REVIEW: Star Wars Rebels "Warhead"
Well, this episode of Rebels was, something. For one thing, it pretty much took place exclusively on Chopper Base, but also focused on Zeb, Chopper, and AP-5. This small-scale approach, which I complained about a little bit last week, would seem not to work here. Yet, surprisingly, it did, mostly.
Hera and the rest of the Ghost crew leave to train new fighter recruits so she leaves Zeb in charge of the base. Meanwhile, Thrawn begins launching these new protocol-like droids to try and detect where the rebel base is at. For the first third of the episode, it boils down to AP-5 being like C-3PO, nobody wanting to be around him, whereas AP-5 and Chopper make fun of Zeb for how stupid he is. It kind of got old although some of the comedy got me to chuckle a little bit.
Eventually, Zeb and Chopper find the droid disabled about being attacked by the spider creatures. Now, Zeb brings it back to base to investigate while Chopper wants to destroy it. We'll find out later why it wasn't a good thing Zeb didn't destroy it, though it is incredibly stupid of Zeb to bring it back to base because, "it looks harmless." Yeah, the Ewoks looked harmless too and they'll rip your face off.
AP-5 fixes the droid although it eventually finds out about the base and attacks the trio. This leads to a series of really well-done and fun action scenes with the trio working together to find and subdue the droid. However, the new droid, which Zeb calls a warhead, has a bomb that will vaporize the base. However, they can't disable it because then it will give off a signal to the Empire. Therefore, what are the rebels to do?
Well, Zeb, in the end, comes up with the plan to reprogram the droid to give it the all-clear signal, then send it back to the Empire where it will explode. It was rewarding to not only see Zeb get some attention this week, but also use his brains, rather than his brawn to come up with the solution. Granted, he did make some dumb decisions before, but he's not an idiot and I wish the show would do more with him to make him seem less like the brainless muscle.
We also got to see Agent Kallus work as both an ISB agent and as Fulcrum as well in this episode, which was also nice to see. He is the one that contacts Zeb to warn of the droid and what it can do. It was interesting to see Kallus in this role firsthand after the show teasing it for so long. It will be interesting to see how long Kallus can keep this up before being caught by Thrawn. In the end, the plan goes well as the droid is brought back to the Empire...only for it to explode causing a star destroyer to be...destroyed. I did not mean for that to be a pun.
The Ghost crew comes back in the end while Thrawn meanwhile says that because of the incident, he can say that the Rebel base is on one of the 94 planets he sent his droids too, which isn't really a lot of planets when you think about it given how big the Star Wars galaxy is. He ends the episode saying that the rebels won the battle but he'll win the war.
Overall, I don't know why, even though the premise was simple and it was nothing spectacular, I enjoyed this episode. I don't know, something about it worked for me. Even if their quips to each other got old about awhile, I still liked the interplay between Zeb, AP-5, and Chopper and this episode does lead the way to Thrawn possibly finding Chopper Base in the near future. In the end, I thought it was a simple, but entertaining episode.
