“Star Wars Rebels” arrived in 2014 with a narrow job and a wide field. The job: keep Disney XD viewers watching between the prequels and the original trilogy. The field: a galaxy still recovering from “Star Wars: The Clone Wars,” which Lucasfilm Animation had cancelled before its story was finished.
The series ran four seasons and 69 episodes, from its October 13, 2014 premiere on Disney XD to its final episode on March 5, 2018. It scored 7.8 out of 10. That number is fair, and it is also a little generous to the first season and a little stingy to the last.
Trailer, via Star Wars.
Lothal, and the Crew of the Ghost
“Star Wars Rebels” is set 14 years after “Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith” and moves toward the events of the 1977 original film. The Empire is hunting down the last of the Jedi. A fledgling rebellion is forming.
The show’s answer to that premise is a crew, not a chosen one. The starship Ghost carries a cowboy Jedi named Kanan Jarrus (voiced by Freddie Prinze Jr.), ace pilot Hera Syndulla (Vanessa Marshall), street-smart teenager Ezra Bridger (Taylor Gray), the muscle Garazeb “Zeb” Orrelios (Steve Blum), warrior firebrand Sabine Wren (Tiya Sircar), and a cantankerous old astromech droid called Chopper.
Dave Filoni voices Chopper uncredited. David Oyelowo voices Agent Kallus.
The group is called the Spectres. They run covert operations against Imperial forces on and around the planet Lothal, and on other planets the Empire menaces. That is the whole engine of the show, and it is a good one: a small ship, a small crew, a large enemy.
Ralph McQuarrie’s Shadow on the Screen
The visual style of “Star Wars Rebels” is inspired by the original trilogy concept art of Ralph McQuarrie. That is not a small choice. It gives the series a flat, painted, slightly dusty look that separates it from the glossy 3D of “The Clone Wars” and ties it to the 1977 film’s own design language.
It also gives the show a problem. The look is handsome in stills and thin in motion. Space battles, of which there are many, rarely build the speed the story wants.
What holds up is the ship design and the planet work. Lothal reads as a place with weather, industry and a horizon. The Ghost reads as a home. When the show needs you to care about a freighter, it earns it.
Four Seasons, Four Television Films
Each season opened with a longer piece before the weekly run. That structure is worth laying out, because it shows how deliberately Lucasfilm Animation paced the show.
| Season | Premiere | Opening film | Network |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | October 3, 2014 | “Spark of Rebellion” | Disney Channel |
| 1 | October 13, 2014 | Series premiere | Disney XD |
| 2 | June 20, 2015 | “The Siege of Lothal” | Disney XD |
| 3 | September 24, 2016 | “Steps Into Shadow” | Disney XD |
| 4 | October 16, 2017 | “Heroes of Mandalore” | Disney XD |
| 4 | March 5, 2018 | Final episode | Disney XD |
“Spark of Rebellion” aired first as a one-hour television film on Disney Channel, ahead of the series premiere on Disney XD. Every season after that got the same treatment on Disney XD itself. “The Siege of Lothal,” “Steps Into Shadow” and “Heroes of Mandalore” each ran an hour and each reset the board.
That is a lot of table-setting for a show with 69 episodes. It mostly works. The films give the seasons a spine, and they give the writers room to move characters rather than just move plot.
Kanan, Ezra, and the Jedi Problem
The Jedi material is where “Star Wars Rebels” takes its biggest swing and where it is most uneven.
Kanan is a Jedi who never finished his training, which is a smart way to write around the fact that the Empire already won. Ezra is a street kid who becomes his student. Their relationship carries the series, and it is the reason the later seasons land harder than the early ones.
But the show keeps reaching for Jedi mythology when its best material is elsewhere. The Force sequences are reverent and slow. The crew sequences are quick and funny. When “Star Wars Rebels” remembers it is a show about a ship full of people who are bad at being professional, it is very good.
Hera is the best character in it. She is the pilot, the adult, and the one who keeps the operation pointed at something larger than survival. Marshall plays her straight, which is exactly right in a cast that includes a droid doing slapstick and a warrior firebrand doing spray paint.
Sabine gets the show’s most interesting arc on paper: a Mandalorian with a family history and a talent for explosives and art. The series takes its time paying that off, and season four’s “Heroes of Mandalore” is where it finally does.
The Empire, and What the Show Gets Right
The villains are the part that ages best.
The Empire in “Star Wars Rebels” is not a distant evil. It occupies a remote planet, ruins the lives of its people, and tightens its grip episode by episode. That is a smaller, meaner version of the Empire than the films usually show, and it suits a television budget and a television rhythm.
Agent Kallus, voiced by Oyelowo, is the show’s most useful Imperial. He is a working officer, not a dark lord, and Oyelowo gives him enough contempt and enough doubt to keep him from being a wall.
The show also brings in characters from the original trilogy and from “The Clone Wars,” which is a double-edged move. It rewards viewers who watched the earlier series. It also means “Star Wars Rebels” sometimes serves continuity instead of its own crew.
Executive producers on the first season were Filoni, Simon Kinberg and Greg Weisman. Weisman left after that season. Filoni was also supervising director for the first two seasons, a role he gave up later. You can feel the handoff. The first season is the most episodic. The later ones are more serialized and more confident.
What 7.8 Out of 10 Means Here
A 7.8 is a score for a show that is good at a lot of things and great at a few.
“Star Wars Rebels” is not as ambitious as “The Clone Wars” at its peak. It does not have that show’s appetite for tragedy or its willingness to sit in a losing war. What it has instead is a family, and a clear sense of what a rebellion looks like before it is a rebellion: a handful of people with a ship, a plan, and no backup.
The animation is the weakest link. The Jedi material is the second weakest. The characters are the strongest, and they are strong enough to carry 69 episodes.
The final episode aired March 5, 2018, and the show ended on its own terms. That matters. “The Clone Wars” did not get that, and the comparison is unavoidable. “Star Wars Rebels” is the series that got to finish.
The Gap the Show Filled
It is also the series that made the gap between “Revenge of the Sith” and the 1977 film feel populated. Fourteen years of Imperial rule is a long time to leave blank on screen. “Star Wars Rebels” fills it with a freighter, a crew, and a planet worth defending.
If you are coming to it now, the first season is the price of entry. It is the most uneven run, and it spends a lot of time establishing a status quo it will later break. The second season’s “The Siege of Lothal” is where the show finds its actual scale. The fourth season’s “Heroes of Mandalore” is where it cashes in.
The show’s biggest limitation is also its clearest identity. It is a children’s animated series with adult stakes, and it never fully resolves that tension. The slapstick droid and the occupied planet sit in the same episode. Sometimes that works. Sometimes it undercuts the thing the episode is trying to say.
But the crew is the argument, and the crew holds. Kanan, Hera, Ezra, Zeb, Sabine and Chopper are not a chosen family in the marketing sense. They are a working one. They argue, they fail, they come back. That is the part of “Star Wars Rebels” worth keeping, and it is the reason the show outlasted its own rough start.
Get the Notebook.
The day's best stories and every fresh verdict, in plain English, in your inbox by seven. One email a day, no more.