Star Wars Rebels: Empire Day

November 19, 2014 3:46 PM - Season 1, Episode 7

It's Empire Day across the galaxy in celebration of the founding of the of the Galactic Empire, but the day also holds a special significance for Ezra Bridger. The crew of the Ghost have their own plans on celebrating Empire Day, while Imperial forces conduct extensive searches for a certain Rodian who shares a past with Ezra and possesses knowledge of the Empire's future plans that may be invaluable for the rebels.
posted by Atreides (3 comments total)

I generally enjoyed this episode, rising above Ezra's angst, which while understandable was still a tad annoying. I definitely want to state an appreciation for several of the director's (if not his, then someone else's frames) choices of framing a few scenes in the episode. We have a great opening scene of Sabine leaning against a building/crate and gazing out over the plains, which was reminiscent of a John Ford Western and just made a beautiful shot as it transitioned to Ezra training with Kannan. There was another, similar, shot that happened later in the film, as well.

I loved the triumphant, celebratory twist on the Imperial March (itself heavily based on Hoist's Mars: Bring of War from the Planets). Though, I suppose, this means that outside of the music played by the bands featured in the films, this is the first time a song from the score has kind of been canonized in the universe...sorta.

TIE Advance. DANG. It's not quite the same ship we see Vader flying in Star Wars in the battle over the first Death Star. Not surprisingly, it almost immediately goes boom! It's also interesting that the Inquisitor flies one, so perhaps the elite of the elite get to have their choice of these ships (TIEs went onto become ridiculously powerful in the TIE flight sim, for unnecessary needed information).

While we learn that Ezra's parents disappeared on his birthday and played a nascent role in defying the Galactic Empire, the more interesting aspect to me was our Rodian friend. First, he was wearing the same head gear as Lando's assistant in Cloud City (nice!) and which we also learned came at a price with regard to personality, among other things (not so nice!). We also got a glimpse of the plans of the Empire which revealed a brief clip of things we definitely know are coming, the TIE Bomber (ESB), a Lambda Class Shuttle (RTOJ) and the Imperial AT-AT walker (ESB), amongst other things. There's a bit of an excitement for me to get to see these things which already exist in the Star Wars trilogy have their origin. It's the remnant Star Wars geek in me, I reckon.

Other thoughts, Sabine obviously grabbed the last recording by Ezra's parents, which we will learn in Part II will tell us some clue as to where they went or provide a message of some kind of importance to Ezra. The fact that this was continued also raises a question, will Rebels be leaping away from 20+ minute stand alone episodes to multiple episode arcs like the Clone Wars. One of the agreeable aspects of the Clone War series was as time progressed, they routinely avoided the time crunch of of stand alone episodes by having story arcs that went from four to six episodes in length. It was a strength and I hope that Rebels is following suit. I can see Disney wanting to avoid that (we don't want our core audience confused!), but hopefully, they can see that the end result is stronger story telling and hence, a better show.

We pretty much got to see every Imperial bad guy from our Inquisitor, to the terribly named Kallus to the Administrator, and finally, our ashen faced Imperial officer. Seriously, send him to Tattoine, he needs sun. We also had our own version of the cantina scene, particularly when troopers walk through the bar in Star Wars and we see our Han and Chewie just sitting at a table looking wonderfully passive aggressive.
posted by Atreides at 9:51 AM on November 20, 2014 [2 favorites]

I like the storylines so far, but as with Clone Wars, sometimes the over-smoothed CGI gets really distracting. I feel starved for visual texture (not just color and shapes). This has always been my problem with CGI though. The sort of vaguely-but-not-really British accents occasionally distract me too, but the original series had the same problem. Ezra is an interesting character, but I would enjoy it if, like Clone Wars, we got more of the female characters getting out and having episodes based on their adventures/choices.
posted by emjaybee at 8:55 PM on November 23, 2014 [1 favorite]

Lambda Class Shuttle (RTOJ)

It was actually a Sentinel-class landing craft, which was featured briefly in the background of the An New Hope special edition.
posted by EndsOfInvention at 9:31 AM on October 27, 2015 [1 favorite]