing world on the Rim is important, and why enough crap happens there to entertain a ship full of very skilled rebels.
The show's overall tendency is to introduce new characters as fairly one dimensional then adding layers as they progress which is not usually how you do nuanced characters, but works really well in context of Star Wars (for more or less the same reason Bioware's thug/saint morality system actually kinda works in KotOR). The exception there is the Inquisitor, but he's basically equivalent to Darth Maul (or at least, Darth Maul in Phantom Menace), there to present a physical threat to our heroes. And he works well enough in that roll, enough at least that when Ezra does a Dark Side Cave Vision Quest and the Inquisitor keeps popping up and killing everyone I believe he's legitimately that scared of the man. Something about the inter-character dynamic absolutely screams of Greg Weissman to me as well (he is indeed a credited creator/writer here of course) but I can't put my finger on what it is exactly. Something about the way the crew has tiny feedback loops of building trust.
Sabine is great.
Weakest Episode- Fighter Flight. It's a fun enough concept but the immaturity of everyone involved is a bit much at times.
Best Episode- Rebel Resolve. While the following episode is of course more climatic, it's also mostly action scenes. This one is where we get that sense of "and everyone really is a team now and they are not going to leave one of their own to rot" etc etc. Cliche enough, but I'm down.
Rating- 8/10.
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