review
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Maul – Shadow Lord season 1 review: Episodes 3-4
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13 min read
With exciting showdowns and rich moral dilemmas, Maul – Shadow Lord episodes 3 and 4 took a strong premise and carried it forward in satisfying ways. I really like how this show is dealing with the wrenching tradeoffs that people face in difficult times. I’m invested enough in the characters to cheer when one of…
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Maul – Shadow Lord season 1 review: Episodes 1-2
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10 min read
Lucasfilm has an interesting habit of producing Star Wars TV shows whose main characters are far less interesting than the worlds they inhabit and the people they encounter. We saw this with The Mandalorian, we saw it with The Bad Batch, and now we’re seeing it with Maul – Shadow Lord. Once again, the title…
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Star Wars Rebels review: "Twilight of the Apprentice"
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23 min read
Lucasfilm Every season finale is supposed to be epic. This is a given in serialized television. But “Twilight of the Apprentice” redefined epic in the context of Star Wars. The Rebels season 2 finale brought back and dramatically enhanced the stature of a villain once discarded as a broken tool; delivered on the promise and…
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Lucasfilm Given what we know is coming in the highly anticipated finale of Star Wars Rebels Season Two, the penultimate episode of the season was refreshingly unique. Our rebels simply had to deal with a spider infestation at their secret base, and despite Zeb’s amusing jitters, this proved to be a relatively straightforward task. The…
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Star Wars Rebels review: "The Forgotten Droid"
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11 min read
Lucasfilm If C1-10P is the cat to R2-D2’s dog, then “The Forgotten Droid” was about that cat meeting a stray and guiding it home. But what happens when the cat remembers that it’s a loner for a reason? That’s the question I was left with at the end of this episode. Yes, Chopper made a…
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Star Wars Rebels review: "Shroud of Darkness"
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15 min read
Lucasfilm Two of my favorite things about Star Wars are the political conflict and the spiritual conflict. The political conflict was Zeb and Agent Kallus sparring over competing ideologies, with one perhaps convincing the other to reconsider his allegiance. But the deeper conflict, the spiritual one, is a war for the “soul” of the Force…
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Star Wars Rebels review: "The Honorable Ones"
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14 min read
Lucasfilm “The Honorable Ones” will be remembered as one of Star Wars Rebels‘s greatest achievements of character development. It took an underexplored but fascinating relationship between two mortal enemies and transformed them, both in each other’s eyes and in the viewers’, by forcing them to work together. Freezing temperatures, a serious injury, and a pair…
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Star Wars Rebels review: "Homecoming"
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12 min read
Lucasfilm “Homecoming” pulled off an incredible feat in the way it introduced Hera’s father, the fanatical Twi’lek freedom fighter Cham Syndulla. On the one hand, Cham threw Hera off-balance and showed us a new side of the Ghost’s confident captain, deepening our understanding of who she was before she was “Captain Syndulla.” On the other…
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Star Wars Rebels review: "The Call"
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12 min read
Lucasfilm Right off the bat, I will admit that I am a sucker for space whales. The Voyage Home is my favorite Star Trek movie. But a cool-looking interstellar cetacean is nothing without a well-developed story surrounding it, and “The Call” ably met that challenge as well. The clash between Hera’s pragmatic priorities and Ezra’s…
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Star Wars Rebels review: "Legends of the Lasat"
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13 min read
Lucasfilm I have never found Zeb, the loyal muscle on Star Wars Rebels, to be particularly interesting, so I never expected “Legends of the Lasat” to be one of the best episodes to date. But here we are. This episode didn’t just advance Zeb’s story by providing closure for his biggest regret; it also connected…