Aside from the fact that most droids are property in the universe (you own a droid), there is also the memories of the Clone Wars and the huge droid armies of those days that likely haunt some people still. A droid that is maintained like the instruction manual says will remain more or less baseline and have whatever personality it was programmed with at the starts. Those that are not maintained as the manual says....not memory wiped ever so often, develop unique personalities and become for or less a lifeform in the Star Trek sense of the word. R2-D2 and Chopper have a lot of personality for beings that communicate in beeps and wahs. More so that someone the characters they are around.
I think Lucas was always pretty clear that droids only have simulated personalities and behavioural patterns. They're not considered sentient, at least for the most part. IIRC the EU had a thing about not getting a memory wipe over a long period could lead to quirky emergent personalities like we see with R2 & Chopper, though I'm not sure if it's ever mentioned in anything currently considered canon. Either way, I tend to equate it to the difference between Andrew & Galetea in Bicentennial Man. One is an emergent sentient individual, the other is a household appliance with a pre-programmed user interface algorithm. Basically, you may as well feel bad about a fertilized human egg being mistreated. Sure they could be a person eventually, but right now it's just a collection of cells, just as your average droid is just a collection of circuits and servo-motors. As for the pilot droid, he seems about on par in terms of intellect as the old B-1 battledroids and they were never big thinkers. I mean really, he's just a needlessly complicated autopilot. That get me thinking, have they ever shown a computer intelligence? As in a disembodied AI. I know in tESB C3PO mention's the Falcon's computer had a "very peculiar dialect" (my mental image is that it swears blue like a Corellian spacer) and that R2 says (via Threepio) the Cloud City central computer told him about the Falcon's hyperdrive, but I've never been 100% sure that's meant to imply they have personalities like droids do. I mean the "peculiar dialect" thing could just mean it's very outdated software, probably bought off the black market and thus cracked and modded all to hell so it can operate as a smuggling ship. But it could also mean it just has a very bad attitude.
Yeah as human as their personalities may seem at times, it's never felt to me like R2 and 3PO had real sentience the way, say, Data did on TNG. Or that they had any real emotional depth or desire to be free from being used as tools by the humans.
Oh man, oh wow. Stealth Strike was....really good. Possibly the best of the season so far. Did anyone else see it? They managed to really squeeze in a lot of quality action into 22 minutes last night. I rewatched it twice after the first viewing. Lots of feels and boom-booms. Personally, I am loving this move to Wednesdays. There's always so much going on during the weekend and these Rebels episodes are enough to get me through the slow, painful drag at the midweek point. Here's hoping we see Ahsoka again someday. She hugged Rex and then basically took off. A glimpse into her story and what she's up to (Vader investigations?) would be nice.
Why in the world would they air an episode the night before Thanksgiving? Sigh. Anyway, great episode. It was really great to see Ezra doing competent combat, and Kanan and Rex bonding. And Interdictors. I really liked the effect of the ship being dragged out of hyperspace. I also liked that the Imperial CO wasn't a total asshole and seemed to legitimately offer Rex a return to the fold.
The interaction between Jun and Ezra was actually pretty good, too. "He's got this!" I laughed at that one. When Ezra was kicking ass, I recalled for the first time that Luke and Anakin were whiny-but-powerful heroes as well.
Not bad. They took the opportunity to explore some unusual character pairings -- Sato and Ezra, Kanan and Rex. Worked pretty well. I'm noticing that just about all the bridge crew members on Imperial ships are voiced by Steve Blum or Dee Bradley Baker, and probably use pretty much the same character model. Could it be that they're clones too?
I enjoyed it, too! It's a little thing, but I'm enjoying all the colorful badge combinations that they're using on the Imperial officer rank insignia. Prior to Rebels, that variety had been strictly a SW77 thing (ANH), since everyone in TESB and ROTJ had the same color pattern (red over blue). For instance, last night Admiral Titus had one row of four red and two yellow, left to right. [/costume nerd]
Also a clear showing of inter-service rivalry. In this case between the ISB and the Imperial Navy. Seeing the Interdictor was nice as well as getting a better idea of just what it does. The old roleplaying game had a description but it was unclear as to what it was doing. It always seemed like it was causing an illusion for the hyperdrive navigation computers in realspace, but now it shown to actually be creating a real gravity well that could potentally rival a star or black hole (as starships can easily escape the gravity of a planet, since they do that all the time). Rex mention of Cody brings back some things. Wonder if Cody's still around? He did try to kill Kenobi, but otherwise he was a good trooper. It seems like Rex and Cody wrote the books the stormtroopers still follow. I wonder if that was because they were to highest placed commanders in Skywalker and Kenobi's Armies, as they seemed to get some of the most intense fighting while still surviving, and winning at least part of the time. If the 501st is still Vader's unit, Rex's protocols are the book for the elite troopers of the Empire. We'll see Ashoka next week I think, given how the trailer played out and the preview of next week is about the two Inquisitors going after Force sensitive children. I expect a lightsaber duel where we finally get to see Ashoka's new blades.
^ The Tie Fighter PC game conceived of Interdictors as gravity well generators (mentioned in one of the mission briefings).
I seem to recall that SW-universe ships can't stay in hyperspace if they hit a planetary gravity well, or something, so I figured it wasn't about being pulled in, just about disrupting the hyperspace effect. They did show the ships being pulled in at the end, but that was after Chopper's sabotage. I didn't like that part, the 20-year-old codes still being in use. What good are security codes if you never change them? Then again, I think there was something similar in ROTJ, a line about the Rebels' Imperial shuttle using an old code but one that was still valid. Which really doesn't make any sense -- if it's old, it shouldn't still be valid, precisely because it could be used by the enemy. I thought so at first, but the trailer also showed Vader, so I think it was just general footage from various episodes. I would certainly like to see Ahsoka again, but I'm not sure if that's what the trailer was showing.
I wonder if it wasn't the codes that haven't changed, but the underlining concept of how they are generated is still the same as when Rex and Cody made them. If that is the case, than until the Empire changes the code generation pattern, an elite Clone Trooper like Rex, who has knowledge of how the system works, can come up with a proper code based on whatever formula Rex and Cody made up. In which case the codes are being changed, but the way they are generated has not, and if someone knows that, they can come up with the code regardless of what it is. Especially if it is based on trooper protocols, which would not generally change, as there is little reason to change protocol designations for a military of such a scale as the Empire. We are talking about perhaps maybe a trillion soldiers or more spread out across an entire galaxy or more. A protocol rewrite would take a very long time to get around the galaxy, and might require a few years of transition time as you train new soldiers and officers, while still maintaining the "peace and security" of the Empire.
I'm really liking this season of Rebels, although, for the "security" codes used, I don't think they were, they're just codes that are used as short hand for bureaucratic business as Rex was clearly telling the cruiser communications officer that something bad was happening to the ship and they needed to dock and was hoping the officer only had a vague idea of what the problem was. And did anyone else think "aren't you a little fat to be a storm trooper" when Rex was first handed the uniform.
Their use of numeric codes was reminiscent of the police robots communicating with each other in THX-1138.
I'm pretty sure I remember some of the Legends novels featuring Interdictors, and describing them as creating gravity wells that pulled the ships out of hyperspace.
Its the Empire. They're arrogant enough to assume nobody could possibly get their hands on their codes. Hell the episode pretty much points out that think they Stormtroopers can get by on crappy armor with helmets they can barely see out of.
I think people are misunderstanding the use of the word "codes" in this episode. They're not encrypted passcodes for verification, they're just procedural bureaucratic shorthand. He's just using his knowledge of military bureaucracy to talk his way into clearing a landing. He basically menaced a flight controller with the threat of *even more paperwork* than he already had to deal with.