Full Series Rebels 3.14 - Warhead - Discussion Thread (Spoilers Allowed)

I feel season three can be more or less described as "the calm before the storm" - we know the Empire will find the base and some characters, not the major ones, will probably die. Episodes like this, though, make me feel Filoni is dragging it out (or his hands were tied because of Rogue One). Either way, I hope we pick up the pace.

 

I really enjoyed this episode. It's absolutely not filler - on the Imperial side we have Kallus sticking his neck out more for the Rebels than he ever has. AND he's doing this after he knows that Thrawn is aware of a traitor among them. This is going to play in directly to the Rebels trying to extract him or Thrawn maybe using him as bait. I absolutely think that Thrawn already knows that the traitor is Kallus. Him telling Kallus about narrowing the systems down to 94 was purposeful.

As an aside - one of my biggest pet peeves in all of Star Wars popped up in this episode - the plot treating an entire planet as something as small as a city. When that infiltrator droid landed on Atollon, it had no idea of there was a rebel base anywhere on the planet, and definitely no idea of where to start looking. But it just so happened to land within walking distance of Chopper Base? It's just one of those things that happens all the time in Star Wars and you have to suspend disbelief, but at times it still annoys me.


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Would have preferred to see Zeb not cast as just the dumb grunt....he was Captain of the Lasan Honor Guard....you don't give that to just any knuckle dragging, trigger puller.

 

That's one of the reasons I liked this episode. Gives Zeb more depth. Look at Zeb's development over the three seasons so far. You have the first season which introduced him to us, and he seemed pretty simple as the muscle of the Ghost crew. The only real development was his relationship with Ezra from not liking each other to having a playful "brother" type of relationship. In the second season we got to meet more of the Lasats, and that's when we found out that he was a respected captain of the Honor Guard. Soon after that we had the episode with Zep and Kallus having to work together - and it is because of that relationship that the Rebels ended up having a Fulcrum agent deep inside the Empire.

Which brings us to this episode - it starts with Zeb making a stupid mistake bringing that droid back to the base. But there are repercussions for his mistake, and he ends up making up for it. Not with brawn, but with brains.


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The problem with that Chopper base looking empty (as soon as the Ghost crew leaves, it looks like there is only Zeb and the droids there), I know it's maybe because of a budget problem, but if Thrawn finds that base it will look like he destroys just a little base with almost no one in it.

 

Vana

Budget reasons are why we never see any faces for the ship crews or fighter pilots. However how hard would it have been to put Wedge's and Hobbie's already complete heads on those 2 fighter pilots in this episode.

 

It was a total super organized mom screaming at her teenage kids to get into the van because they needed to get some place on time.

Wedge, Hobbie, Ezra, Sabine and Zeb. Think about the effort it takes to get that bunch ready and moving all at the same time.

 

I like that we got Wedge and Hobbie...but it is time to move them to General Dodonna's cell. And in Hobbie's case to his undercover assignment on the Rand Ecliptic.

 

Going by the trailer, Dodanna is going to come to Atollon, and they all will be there when the Empire attacks. I'm guessing when the Rebels skedaddle from the system, Wedge hightails it with Dodanna.

 

This episod makes me hope for some more AP-5

 

Disney is making sooo much money with all the movies, they could at least spend more on Rebels...

 

Keep in mind that the assets and other character designs we are currently seeing in season 3 of Rebels were likely done over a year ago, before Force Awakens and before Disney started getting a return on their 4 billion dollar investment in buying Star Wars.

 

Yes but now they have the money... and they could upgrade the old 3D models or at least stop covering the faces of soldiers and officers...

 

Mix and match eyes, ears, noses and mouths....then add different skin tones. Maybe make a few near humans with different color skin like Pantorans.

Maybe some epic mustaches and sideburns as well. Go thru the office and make up names based on all the staff and fans.

 

I mean you can already see some advancement on that front.

 

It's probably not as simple as that - if they increase the budget for Rebels I'm sure that Filoni and the crew producing it would rather invest extra funding in the episodes currently being produced for the next season vs cleaning up whats already been done in this season. And to Jedi Knight Fett's point, they already have made improvements over the first and second season. A couple examples just from this episode - there was a cool shot with Zeb and AP-5 in which you see Zeb's reflection in AP-5's visor. That was a slick detail that wouldn't have been there in previous seasons. The shot of that imperial cruiser exploding was very detailed - beautiful work there. And there was also a shot of the infiltrator droid's chest panel when it got back to the cruiser still dripping from the melted ice that was on it earlier.

 

Pretty mediocre episode- It seems they wanted to do Zeb-centered episode and Chopper also lacks own episode this season so this episode feels like it was made to fill that quota instead of actually being needed for the sake of the story.

+ Flash Speeder was nicely used here
+ There were a few funny moments there with AP-5, Chopper and Zeb

- Empire using infiltrator to do probe droid's task seems like a weird decision. Surely that droid was kinda cool but if they would have had standard probe there Thrawn would already know the location of their base (since that guy has long range transmitter that is really needed apparently)- now they send there a droid with firepower but with lacking capabilities to actually search for the base and somehow even to engage spiders in the battle(?).... makes no sense really- maybe it was experimental technology yes but seems like writers just didn't come up with a good story so they went with a mediocre one.

 

I hate to say it -- but this episode did nothing for me. I guess I just am really not a fan of Zeb in the end. I would have preferred to see the droids from ESB used for these purposes and this droid could have been used in some other story line.

Yea, good to see Kallus and all -- but ultimately, I hesitate to call an episode filler as I doubt anyone working on it feels that way not intends it to be the case -- but just --- did nothing for me.

Seeing Hobbie and Wedge bump into each other actually annoyed me. Maybe they are depicted that way in some other stories I am unaware of -- but I'll have to pass on this episode and look forward to the next.

 

just rewatched Seige of Lothal. Interestingly enough, Lando owns the protocol droid model which the infiltrator droid imitates.

 

I completely forgot about that droid.

 

Yeah, that was Lando's RQ protocol droid, W1-LE (thank you Wookieepedia for the name of the droid). There were a lot of protocol droids on Lothal that shared that exact model to. The infiltrator droid's protocol droid form is looks mostly like a retexture of that model, aside from the upgrades needed for it to go into 'attack mode' or what not. The eyes of the infiltrator droid's protocol form, for example, are a lot beadier.
As for the episode itself, I'm glad that the writers haven't forgotten about poor Zeb completely. I was really looking forward to what sort of character development our ex-captain of the Lasan Honor Guard, but he, alongside Hera and Chopper, have really taken a backseat for Ezra, Kanan and Sabine. Also loved seeing AP-5 again. I missed Star Wars' answer to Marvin the paranoid android.

 

I quite liked Zeb getting trolled by AP-5 but really that was just about the only real thing that I got out of it. Zeb's best showing since he and Kallus buddied up last season, but that's really not saying very much at all. Thrawn is STILL scheming away but yet to do anything really worthy of his reputation as far as I'm concerned. This season has not been truly bad but it's certainly the weakest to date for me.

 

I just hope we see AP-5 more often.

 

If they do that they might as well just bring back The Clone Wars.

I also really liked this one. The Thrawn scene at the end was great, and I love the 2 droids bickering.