STAR WARS REBELS
“Warhead”
By Jason Gibner
Over the course of this season of Star Wars Rebels, a dirty word has come up over and over that continues to haunt over almost every episode that doesn’t seem to feature Darth Maul or connect to Rogue One somehow. The kids on the World Wide Web are using some crazy beatnik jive calling these episodes “filler”.
fill·er
ˈfilər/
noun
an item serving only to fill space or time, especially in a newspaper, broadcast, or recording.
Now, in all fairness, I’ve used this lazy word myself in describing some of the season’s “why is this episode even happening” moments. Looking at you once again, space kids with space waffles. Nowadays, if an episode isn’t telling an epic story featuring lightsabers and characters from a movie, it’s instantly labeled as “filler” and quickly dismissed. This episode does not deserve that treatment.
Warhead is an intriguing episode that begins with an ode to Empire Strikes Back’s opening with a Star Destroyer sending out probes to find a Rebel base. Only instead of a probe droid, we get a fairly innocent looking protocol droid wandering around Chopper Base. Turns out the droid is actually a giant killer enforcement droid and it’s up to the oddball trio of Zeb, Chopper and AP-5 to save the day.
Is this the most mind blowing 22 minutes of Star Wars Rebels you’ve ever seen? Mostly likely that’s a no but the one thing this episode does have going for it is that it’s a good time. Thanks to a snappy script from Rogue One writer Gary Whitta, the episode gets right to the fun and balances the Aliens/Predator action of hunting a killer droid with the mismatched team of Rebel heroes.
In an interview Dave Filoni said that the episode was originally to feature Zeb and Captain Rex as the Rebels left on the base, but putting Zeb against the underused AP-5 is a stroke of genius. AP-5’s delight in wondering what the point of Zeb is almost sounds like fans on a Saturday night on Twitter after a new episode of Rebels just finished. It’s smarty pants, snappy stuff like that that echoes back to the original trilogy style of dialogue that we all love so much.
In conclusion your honor, this episode is not “filler”. It offers some fun droid and Zeb action and while Thrawn still really isn’t doing anything yet, the threat with him figuring out Kallus being Rebel’s inside man is becoming way more real. The Thrawn thing is shaping up to be slow buildup to what eventually will be his total freakout on the Rebel crew. And that’s gonna be something.
Final grade : B
Side note : In this episode’s Rebels Recon on Starwars.com, Filoni said if he knew when this episode was to air, he would have had the warhead droid be a K-2SO style droid. The chances of us exploding if that would have happened would been high….very high.