Review: Star Wars Rebels “Breaking Ranks”

How bad can an episode revolving around be? Well, it’s not terrible.

Spoilers Below

I wasn’t sure what to expect from tonight’s episode. I was just thrown for a loss when the episode dropped you right in the thick of things, so I just went with it.

That tends to get a little confusing, because you have no idea what I am talking about. This is the same thing I was thinking when I started watching “Breaking Ranks,” and I saw that Ezra was in a cadet’s uniform for the Empire. It wasn’t until after Ezra flashed some gang signs at a repainted Chopper, that you knew something was up. Then, Kanan gave us the gist of the episode. It would have been nice to get a little bit of a back story before Ezra finished his Empire Cadet Olympics.

Weeks went past since Ezra made it to where he was in the Academy, yet we see nothing of it. Nor do we see who gave the Rebels the mission to destroy the kyber crystal. This was just not a great job writing. A lot of “Breaking Rank” seemed rushed. That’s bad, because this seemed to be an episode that was supposed to carry the overall narrative of the season. I think that any episode with the Inquisitor is a canon episode, where the rest are just there to fill out a season. “Rise of the Old Masters” did a great job incorporating the Inquisitor, and made him look like a grade 1 badass. This week, he just seemed like a desk jockey. That’s just weak.

All of this griping aside, I think that it was pretty necessary to introduce a possible foil for Ezra inside the Academy. With Zare Leonis, we get a friend for Ezra, at first. But with him ending up in the hands of the Sith Inquisitor, you know that he won’t be coming out of this as the same Zare that went in. Down the line, I either see Zare becoming an underling for the Inquisitor, or faking it to find his sister. Officially, my money is going on Inquisitor agent. Their fellow cadet, Jai Kell, shown a similar affinity to The Force as Ezra, so he made an escape as well. Then, of course, he was shooed away with his mother to probably never be seen or heard from again.

What I didn’t understand, was two fold. One, why was this training exercise basically the same thing, three times? I’ll give you that the second and third had guns, but it didn’t really do much. If anything it could have outed Ezra for being sensitive to the force. In fact, I’m pretty sure that the instructor actually saw that Ezra was “too good.” This whole episode almost got Ezra outed, but no one seemed to care, except for the instructor, and the Inquisitor at the end.  I’m pretty sure that the absolute last person you want to have close to the Inquisitor, and the Empire by extension, is Ezra.But hey, Kanan just channeled his inner Qui-Gon Jinn and said “fuck your rules.”

“Breaking Rank” could have been so much better. Instead, most of the episode took place in either the training pit, or the halls of the Officer’s quarters. There was a lot of rehashed animations and backgrounds, and not really much new introduced, location-wise. Now, is it me, or is Lothal seriously the biggest planet in the Star Wars universe? There is a rich backlog the animators and writers could have used, yet almost every episode took place on Lothal, with a very small smattering of other planets just for missions. I thought that it was novel to keep the series anchored in Lothal. But being anchored, and just having everything take place on the planet are very different. I think expansion into the last frontier needs to happen, and soon, because things are becoming stagnate. I think with the Inquisitor coming to Lothal, the Rebels are going to be on the run soon. So, hopefully that breaks up the monotony. However, this week was slow, drab, and somewhat confusing if you weren’t paying attention. Definitely a pass unless you absolutely have to watch every episode.