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 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:

So everyone aiming in the same body shaped space, and firing at approximately the same time may well easier for the Jedi to dodge. Whereas a mad blizzard of blaster bolts, where the Jedi is now trying to keep track of lots of stuff still seems the best way.

Could call it the Zap Brannigan gambit. From his big book of war.

ccs wrote:

Voss wrote:

The New Republic stuff wasted time the show didn't actually have, but was setup for something that... didn't happen.

Yet.
Or are you assuming this is a 1 season show or there won't be carry over elements in future shows?

In theory... sure, they might. That may even have been the intention.
In practice... between streaming policies, strikes, actors and management, well... I don't think its very likely. For several elements, a sequel is going to have to start from scratch.

But, I don't think its too much to ask for a show to introduce AND handle its own plot points rather than farm them out in a nebulous way that's virtually identical to forgetting them.
Consider all the things this show introduced in the first half. It resolved... basically just the set-up from Rebels (Ezra and Thrawn) and Sabine coming to terms with the master she didn't have until this show decided she did. (She and Ashoka left Rebels as buddies on a quest).

Voss wrote:
[ (She and Ashoka left Rebels as buddies on a quest).

not *a* quest, but this quest.


the end of episode 2 is explicitly a shot for shot remake of that scene, and is clearly intended to say "what you are watching now is the same event we ended Rebels with, and this is the story of how that went".

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:

If we look at Thrawn’s actual defence plan, I think it would’ve worked had Ezra been alone. Jedi are good, but they’re far from infallible.

It DID work. Ahsoka and friends accomplished almost nothing.

That’s true! Though Ezra was able to get aboard, and thus alert the New Republic that Thrawn is back, potentially cutting his lead time.

Ezra may also have been able to see or otherwise find out he was headed to Dathomir first.

My minor thought on Thrawn’s defenses is instead of shooting at the Jedi, smaller moving targets, on their initial run for the door, have them target the area in front of the door where you know they’re going to be going and blanket that with fire. Or even preemptively seal the doors. Heck all the interior doors were left open and it was the Jedi closing them to slow people down.

As an old fan of “bigatons” Star Wars, those pathetic turbolaser blasts made me sad. Where’s the kt per second? Where’s the Base Delta Zero crust-melting? Those are sadder little puffs than the photon torpedo the Enterprise shot at God.


As for the fighting, to me it swung wildly between really good OT-style fighting and really silly PT style sword-spin-and-walking. The video game escalation of the battle didn’t help sell me on the stakes.

Other than the fighting, I don’t recall anything annoyingly stupid in this episode. Granted, they had the big conversation between Sabine and Ezra off screen to accomplish this, but still nice.

Thrawn is shaping up to be the Thanos to the next wave of streaming Star Wars…or the next Kang. This series had a lot of build up and not a lot of satisfaction.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
That’s true! Though Ezra was able to get aboard, and thus alert the New Republic that Thrawn is back, potentially cutting his lead time.

Ezra may also have been able to see or otherwise find out he was headed to Dathomir first.

If only ol' Bluey had eliminated Ezra during the YEARS that he had the opportunity...

Again, that takes resources, which are finite for Thrawn. Fuel, ammo, troops. All you’d need to expend to find Ezra.

Or, your castle up, safe in the knowledge Ezra would have his work cut out for him getting to you. If he does that? Brill, blaze away as we saw. If he doesn’t? Get back to the Galaxy and never have to worry about him again.

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:
As an old fan of “bigatons” Star Wars, those pathetic turbolaser blasts made me sad. Where’s the kt per second? Where’s the Base Delta Zero crust-melting? Those are sadder little puffs than the photon torpedo the Enterprise shot at God.


As for the fighting, to me it swung wildly between really good OT-style fighting and really silly PT style sword-spin-and-walking. The video game escalation of the battle didn’t help sell me on the stakes.

Other than the fighting, I don’t recall anything annoyingly stupid in this episode. Granted, they had the big conversation between Sabine and Ezra off screen to accomplish this, but still nice.

Thrawn is shaping up to be the Thanos to the next wave of streaming Star Wars…or the next Kang. This series had a lot of build up and not a lot of satisfaction.

The entire Star Wars brand is built on "Turbolasers are bad at hitting small targets". Also, "May the Force be with you" is a very literal concept in the setting. 3 Jedi somehow not getting hit by a barrage of fire is very much how the Force is supposed to work; moreso than the overt displays of specific powers that have come to define it.

Also, those weapons are intended for planetary bombardment as part of a task force, so likely aren’t calibrated for any particular precision. They can probably hit something the size of a building, but any smaller and it’s just not what they’re designed to do.

xerxeskingofking wrote:

Voss wrote:
[ (She and Ashoka left Rebels as buddies on a quest).

not *a* quest, but this quest.


the end of episode 2 is explicitly a shot for shot remake of that scene, and is clearly intended to say "what you are watching now is the same event we ended Rebels with, and this is the story of how that went".

No.
It may be a callback to that scene, but the show is very clear that Sabine and Ahsoka were together (as master and apprentice) for some time, split off, and years passed before the events in this show happened.
The end of Rebels happened, and they gave up (having no way of knowing where the whales went). Then years went by, and Ahsoka found the map and went back to Lothal and so on. They returned to 'this quest' after a decade or so with new information.

I agree with Voss.

Yes there are clear similarities between the scenes, no dispute there.

But Ahsoka was dressed entirely differently, had that nifty staff thing. Add in that Sabine spent a currently undisclosed period as her Padawan, and it’s not the same scene.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Anyways, watching the finale again.

I really cannot describe just how much I adore the portrayal of Thrawn.

Physically and emotionally you can see the iron in him. When the current stage of a plan doesn’t work, there’s a moment of upset visible, but only a moment. Then his facial muscles relax, and he’s decided upon the next step there and then.

It’s so understated I love it.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:

I really cannot describe just how much I adore the portrayal of Thrawn.

Physically and emotionally you can see the iron in him. When the current stage of a plan doesn’t work, there’s a moment of upset visible, but only a moment. Then his facial muscles relax, and he’s decided upon the next step there and then.

It’s so understated I love it.

Would he have liked the old chap from Andor as his Int chief? Seems to be more his style of management than the waves and waves of my own men style.

 LunarSol wrote:

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:
As an old fan of “bigatons” Star Wars, those pathetic turbolaser blasts made me sad. Where’s the kt per second? Where’s the Base Delta Zero crust-melting? Those are sadder little puffs than the photon torpedo the Enterprise shot at God.


As for the fighting, to me it swung wildly between really good OT-style fighting and really silly PT style sword-spin-and-walking. The video game escalation of the battle didn’t help sell me on the stakes.

Other than the fighting, I don’t recall anything annoyingly stupid in this episode. Granted, they had the big conversation between Sabine and Ezra off screen to accomplish this, but still nice.

Thrawn is shaping up to be the Thanos to the next wave of streaming Star Wars…or the next Kang. This series had a lot of build up and not a lot of satisfaction.

The entire Star Wars brand is built on "Turbolasers are bad at hitting small targets". Also, "May the Force be with you" is a very literal concept in the setting. 3 Jedi somehow not getting hit by a barrage of fire is very much how the Force is supposed to work; moreso than the overt displays of specific powers that have come to define it.

Small target being fighters than can dodge the actual turbolaser bolt. In the case of a planetary bombardment, the actual explosion would mean it's a lot easier to hit smaller target, don't need a direct hit, just let the splash of the laser's explosion do its work.

As for the Force, unfortunately yes, as per the worst bit in Rogue One, it's apparently a plot armor switch you can toggle on. Darn shame the masters in Revenge of the Sith forgot about, though. Edit: Now that I think about it though, a grenade seem to counteract the will of the Force well enough

Eh, that was fine but I'm not too interested in another season and I really, reaaaally don't want to see a movie that brings all the same era shows together as some sort of sequel-prequel.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Also, those weapons are intended for planetary bombardment as part of a task force, so likely aren’t calibrated for any particular precision. They can probably hit something the size of a building, but any smaller and it’s just not what they’re designed to do.

I think you both misunderstood me. A turbolaser that hit like a standard artillery shell or Heaven-forbid a modern battleship shell, any one of those misses would have blasted both Jedi and their mounts into fine mist. The weapons on this Star destroyer would struggle against modern armor. Actual grenades would have done the job. It is hard to keep suspension of disbelief for a galactic empire with a mile-long battleship that might be able to wipe out the forces of Napoleon, maybe, after a few hours’ bombardment.


“Planetary bombardment” you say, with firepower insufficient to take a parking lot rally.

It is, unfortunately, consistent with Rebels, if anything.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ARR0RPrr_rg

The explosions at 0:39 could match that of a hand grenade, maybe a little bigger. The first strike would have annihilated the biker guy, however, such a close shot. But...

That’s why I said don’t target the Jedi, just continuously shoot up the space outside the door.

They really do seem like they're just wheeling out Hayden Christensen as much as they can for the memberberries nostalgia before the diminishing returns kicks in. The problem with showing him that ubiquitously is how it (unsurprisingly) further undermines the shaky foundation of the sequel trilogy:

https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fxlnotubf7dsb1.jpg

Now before you say, "Oh but Luke cut himself off from the Force", you'd think Anakin would either appear to Luke at some point regarding Kylo before he did his little "not murder" whoopsie in the tent OR he would show up shortly after Kylo burnt down the second Jedi Temple, especially since it's already been established in the ending of Episode 6 that Luke saw him as a force ghost. Hell, you would think he would potentially show up for Kylo himself when he gets stabbed by Rey in RoS, rather than Han, given that Kylo's been idolizing him as the Sith Lord he wanted to be.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Solo should’ve been a TV series to be honest.

As a film, I’d say there’s nothing terribly wrong with it. I mean, it’s not gonna win any awards for acting, and it didn’t revolutionise and revive a genre. But what’s there is fun at the end of the day. I’d say its worst crime is being pretty disposable, compared to Rogue One where the content genuinely added to the whole of the thing, whilst not being something you need to see to understand what follows.

Solo's cardinal sin is to hand out an iconic name in such a dismisive way. Way to break the inner struggle of the main character by having basically an extra name him. I guess the writers were going for a subversion of expectatives too.

M.

 Grimskul wrote:
They really do seem like they're just wheeling out Hayden Christensen as much as they can for the memberberries nostalgia before the diminishing returns kicks in. The problem with showing him that ubiquitously is how it (unsurprisingly) further undermines the shaky foundation of the sequel trilogy:

https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fxlnotubf7dsb1.jpg

Now before you say, "Oh but Luke cut himself off from the Force", you'd think Anakin would either appear to Luke at some point regarding Kylo before he did his little "not murder" whoopsie in the tent OR he would show up shortly after Kylo burnt down the second Jedi Temple, especially since it's already been established in the ending of Episode 6 that Luke saw him as a force ghost. Hell, you would think he would potentially show up for Kylo himself when he gets stabbed by Rey in RoS, rather than Han, given that Kylo's been idolizing him as the Sith Lord he wanted to be.

Dead masters appearing to their apprentices is not a new thing for Star Wars. Having him pop in to check on Ahsoka works fine.

As for why he doesn't appear in the sequels, apparently that's explained in a recent novel - his ghost is damaged/depleted/whatever protecting Luke from some Sithy Shenanigans on Exigol.

 insaniak wrote:

As for why he doesn't appear in the sequels, apparently that's explained in a recent novel - his ghost is damaged/depleted/whatever protecting Luke from some Sithy Shenanigans on Exigol.

That's so much worse than just not mentioning it.

Voss wrote:

 insaniak wrote:

As for why he doesn't appear in the sequels, apparently that's explained in a recent novel - his ghost is damaged/depleted/whatever protecting Luke from some Sithy Shenanigans on Exigol.

That's so much worse than just not mentioning it.

I was about to say exactly this! Actually that gakky explanation fits right in with the dumpster fire sequels, so maybe it's perfect.

A couple of posters beat me to it, but wow, that's the explanation? Having to resort to a novel to explain it and this badly, man we really need to skip like 5000 years ahead for SW or something because the current era of the post Galactic Civil War era just keeps making things worse and worse.

It would be just as incoherent as it is now, just with different characters. Well, they'd probably still wheel Anthony Daniels out, and maybe somehow Palpatine would return again.

Meh, different strokes, and all that. Anakin's ghost being 'injured' seems like a reasonable explanation to me. They've established elsewhere that force ghosts can interact with the world of the living, so it seems reasonable that some things could in turn affect them as well.

The fact that the explanation is in a book is only a problem if you are expecting every little detail to be explained in the movies. And that's never been Star Wars' thing. This was something that didn't even need an explanation until newer stories made it an oddity... so they provided an explanation. Which has always been a Star Wars thing. The EU was used rather extensively for plugging plot holes.

I’d argue the Old EU existed because of people wanting to plug those gaps. Likely by authors who had the toys a kid. Silly named random background “blink and you’d miss them” characters, who started their creative Star Wars careers inventing backstories in their backyard.

Those who developed their childhood imaginings into a more refined creative process, leading them into creative writing and from there? The Holy Grail of being allowed to add to actual Star Wars Canon.

I would have just said Yoda or perhaps even Obi Wan were the better choice as they were Luke's teachers rather than the father he didn't know and sort of helped kill.

 creeping-deth87 wrote:
It would be just as incoherent as it is now, just with different characters. Well, they'd probably still wheel Anthony Daniels out, and maybe somehow Palpatine would return again.

Yeah, that's sadly true, though my preference for it being that far out is for selfish reasons where it's harder to taint the earlier legacy of the previous movies with that level of time gap, but knowing Disney they'd butcher it somehow with either force ghosts or some weird retcon where they make them look bad anyways to try and make their self-insert OC's better by comparison.