Twilight of the Apprentice

[unspeakablehorror]

Just finished rewatching the two Season 2 finale episodes.  These were pretty exciting, but then in then in the next season the show just really dropped the ball on a lot of the stuff set up here.  A list of arcs that I feel were mishandled:

*Maul--the plotline to nowhere!:(
*The Sith Holocron--who was speaking?! Whose holocron was this??!! Inquiring minds want to know!
*Ahsoka--am fine with the ultimate outcome, but deeply annoyed by the unnecessarily convoluted path to that destination; I admit a certain bias against this kind of plotline, of course...
*Ezra--because he should have had more interactions with Maul!

Which brings me to my last point:
*Maul--aaarrrgghhhh...just give me....Maul redemption arc...giiiiiive...

Anyway, it was interesting to rewatch this thinking about what I would change if I were to do a fanfic AU for this.  Which I would love to do, but I don't have enough of a direction yet (though I have some ideas).  I feel like I want to make progress on my current longfic though, because if I did this, it would definitely end up being a longer story.

Comments

[chamerion]

Rebels was such an uneven show but when it was good it was so good, and that finale is a prime example. The setting, the music, Maul’s interaction with Ezra, Ahsoka’s confrontation with Vader. The animation alone was unusually memorable (the first sight of the Sith Temple and Anakin’s eye peering out of Vader’s mask are some of the visual highlights of the show imo).

And I’m with you in wishing we got more of Maul overall, though I liked what we did get. But I enjoy tragic villains who self-sabotage their own opportunities for redemption almost as much as I like redemption arcs themselves, so it’s admittedly unsurprising that I would.

[unspeakablehorror]

I enjoyed parts of Rebels, but Maul's arc in the third season was just incredibly disappointing to me and really almost put me off watching the show entirely. I just have *feelings* about that part haha. I was also a bit annoyed by the prophecy thing for Thrawn at the end of the third season because I felt like it reduced the stakes a bit too much regarding his character being a threat to the rebels (even though it wasn't clear at the time when or how that prophecy would manifest).

As it is, though, they added Palpatine into the show and I was just like 'well that's a cheap trick, but fine, I'll finish watching this silly cartoon'. And I do like the season 4 finale a lot even if it does feature *time travel*, which I am very much not a fan of. It still managed to give me a lot of the things I wanted, probably because every recent Star Wars movie/show has taken a different approach to the storyline, likely in an attempt to appeal to as large a segment of viewers as possible. I actually do think the scene where Ezra isn't able to use the World Between Worlds to change that one pivotal past event was pretty clever, and the scene where Palpatine tries to get him to unlock it extremely well done. Everything else is just standard happy ending fare, which I have my criticisms of but mostly enjoyed because, well, I like happy endings.

[chamerion]

I’d be interested to hear more of your thoughts about Maul’s arc! I haven’t seen TCW, so I don’t know precisely how it lines up. And I do think Rebels is generally not at its best when handling complicated villains; Thrawn works well within the show, for example, but he’s a lot more one-dimensional than Zahn’s version and the contrast is a little jarring if you’ve encountered him elsewhere. To some extent that’s probably to be expected in a kid’s cartoon, but still. Thrawn and Ezra would actually make fascinating foils if the former were better developed. Likewise I enjoyed the Kallus redemption arc once it got going, but I think it suffers from a lack of foreshadowing in the early stages - he’s a pretty one-note villain right up until the moment they start telegraphing where his story is headed, so the character continuity you need for a smooth transition just isn’t there.

I was initially irritated about Palpatine too (the galaxy is huge! pulling every single character into every story makes it feel small!), though they won me over with the execution. And thematically I appreciate that the show starts with Ezra caring mostly about his own survival, and struggling to connect to so much as a single loth-cat - and ends with self-sacrifice, and freeing his planet alongside not just the Ghost crew but a bunch of characters he’s personally drawn into the fight, and reaching out with the Force to connect with an entire school of space whales. It ought to be ridiculous but somehow it gave me feelings.

[unspeakablehorror]

Ah, I was actually really happy when they added Palpatine because he's one of my favorite characters, I just also thought it was a cheap trick because I could just somehow hear the corporate board meeting going 'well, here's the chart of our prospective profits if we bring in yet another major franchise character and as you can see the line is going *up*'. I wasn't really bothered by it making the galaxy seem smaller since they'd already introduced a whole score of major and minor characters from the movies, The Clone Wars, and even the EU (Vader, Maul, Ahsoka, Rex, Thrawn, Leia, Obi-Wan, Lando, Wolffe, Gregor, Hondo...). I definitely loved how they dealt with the finale, though. I also realized that they'd foreshadowed that there was something really important on Lothal way back in season 2 when I found out I missed the first two eps for that season and finally watched them.

I can't say I was able to actually enjoy the Kallus redemption arc. I never really warmed up to his character and while I don't remember the specifics, I do know that part of my dislike was the manner in which they chose to pull that arc off and it wasn't just completely based on my lack of interest in him.

I actually felt Thrawn was another opportunity where they could have had Sabine play a more integral role than she ultimately did. She's an artist and Thrawn's big thing is art, after all. But oh, well. And yeah, he's definitely more one-dimensional in the cartoon than in Zahn's books. Also, Pryce is much more interesting in the Zahn novel she appears in than in Rebels. I don't really feel she did a whole lot in Rebels. Also, I'm curious what you would have liked to have seen regarding Thrawn and Ezra?

As for Maul: I've seen all of The Clone Wars and that is some wild stuff, let me tell you! They do reference that a number of times, so my issue with it isn't so much that it can't be seen as an extension of The Clone Wars plot, just that his entire plotline seemed a lot more superflous than I thought it should have been. I felt there should have been more of the Sith holocron, and more time with Maul and Ezra, and also more should have been done with the fact that Sabine is a Mandalorian and Maul became a Mandolorian at one point during The Clone Wars. I thought the ending that Maul got was overly abrupt and I don't buy that Maul learned so little about fighting since the last time Obi-Wan and him fought that he couldn't even manage to last more than a few seconds against him when he has always been a much tougher foe than that, both against Obi-Wan and against other opponents. I also find it very derivative since I think he died on Tatooine going after Obi-Wan like twice in the old EU. Like, I'm not surprised they went that route, but it's just very uninteresting to me. And they didn't even make Obi-Wan work for it. I was really excited to see Maul in Rebels, but I just felt really let down by how his arc was executed, especially when compared to what some of the other characters from the movies and The Clone Wars got.

[chamerion]

That’s kind of what I meant when I said I was irritated. To elaborate, part of the problem with including so many outside characters (in addition to being a worldbuilding misstep imo) is that they get shortchanged, especially in Rebels’ 20-minute episodic format. The main focus of the show is on the Ghost crew. That doesn’t mean you can’t pull in outside characters - but if you pull in too many, they’re competing over such a tiny amount of screentime that none of them gets the chance to really shine. It becomes an exercise in name-checking for fanservice and profit rather than an effort to meaningfully build on those characters’ stories. Personally I feel Maul comes off better than most in this respect, but your disappointment with the brevity of his arc illustrates the problem. So while I also enjoy Palpatine, any excitement about his appearance was initially tempered by my “here we go again” feeling regarding the show’s penchant for including franchise characters for their own sake, rather than (with a few exceptions) because they had something interesting planned to do with them.

That said, I don’t think I would describe Maul’s plotline as superfluous? The fallout from the season 2 finale, and the lessons learned from their continuing interactions, form a pretty major thread in Ezra’s character development. He isn’t the same character without Maul. In fact I think you could argue that part of the reason Ezra ultimately does so well against Palpatine’s manipulation is because he had a trial run against Palp’s former apprentice. (In many ways Maul was actually the more effective opponent, because he turned Ezra’s greatest strength - his ability to make connections in unlikely places - against him. Palpatine just rehashed his Anakin Strategy.)

I also read the Twin Suns fight scene very differently in that I think it functions on a very symbolic level. These two characters have already had big flashy lightsaber duels, on multiple occasions. So instead of rehashing those, the showrunners gave us something else: pure character study. They gave us a duel of philosophies between two lonely old men living with the traumas and mistakes of their pasts. Obi-Wan says it explicitly: “If you define yourself by your power to take life, you have nothing.” The fight itself is not the climax of their confrontation - it’s just a literalized illustration of the much more significant clash in outlooks that occurred beforehand.

Thus I absolutely do think they made Obi-Wan earn his victory - they just made him do it emotionally, rather than via combat. There’s so much history between the characters that their meeting is reminiscent of that horrible way arguing with family can make you feel like a child again. The dynamic is so well-established and those psychological ruts are so well-worn that you fall right back into them, even after you’ve promised yourself that you wouldn’t. To me that’s the heart of Maul’s tragedy: he justifiably hates the Sith for the way Palpatine used and mistreated him, but his approach to solving problems is still fundamentally the violent, vengeful, manipulative one that Palpatine taught him. He has so many opportunities to change, and he keeps turning them down. Faced with Ezra’s empathy and willingness to vouch for him to the other Jedi, he tries to murder them and take Ezra as his own padawan. Faced with Obi-Wan’s desire not fight, he threatens the boy Obi-Wan has devoted the last 20-odd years of his life to protecting. Hurting others has brought him nothing but suffering, and yet he keeps trying the same approach and expecting different results.

Meanwhile Obi-Wan, after he’s finally goaded into igniting his lightsaber, falls instinctively into the stance of prequels-era Ewan McGregor...and then he takes a breath, and shifts into OT Alec Guinness. He’s not a better fighter than he was the last time they met - he’s a different person, with a different approach to life. He doesn’t win by killing Maul (and in fact Maul’s death is framed as a tragedy rather than a triumph). Obi-Wan wins when he tries to avoid the fight, and when he stops himself from going on the offensive, and when he cradles his old enemy as he dies. He wins the moment he breaks out of that psychological rut. And Maul loses the moment he falls back into it - quite literally by attempting the same feint that killed Qui-Gon, but more metaphorically by his inability to change his approach.

So I don’t think that scene shows Maul to be a less skilled fighter at all. I think it shows a fight between two master duelists, one of whom has a psychological and emotional edge. For one it’s a final, self-destructive attempt to punch the same wall he’s been breaking his fists on for most of his life. For the other it’s a step on the road between the man in ROTS - who loses a fight by winning it - and the man in ANH who wins a fight by losing it, because he recognizes that the fight and the fencing match are different things. Maul is consumed by the past. Obi-Wan is safeguarding the future. I’m a sucker for that sort of beautiful economy in storytelling, so I loved Twin Suns a lot.

Which is not to begrudge you your disappointment! Nor to say that I don’t think there are other satisfying ways to have concluded Maul’s story. It would have eaten up a lot of their limited showtime, and run up against the same problem they face with all the other Force-users (ie, how to get them out of the way in time for the OT), but I agree that a Maul redemption arc would’ve been really fun to see, and played a similar thematic role as characters like Hondo and Vizago (shady types changed and drawn into the larger fight via connections with Ezra).

As for Thrawn, the short version is that he and Ezra are both driven by love of their homeworlds. (Though I do also agree that Thrawn and Sabine should have had more opportunities to discuss art.) When Ezra surrenders to him in the finale after Thrawn threatens to destroy Lothal he says that he didn’t really have a choice, and Thrawn’s reply is “Nonsense - you could have let your people die.” It comes off as standard-issue villain gloating on the show, but the line has so much weight if you know that Thrawn’s whole motivation for allying with the Empire is to protect the Chiss. There’s so much potential characterization mileage for both of them in those parallels!!! As written, though, none of Thrawn’s motivations make it into Rebels, so it’s hard to tell if the dramatic irony is deliberate or just a happy accident.

[unspeakablehorror]

Yeah, I'm aware that Twin Suns is supposed to be symbolic and stuff, but it's not a symbolism that delivers anything I can enjoy, so *shrug emoji*. That's probably because my personal interpretations of Maul and Obi-Wan don't line up very well with those of the showrunners, or Lucas, for that matter, and the entire point of the symbolism is to reinforce their interpretations. Which is likely a large part of why it seems superflous to me. And I'm just going to have to disagree that Maul's portrayal there is anything except evil equals not just failure, but incompetence. Also, lightsaber fights are *never* a waste of screentime in my book!

The limited time frame of Rebels was definitely an issue. If they had had more seasons, they could have developed character relationships better and given them more detailed arcs. Also maybe they could have worked out more of the kinks in their rendering designs (I feel like they should have redesigned Ezra's hair to look better, for example, rather than just giving him a buzz cut). The graphics quality did improve as the show went on, but I didn't feel it ever reached the level of quality The Clone Wars attained relatively early on. Barring a few notable exceptions, clothing design on every level was just awful imo.

Also that is a good point about Thrawn! There wasn't really anything done to highlight that parallel, which is an interesting one for sure.

I think one of the limitations of Rebels is that it's an interquel, an unknown sandwiched between two known quantities, and there's so many characters introduced that either have impenetrable plot armor due to being in the OT or have to disappear before the OT, that the possibilities for these characters becomes significantly reduced. That's probably one of the reasons I enjoy AUs so much, because they can break the story out of these restrictions. Also because they can explore themes and ideas that canon doesn't.

[chamerion]

Fair enough! I find Obi-Wan a far more difficult character to like than I think Lucas & Co intend him to be, and I had few feelings about Maul prior to watching Rebels, so in part I was just pleasantly surprised that Twin Suns gave me so many emotions about them.

And yeah, the timeframe was a problem, as was the baffling decision to rely mostly on self-contained episodes-of-the-week rather than story arcs. It’s just hard to tell a story in twenty minutes. There’s a noticeable uptick in quality with the two-parters and in the fourth season where they take a more arc-based approach. Likewise I agree that much of the animation was a pile of meh, which is why the bits that wowed me in the S2 finale made such an impression.

The silver lining of the things that frustrate us about a work is always that they make good fanfic fuel, haha. I tend to like interquels - done well I think a story is more about the journey than the destination, and constraints can spur a lot of creativity - but the freedom of AUs definitely has its appeal.