Episode 12: Spoiler So, the shit wolves can travel through the time vortex. Hopefully they don't hit the TARDIS while they're transporting people wherever they want to go. The emperor showing up is awesome. The "Mortis Gods" can fuck right off. Also, moving magic paint on walls. because why not at this point. Then there is a magic portal, because just fuck everything ever in the SW universe. This episode reminds me of how out of his fucking mind Lucas was getting by the time of the clone wars cartoon. The Force being a squabbling family of gods is still the stupidest thing he ever did. Stupider then making mandalorians into fuckhead pacifists, banning wookie jedi, making Twi'lecks and humans capable of breeeding (they have their brains coming out of their heads, how the fuck does that work with humans genetically? Not well, based off those freaking mutant abominations in TCW), and dozens of other idiotic decisions. That said, these wolves are getting close to Mortis territory. If Ezra's little trip this episode ends up leading to a stupid enough location, it might actually elevate the wolves above the Mortis shitheads into the absolute worst thing in SW.
Not impossible but you'd think that would risk making Lothal a substantially larger target. This is also the reason the rebellion stopped hiding among civilian populations after Garel, and instead moved their military assets to uninhabited backwaters. Hell, just look at what The Partisans' presence did for the people of Jeddah. Given that the factories and refineries were gone in the coda, it's possible all that equipment was removed and donated to the Alliance for use elsewhere.
The end of this series almost seems to be setting up a post original trilogy series that will cherry pick parts of the Expanded Universe even more, particularly with Thrawn I think. Although this series has 30 years to play in I imagine they'll stick closer to after ROTJ so as not to step on the toes of the new trilogy.
Not, it's really restricted by the publisher. Something about having only one copy of the plans...I don't understand Imperial logic.
Episode 13 Spoiler Ashoka lives. That is the only good thing about the episode. Fuck this show. fuck making Palpatine a fucking wizard (don't even think about bringing up those idiot "witches of dathomir", I know they are probably where Palpatine got his magic caldron technique from its still moronic), and fuck time travel in Star Wars. This is beyond bullshit. Its like fucking Harry Potter at this point, because everything is just magic. The force cannot make you travel through time, period. This is the line in the sand that I am drawing. I thought people were ridiculous for complaining about force projection in Episode VIII, and that complaint seems even stupider now that Rebels says that the force can both teleport people AND ENABLE TIME TRAVEL. Also, how come the magical force dimension only plays audio clips from Star Wars movies? Are there literally no other events in the universe worth having audio clips played in the space between spaces? I know the production reason they did it (mostly because they thought it would be cool, I assume), but its pretty weird to think that in the entire history of the SW universe the Force only considers a few specific events worthy of playing over the interdimensional speaker system. Back on my point, how are the Rebels people worse at this then George Lucas? How can anybody be worse at writing Star Wars then post RotJ George Lucas? I didn't think you could be this bad if you tried. Thank fucking god that there are only two more episodes left. This show has somehow spent all the moderate amount of tolerance and goodwill I'd developed for it so quickly its honestly amazing. Two episodes ago I was actually sad that a character I didn't used to like died. Now I'm close to just losing it because its gone so completely stupid. I'm more pissed at this stuff then I was at the preschooler bullshit in Season 1, partially because the show has shown that it can be better then this when it wants to, it apparently just doesn't want to put the effort in anymore.
Whibbly whobbly forcey warasy, things just make the Force out to be far larger than our understanding. It also suggests that there were greater users of the Force than the Jedi or Sith back in the past. Possibly before the Republic. The EU use to suggest this as well back in the KOTOR days.
Palpatine was originally a "socceror" any way, in the spirit of the more fantasy elements of the world building.
Episodes 14 and 15: Spoiler Its finally over. In a weird way, the show went out as it came in: extremely fucking stupid and pissing me off. It managed to degrade the goodwill it had built up so that I hated the last chunk of episodes almost as much as I hated the first season, although admittedly for different reasons. Well, actually not totally different reasons. Fuck space whales. One benefit of the stupidity of the ending episodes of this show is that I'm numb to Thrawn being banished to the negative zone. Sure, its stupid and the space between spaces still goes against the Force and the entire Star Wars franchise, but then I realize that no film director is ever going to mention this time travel interdimensional bullshit in a SW film so it might as well be as canon as the old EU as far as the movies are concerned. This is where we're at now, someone who considered the old EU the core of the SW universe with the movies being really good but side stuff now has to take comfort from the movies not interacting much with the expanded material. Also, Jacen Syndulla should look like this but the genetics of the SW universe are apparently just as fucked as the force. seriously, nothing explains how head tails work with human biology, it makes nose sense. these humanoid species shouldn't be able to have kids, and if they do they should look like those creepy clone wars kids, not a average human with weird hair/eye color. I don't see brain tails being anything but a dominant trait, especially since we've seen human hybrids before. The old EU just said that Humans/Twi'leks can't reproduce, because some old EU writers actually had common sense. The reason this probably happened, out of universe, is that the Rebels people realized that those kids in TCW were way too freaky so they just said fuck it and gave Jacen Syndulla green hair/eyes and thats it. I get it, and I think it is a better solution if you have to do it. I'd just prefer that the alien species that look like they shouldn't be able to have offspring because of some major physical differences just couldn't in the first place, since it was a very obvious thing that the old EU went with before TCW fucked it up. The only kind of good thing from all of this is Ahsoka is alive, but unfortunately Dave Filoni still gets to decide what will happen to her so we'll either not see her again or she'll get screwed over somehow So, that was Rebels. Its highs weren't as high as TCW, and its lows were generally a lot lower (except for the fact that no arc was as terrible as the fucking pacifist mandalorians in TCW, which for me will remain the low point of any official Star Wars production). It got decent somewhere around season 3, but shat out its built up goodwill with the last part of Season 4. So at this point, I'm just thinking good riddance. I'm not excited for whatever is next, and won't be until Dave Filoni retires (which will probably not happen and he'll still be fucking things up until he dies of old age, which is probably decades from now, he's basically the prequel era George Lucas of the Disney era SW).
Well... That means we can never again call them force "ghosts". That means that neither Yoda nor Darth / Anakin "died" either. I'd be real curious to know how Anakin got out of THAT one.
Then I will amend my original post to "But not too far from 'Darth and Yoda can come back from the dead.'" Although I don't see why Ben mysteriously disappearing is different from Yoda mysteriously disappearing. Come to that, Luke seemed pretty okie dokey with that but it seemed to perplex Darth.
And for me that leaves open the possibility Yoda didn't die either. Perhaps Ben and Yoda had things to take care of elsewhere together. My take on Luke not being as confused about it is simply the direction given to the actor -- maybe he didn't know the Yoda puppet was going to vanish like that.