Full Series Rebels 3.17 - Through Imperial Eyes - Discussion Thread (Spoilers Allowed)

Also Yularen was viewing the whole thing from above and saw Kallus running towards the left and away from the officer while that officer(Ezra) was running towards the shuttle with the two droids following him slowly behind. So something mustve have registered to Yularen. Apparently it did, or at least the "eye of Yularen" spotted details in the whole debacle where he did not believe Lyste was the man, but for his own bias refused to zero in on Kallus, one of his own as pointed out by Thrawn..

 

It actually work rather well if you connect the dots like this:

1. Thrawn has studied Sabine's artwork very closely and can immediately identify it
2. As the two youngest members of the Ghost Crew, Thrawn intuited that Ezra and Sabine are close
3. Thrawn knows that Fulcrum is a highly ranked Imperial officer
4. Thrawn knows that out of all the Imperial Officers, Kallus is the one who has had the most encounters with all members of the Ghost Crew
5. Kallus was the agent that apprehended the Rebel spy

In possession of all this knowledge, Thrawn sees the final clue of Sabine's artwork on the prisoner's helmet and immediately knows that the prisoner was Ezra Bridger. With that knowledge, he knows that Kallus is Fulcrum. Because Kallus has seen Ezra many times before, and if he were loyal to the Empire, he would have immediately reported Ezra's capture and had him locked up in a maximum security cell under heavy guard.
I've criticized Thrawn in the past for taking too long to take any action, but I will say this. He has been paying close attention to all the details left by the Rebels. Maybe he won't disappoint in the end after all.

 

I wander if Lyst will get out.

 

Okay, that was a refreshing episode after the slump Rebels has been in for me. Also, ZOMG, a stormtrooper finally immediately shoots down a main character goofing off in a disguise!

 

Very good points. For the viewer it may seem a bit too convenient for Thrawn to connect the dots like that, but he's been studying and observing the rebel crew for a long time, as well as everyone who encountered them in the past like Kallus. Each point you made is another piece of the puzzle that falls into place.

There was also the issue of the guard in front of Thrawn's office. He would never let anyone in or leave his post and wasn't taken out either but still remembered Lyste was inside. Thrawn must have suspected some kind of technique was involved. And considering there are two Jedi's, Ezra and Kanan, it was another dot that lead him to believe it had to be one of them, and the helmet confirmed that the likely culprit had to be Ezra. In case of doubt he could have questioned the troopers who had seized the shuttle and transferred the prisoner for detailed descriptions of the captive but there was no need for that anymore.

 

This was a good rebel episode IMO. Sure there was few issues that are typical for this show like Lyste being so easily mislead by Kallus etc. but in the end I really liked how it played out.

+Nice to see Yularen again- in his original form even. Also he seemed like he has not changed that much and way he cared about his pupils shows that he is not really so evil and nasty imperial as most guys in this show
+ Thrawn's office, his art collection and way he trains his combat skills and even those little stylized Chimaera- markings in his crew's uniforms were a nice touch for the visuals of this show.
+ Chimaera mentioned by name- nice
+ Thrawn and Yularen didn't buy Kallus' story after all- for a moment I feared they are really written to be too dumb after all. I think Thrawn's way to deduce that Kallus is Fulcrum was a bit far-fetched though, but he seemed to suspect him from the start. Lothcat was just a confirmation that Kallus is not telling everything and it connects Lothal Rebels and him in a way that really blows his cover. It's not like Thrawn even needed to be genius for that he was just not as dumb as average imperials in this show.
+ Code cylinders were actually used- nice to see that they are there for a purpose

- Lyste was pretty dumb really, even for him it was pretty stupid to think Pryce would be the traitor that starts attacking stormtroopers in the middle of the imperial hangar....
- Seeing all created imperial officers (or most of them at least) at once really reminded how little they have animation models, besides Geonosis for example is not even on same sector as Lothal.... Oh well...

 

I think there is not a shadow of a doubt that he can and already has figured this out. If not - he is not worth the digital ink he is rendered with.

-----

On a side note -- all this hate for a well-intentioned, well-planned, and well-crafted show that is taking SW is new directions [many of which we weren't getting anywhere else for that matter] and linking old EU back to the NU and even newer [R1 references] --- honestly people,lighten up.

So what if it's not watchable twice?
If you weren't so keyed up to "write a review" and just sat back and enjoyed the 27 minutes of your life that gets to be spent in the GFFA on a given week you might be surprised.
For example, I spent the following hour after watching this week's episode doing some of my taxes. I'd have watched the episode over and over to avoid that!

It's great to have a critical eye -- but once you step over the line of harsh negative criticism, it's ok to find a new interest -- maybe create your own tv show, your own mythos, take some classes in digital film making, apply for a job at LFL, and actually create the GFFA you want it to be.

You know, that's pretty much exactly what people like Rian Johnson and Gareth Edwards and Dave Filoni and Henry Gilroy and Pablo Hidalgo did.
None of them worked on the OT but they dreamed to be a part of SW and voila.

Bottom line: If the force is not with you... don't "force" it to be!

 

"They will be the architects of their own destruction."

 

It's not even that hard to target Kallus. Pryce, Lyste, Thrawn, Yularen, and Kallus all have different ways of talking. Kallus speaks in a slow, methodical, deep voice. Just listen to one Fulcrum transmission and you can go "Yep, that's Kallus."

 

Actually come to think of it, why does Ezra bring that helmet along with him? It shouldn't take a Thrawn-level genius to take a look at it and connect the dots.

 

My guess? The Rebels aren't perfect and they are unaware of Thrawn's infatuation with studying art. People make mistakes. Genius-level tacticians take full advantage of them.

 

I am a little late the party but thought it was yet another excellent episode. Thrawn is significantly better in this episode than he has been so far this season. The tension in this episode was much better than it has been throughout this season, it actually had me rooting for Kallus to escape. Ezra hanging from the ceiling on his cell was pretty amusing. The ending of the episode was rather underwhelming with Kallus staying behind although this is redeemable if executed well. Hopefully we do not have to wait too long to see the ramifications that. Rebels seems to have been on a streak three episode streak so far! imo

 

Ezra isn't exactly the sharpest tool in the shed. He's still a adolescent teenager without a formal education or more than a couple years of formal training. He gives into his whims and impulses all the time. In some ways to him the whole Rebellion is a game. He's not a serious, disciplined warrior like Kanan so it's in his character to make a simple mistake like that.

 

Ezra's been fighting the Empire for what, a couple years now? He shouldn't be making mistakes like that.

 

But he is. He's still very much a child despite his growth over three years. We see it so much in Season Three.

He messes up royally on the salvage station.
He gets stunned by Thrawn
He gets way too emotional over Sabine in Antilles Extraction
He trusts Hondo blindly

Season Three has done a good job of showing us that while Ezra has done some growing up, he's still very much an adolescent kid, not a mature adult with sound judgement.

In some ways he's quite similar to Anakin in AOTC, just less power and more bad jokes.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

I expected this episode to be much more well-received than it apparently has been. I was really looking forward to it and I very much enjoyed it, and it was a great change of pace and focus from the prior episode, which I felt fell extremely flat as a follow-up to Trials of the Darksaber. I was also glad to have remained 100% spoiler free, which I wasn't able to do last episode because people on my Tumblr feed have no concept of tagging spoilers.

This episode, if anything, was jam-packed with plenty of great easter eggs and references. I think that was Sloane we saw in the hallway, it was great to hear the Chimaera mentioned by name, the mention of "Ruhk"-- great to see Yularen again, too.

I don't typically engage in discourse for Rebels so I'm not super attentive to in-depth analyses of plot and stuff, but as a casual viewer, this episode came as a complete surprise to me. I didn't expect Kallus to stay behind at the end of the episode. I think it was a bad decision on Kallus' part, and surely sealed his fate to die either in this season or early next season. The episode was high-energy and tense, and I feel like we're finally getting to know Kallus.

And yeah, I agree with Vialco that Kallus is much like Anakin. I see in the PT forum a lot of criticism of Anakin for being an inconsistent, unbelievable character in terms of his morality and loyalty, and I see a lot of the same qualities in Kallus (and recently ventured into the Kallus thread and saw much of the same criticisms). Inconsistency is normal, and personally I think it makes for better, more believable characters. People make bad and stupid decisions all the time, and Kallus is hardly an exception. This episode really did a good job of showing us that Kallus messed up hella bad.

I also enjoyed seeing Kallus and Ezra interact. Warily trusting each other. It was refreshing to see, but we all know that Ezra's number one pitfall is how easily he trusts others. It wouldn't surprise me if Kallus was triple-timing everyone like some people mentioned earlier. (And yes, Ezra is notorious for making mistakes and bad decisions. )

 

On the orders of someone though.

 

Does anyone know if the Clone Trooper Phase II helmet in Thrawn's office has any significance? I couldn't recognise the markings as anything familiar, and I have no idea what relevance it has to hunting the Rebels.

Additionally, I wonder what that mysterious chunk of green crystal is? My idea is that it's a fragment of the giant Kyber crystal from Utapau, or the one destroyed in the convoy in Season 1.

 

It doesn't have any significance other then the fact that it was Gree's apparently.

 

I guess that links it to Yoda, though it's not the one that Gree was wearing when Yoda cut his head off.

 

Good episode, I liked seeing the officers that we saw in previous episodes being marched through the corridors, as if their failures were being discussed with by Thrawn or some other officer.

I thought they were cuffed at first, but I realized they just had their hands behind their back to look more "official."

 

Ezra and Kallus had some nice interaction (Ezra getting easily distracted by the kalikori and Kallus bringing back his focus to the mission, Kallus’ annoyance at him hanging on the jail’s ceiling, Ezra’s idea to send information from Thrawn’s office, and Kallus’ surprise at Ezra being there to rescue him). And for the record, Ezra’s acting is pretty terrible.

There is no way that Thrawn wouldn’t notice that a planet was deleted and replaced. I don’t know why Kallus and Ezra even bothered. Yet somehow Thrawn didn’t even seem to notice.

I thought it was odd at the beginning of the episode where that stormtrooper sounded so freaked out like the Imperial ship was under attack or something when he tells Kallus to get to his station right away. But Kallus doesn’t looked alarmed or in a hurry, he just looks stressed and tired. Typical day in the Empire, I guess.

Kallus setting up Lyste as "Fulcrum" was actually pretty clever, and it was great at the end when Pryce looked like the bad guy to Lyste. Poor Lyste.