Saturday, October 28, 2023

Star Wars: Rebels - S1E5 - "Breaking Ranks"

At the beginning of the Rebels episode "Breaking Ranks," there's a brief establishing shot of Lothal City.


At first, I noticed only the visual symmetry that this shot has:  the Imperial facility is centered, and the Star Destroyer on the left is somewhat balanced with the sunset on the right.  Then, I realized that there's a contrast between the two sides of this shot and that this contrast illustrates how the Empire's occupation is changing Lothal.

The right side of the shot shows a bright city with rolling hills beyond it, but the left side shows a darkened city emitting smoke from Imperial factories.  The Star Destroyer overhead indicates the Imperial oppression, and the sunset with which it's balanced may even represent the fading of the old days of Lothal.

There are episodes later in the series that demonstrate more clearly how the Empire is stripping the planet of its resources ("The Occupation" S4E5 and "Crawler Commandeers" S4E8), but this episode shows it in its early stages.

Saturday, October 21, 2023

Star Wars: Rebels - S1E4 - "Rise of the Old Masters"

I recently started re-watching Star Wars: Rebels.  Even before I got to it, I was thinking about "Rise of the Old Masters," and I realized that it's significant that Luminara Unduli is the Jedi Master in this episode.

After the Ghost crew hears Senator Gall Trayvis's broadcast claiming that "one of the Republic's greatest peacekeepers, Jedi Master Luminara Unduli, is alive," Kanan says that "she was a great Jedi master, brave, compassionate, disciplined" and tells Ezra that "she'd made an excellent teacher for you."  From the moment she's introduced, Luminara is presented almost as the epitome of the Republic-era Jedi, but in this time period (the "dark times" of the Empire, as Obi-Wan describes it in A New Hope), she's more suited for this idealization than some other Jedi.  Luminara's name is related to lumen (gen. luminis), the Latin word for light, so in a way, she's the embodiment of the light side of the Force and acts as a symbol of the old Jedi order.