A More Civilized Age: A Star Wars Podcast - 103: Warhead, Trials of the Dark Saber, & Legacy of Mandalore (Rebels 51 - 53)

Episode Date: January 29, 2025

For three and a half seasons, Rebels has been teasing us Sabine backstory. Finally, this week, we get the details behind that backstory... at least most of them. And hey, they're pretty good! Sure would've been great if they'd gotten them to us sooner, so that we could've, you know, thought about how the events of the show intersected her history. Still, a much needed showcase for Sabine, and hopefully a good sign of things to come. Oh. And Zeb has some droid hijinks.  Support the show by going to Patreon.com/civilized! Next Time: Rebels 54 - 56 (Through Imperial Eyes, Secret Cargo, and Double Agent Droid) Show Notes Hosted by Rob Zacny (@RobZacny) Featuring Alicia Acampora (@ali_west), Austin Walker (@austin_walker), and Natalie Watson (@nataliewatson) Produced by Ricardo Contreras (@a_cado_appears) Music by Jack de Quidt (@notquitereal) Cover art by Xeecee (@xeeceevevo)    

Let us return once more to a more civilized age, a Star Wars podcast. I'm Rob Zakening, joined by Aliaqampora, Austin Walker, and Natalie Watson. We are, as always, supported by you, our listeners, via patreon.com slash civilized. So head over there if you'd like to support the show and get access to all our Q&A episodes. Before we get into the show, I think we do need, I hate to open on a somber topic. but this past weekend we got word

that Wado canonically was killed we don't know the exact circumstances of his death yeah I heard this I did hear this

I think we do know how he how he die I don't know I don't know I'm learning this live what did I should have warned you

yeah you should have yeah this is a terrible Well, Wado passed away. Where with Patricia Arquette being told about David Lynch live. Picture like a little video, picture like a little still frame of Waddo. Yeah. Like Waddo, 1997.

Uh-huh. To 2025. Yeah, my understanding, it was, uh, it was old, uh, Darth Vader. For some reason, went to Tadda. And killed poor little Waddo. Little Wado? Apparently, that's my understanding. Oh, flying, oh, that little flying traitor?

Yeah, that's it. Yeah, let me take a look here. This was a Twitter user, Buy Your Logic. Hashtag bullshit, hashtag fuck Star Wars. Hashtag Wado is the hero of Star Wars. Quoteeting, a disgusting film tweet with some panels here. A new comic series, Legacy of Vader, has revealed that Darth Vader went back to Tatooine once and killed Wado. Cut scene from what we won

I'll link you I will link you this It's coming I'm sorry Darth Peter went back to Tattooee once Is the very funny It's so funny

Yeah uh huh Was he just stopping there For gas on the way Somewhere else And he was like you know what Let me go find Wano Why I'm at it No you know that like

There was like a long weekend once And he had like the Monday off Or whatever And he was like You know what I'm gonna go Merck Wado this weekend. That's what I'm going to do with my time off.

I'm going to go and kill him. Can I give you another person that Darth Vader killed that's maybe relevant to our recent viewing? Um, yeah. I found out about this in the Rebels Recon for our first episode, Warhead. Um, Darth Vader killed that Geo-Notion queen that click-clack saved. no wait Natalie you may have missed these episodes did you go back

you ever watch those the Geoenotius episodes yeah yeah I watched them like four months ago whenever the little guy click clack saves an egg that's like the whole thing Salgarer wants to

yeah Darth Vader found her and she had developed into a mid-sized queen and had like a I'm gonna use the word here a portable droid I'm just read the sentence here

unable to repopulate her species Karina replaced her womb with a portable droid factory acting as her mechanical womb biology had failed her so she turned to science to repopulate her species by any means necessary. Rather than geonotions, she produced many B1 droid

workers altered to look like her people. She considered the droids her children and was fiercely protective of them seeing them as the means to rebuild an empire on geonosis. Wow, she's like the bug Jabo hood. that's really true actually Rob, extremely true

and then sometime after the Battle of Yavin and the destruction of the Death Star Darth Vader wanted to build a new secret base. He went to Geonosis and wanted to take over this droid factory and killed her. He killed her. She might be the last of the Genoosian queens.

Pablo Hidal said in the Rebels recon, there's a lot of those caves. There's a lot of towns down there. Maybe there's the queen egg. What are we doing to our beautiful mid-sized queens? We're making room for larger queens. Yeah. Oh, you know what? Wait a second.

Maybe I'm misreading here. Wikipedia is saying she's not dead. But in the Rebels Recon, Pablo Hidalgo is explicitly like, well, is that the end of the Gene Ocean people? And he's like, well, they're. could be another queen. So I'm getting mixed messages here. I think he really did not want to be interrupted, whatever he was doing, this Rebel's Recon. Did you see it?

I did it. Okay, well, that's so funny. I'm just going to play it right now, actually. I know we haven't even done the intro yet, but it's a Rebel's Recon. It's the question segment of the Rebels Recon, which, as you know, is about the previous episode. And so it's such a funny Rebels Recon episode, actually. um so let me uh let me pull it up because the idea that he in fact did not want to be interrupted is kind of exactly right and important let me uh let me find it here i can't believe the spirit of the old one-op show survived it's wild became rebels recon yeah uh-huh um do you all see my screen you see pablo oh man he's in the criterion closet for nurse i do

Yes, he's holding the episode one script or something. I don't know. All right. I'm hitting play. I got a question for you. Okay, Chels has a timeline question. When we meet Saw and Rebels, has Jin already come and gone from his life? Where is she during these episodes?

Jen's been gone for like four years now, and Sa's not going to see her for another two when Rogue One happens. As far as what she's up to at this time, I can't really tell you now, but hopefully you'll be able to read about it very soon. Okay, but then what about the... The queen egg? Is it the same queen from the Veda? comic yet that is the idea. I don't want to connect too many dots because that might be a story yet to be told somewhere but the thought is that is indeed the queen that hatches from click clack's egg. Okay now but what about it gets so big because click

clack's taking care of her and he's got all that supply of royal jelly so these things can grow pretty fast and it speaks basic because you got all that droid apparatus around you and you know click like may be able to understand it but you can't speak it but geon ocean queens can speak it okay but how about the in terms of does that mean why does it call itself queen korena the great well you know again and not to spoil too much, but that queen is not altogether right in the head. But does that mean that...

Doesn't mean that they're all gone forever and ever? Well, those tunnels run pretty deep so that there may be hope for generations in the future. You never know. All right. Well, thanks, Pablo. Oh, yeah, one other thing. That wasn't Ray Sloan.

It was Captain Brunson. Settled. Thank you. He's great. Shout us to Pablo. That was really cute. Tremendous. Tremendous.

We'll come back and watch another Rebel's Recon later, because I need people to hear how people talk about Sabine. Oh, yeah. It's not negative. It's just interesting. We'll get there. All right.

What are these episodes we watched, Rob? So, yeah, we have sort of a one-off, a standalone here, warhead. And then we have two dealing with Sabine and Mandelor and the past and future of Mandelor. And the Mandalorians. I think you actually, it's not really a two-parter, I would argue. I think the two Sabine episodes are also basically standalone.

You sort of tackle them separately. I will say, something on your mind. I'm just glad we didn't have to wait a whole season for the second Sabine episode. Because they could have given, though maybe I would be happy to do that if they put the first Sabine episode a season ago. That way we would have at least gotten, you know what I mean? Well, that would have required them knowing Sabine's backstory a season ago rather than

like just adding new parts to it where it's like, okay, so basically she's Doogie Oppenheimer. And so like in middle school, she's like, Doogie Oppenheimer, but then like she like, I don't want to talk about the is we can't get there until we get to the episode. You don't understand. I also want to say you're also sensing

there's something else here, which is in, you're right that, um, I'm sorry, Natalie, Dugi Hauser was a fictional TV doctor who was like so preternational. brilliant and precocious they like made him a doctor as a child he's like a teen doctor yes usually of course you know med school you you finish med school and practice like being a doctor in your 20s but dougie hauser was so gifted yeah let me show you a picture and then

i need you to tell don't anybody say do you know who this is i have just sent you a picture oh my god no it's it's our it's our fucking it is our it is our it is our it is our it is our it It is our mortal enemy. It is our mortal nemesis. Neil Patrick Harris. It is Neil Patrick Harris. That's correct. You think I wouldn't see those eyes?

We put a very young picture. He's so young in this. You know, his spirit transcends time. He looks so much like the kid who goes, master Skywalker. What should we do? He does. And then gets God, which would have been very funny if it had been Patrick Harris. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

God, he's apparently like 16 here. He looks 12. He looks like a baby. Anyway, um, uh, yeah, that's why Harold and Kumar worked. They figured out, like, it would be hilarious as, like, made this guy totally bonkers. The thing I was saying was, um, kind of know how we got to, how does the hell do we even get to do? Oh, right, you were talking about the timeline. Um, the, for the episode, the second episode we watched today, trials of the Dark Saber and Warhead

used to be. It didn't used to be one episode, but when they were first outlined, Warhead was the B plot for Trials of the Darksaber. That would have been a nightmare. And Filoni was like, no, we can't do that. We need a whole episode about the Dark Sabre

and Sabine and training. And thank God, because can you imagine trying to do both of these stories in like... I would have lost my mind. One in 14 minutes. First of all, coming back to rebels after like four gajillion years. to the first episode ever about Sabine

and there's a B plot about about a fucking just a droid with bad vibes about Zeb hanging out with droids yeah anyway I'm sure you have summaries about these let's hear them yeah they're straightforward enough

so Warhead is you know a TV classic what do we do with this guy you send away all the other characters and then you have a supporting character sort of take central stage and be the be the main character for a week in this case the whole crew of the ghost goes on a mission and zeb is left in charge of of chopper base and while he's there he encounters some weird fritz lang looking imperial probe droid that shows up and at first they're like what i it's just a friendly droid who wants it who seems way better at doing droid stuff than uh chopper's husband and then it turns out that the thing has an evil setting and uh once it activates evil mode it turns into a can look things get real fun we'll get into this but like it's a droid that eats people eat other droids so your mileage may vary about the people

thing. Anyway, point is, how they handle this gets tricky, though, because Agent Callis messages them and, like, look, if this thing doesn't report back, they'll look at where it went, and they'll come looking for it, they'll find your base. If you send it back, it will tell everyone where you're at. So what are we going to do here? And Zeb figures out, well, they can well chopper figures out really the key part they can freeze its self-destruct mechanism works surprisingly well don't know about the physics

yeah that stays frozen for a long enough time to go back through hyperspace I guess maybe stays frozen in hyperspace I mean like look we all made liquid nitrogen ice cream that is surprisingly hardy once you once you do that but still yeah it does seem a little bit a little bit out there but they send it back it gets there they plug it

in to get its to get its recon data and that's when it self-destruct goes off and it destroys a star destroyer and callus is like oh damn admiral thron that's how upsetting disappointing and i continue to think grand admiral thron playing a different game because he's like this rolled actually this is pretty funny right uh-huh it it is bringing him slightly closer to the rebels Sort of. I mean, yeah, no. He now has a narrow list of planets to search. Yeah, he's like, well, now it's one of these nine.

I thought it was any of these thousand planets. And we know it's one of these 91 planets. Because even though we didn't get the data from the thing, we know one of the robots that we sent out was sent back to us and blew up. So they should have just pointed into the middle of space and had it blow up somewhere before it could transmit. Their egos got ahead of them. Yeah.

They got the better because they were like, oh, we could, we could, send it back. I mean, this is Zeb's hubris at play here. So true. Really quick, Rob, you described this as being a Fritz-Lang-style robot, which I fully see the Metropolis style. Or not Metropolis. Is it Metropolis the one that that robot is in? Yeah, I think it's Metropolis. But it's actually, which is I think true and actually I think what's happening here is that Macquarie is drawing on that same thing. This is like really closely based on the original C-3PO art. the, like, C-3PO sketch that was done with the, like, like, heavy eye sockets and the kind of...

Humanoid is imagined by Italian futurists. A hundred percent that, yes. Including the, being able to transform into a sort of human blender, you know, like, that's also a big Italian futurism thing. So there's that design. I didn't think of any other important... Oh, originally, in the original outline, or maybe an early draft, this was the not going to be a Zeb and the droid story. This was going to be a Zeb and Rex story.

And then they decided more hijinks with the droids. And so they went with the droids. I think that's for the better. Yeah, it's fun. I like the droids. I like, but I also like Rex. I also like Zeb and Rex. Yeah, I guess we just came off of a Rex episode though, right? That's true. We need a, I think, I think the decision to give more AP5 was probably the correct one. Oh, one other thing about the droid design. Sorry, but I do want to talk about 85. Flonio also does go on to say later that if he had known what K2SO would look like from Rogue 1, he would have just made it one of those droids. But the production timelines were such that they were already doing this episode by the time K2 was locked in.

And so separate design. He would have made the, the-enemy droid? Yeah, the spy droid, the probe droid, look like K-2 as, just be a K-2-style droid. Got you, got-you. Yeah, that would make a lot of sense. with Andor in Rogue One. So, yeah, anyway, talk about AP5. I mean, he's fun.

Like, look, the brief for this character is we all loved Alan Rickman's take on Marvin in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. And so we just put him in the show, Chopper's husband, and he's just going to be sort of the Stadler and Waldorf of, well, I mean, he and Chopper are the Stadler and Waldorf, but only one of them talks directly. Yeah. that we can immediately interpret. And he's just going to walk around

and being like, Zeb, you're a dip shit. And it's kind of funny because Zeb is a bit of a diphthip, but also he's insecure enough that it really needles him. Yeah, it does.

It gets under his skin. I think I like about AP5 is some of his dialogue. A lot of his dialogue is really, it's all in the delivery. Like, there's a lot of what he says that if you read it in C.

3PO's voice and the Anthony Daniel C.3PO voice, you would read as like nebish and over-interested in details, but because he's doing, because the voice actor is doing this Rickman-style voice, it's just, like, cutting sarcasm all the time. It's really fun.

It's not all of his lines, but a lot of those lines come across is like, you know, um, you know, anybody, at C3BO could say it, any, any logistics or protocol droid could say it, and it would just sound normal, but this delivery. Like reporting information. Exactly that. Yes, 100%.

Well, and also, like, I, I, I do enjoy this concept that was sort of there from the beginning of AP5, which is he's a perpetually disgruntled employee who will never say anything actionable. It will always be this horrible gaslight situation of like you're sitting there across from your report, from your direct report or, you know, HR and you're like, no, you don't understand. It's the way he's saying. And I'm sorry, it just doesn't sound like I don't see the problem. Exactly. Yeah, but have you ever walked into a situation where, Like, you just know what's wrong with it

and that it would be better if they just let you fix it and you're just looking at everything. And it's so disorganized. And, like, it's like a bunch of cables in, like, a very small studio or something like that. And you just want to move them all around and organize them and fix them to look nice and stuff. And the powers that be won't let you.

AP5 is checking expiration dates on things in your fridge. 100%. I do that. Someone needs to. Yeah, real bitch you live like this energy. Check your parents' fridges expiration dates. Look, I've done it. Like, the thing is that entire generation thinks that a condiment doesn't go bad ever.

They do. It's a condiment. What do you mean? It's like, yeah. The condiments exist in like another food group that's like eternal. Yeah, it's like... Mustard is forever. It's worse.

It's like a relish. It's like, I'm sorry, this is, this is diced up cucumber. Yeah, this is exactly. Like, this is before it was the thing you think it is. Yeah. Like, what do you think? It's not just sort of like green like sauce. This is like, this is cucumber.

There's like vinegar or something in there. It makes it last forever. Don't worry about it. That's what my mom always says. She always says. She always says. There's vinegar in it. There's vinegar in it.

And the horrible thing is they're kind of right, because obviously they haven't died from this. I mean, apparently. It's the, like, maybe I'm just the, I'm believing in, you know, the FCA's like overaggressive expiration dates and all that. It's like, look, you seal that jar, enough olive oil, whatever in it.

It's good forever. Maybe they're right. Don't worry. By the end of a year or two from now, there won't be an FDA anymore. So it'll all just be. Just vibes base. This is Vime's base.

It would be an AI. Everything will be the sniff test. Uh-huh. Who, anyway, speaking of the sniff test, they find this fucking droid and Zeb is like, we should bring it home. Seems good to me. I, Zeb,

I know. You are left behind while all of your friends go on a mission, you're left behind to take care of the rebel base. Mm-hmm. The base of rebellions, and you're in charge. And a rebel base is a place that people want to find. Bad people. Bad people want to find this place.

And you find an unidentifiable new person. It could have been, it is just not even just a droid. Like, although droids are people, droids are people. Of course. You know that I stand by that. But you just see a new guy out there. And you're like, let's bring him back. Let's bring him back to the secret base.

Because I think it's either Pablo or Dave or Henry Gilroy specifically points out in the Rebels Recon for this that the reason AP5 and Chopper have such big personalities and this spy droid doesn't is because the rebels think about droids as people and the Imperials don't. So it's like literally, yes, in their vision, Zeb should be like, that's a guy. What do we do with that? And the answer was, bring him home to the base. which, by the way, the bases are on the big leaves of, like, the giant super corals on this planet?

I think I did not understand previously. I thought they were just on the ground. But apparently they're on the, like, there's a few shots of that you can see ships taking off and landing from the giant plants that are on this planet. I did not understand that. Oh, that's cool. I didn't pick up on that. It's early on if you, like, you can see them. As the droid is walking towards it and scanning it, you can see it happening. and then like immediately goes to a different shot of like looking down at the logistics base

and it's just straight up on a big leaf it's very it's very funny anyway so the droid does have some programming that makes it very effective at tricking zeb uh into thinking that this is a way to needle ap5 and chopper basically what zeb thinks is he has an awesome little butler droid that just showed up. This thing comes to and immediately starts putting all the contents of the rebel base into an Excel sheet. And Zeb is like, holy shit, look at this guy go. Now, AP5 does the same thing. He's just mean about it. But this droid is just like down to business. Like, let's start organizing all this. Except he doesn't really want to organize it. He's doing recon until he sees something of interest.

And he also just, he pulls in some interesting things. Some of the things he said, my first vibe of this thing was he felt almost like a separatist-era droid. Like it felt like he almost an outdated knowledge of the world. I don't know, there's just something,

the aesthetic of him, first of all, it's not very imperial. Much closer to the sort of shit you saw wandering around in Phantom Menace. Like that sort of like streamlined design. Naboo vibe Would you believe that the answer for why

we don't see ones like this that often are because they're illegal again from that Rebel's Recon episode which I hadn't put together with what you're saying but I do imagine that this is connected Gilroy notes that these droids

were outlawed by the Senate and Thron is using them anyway because you can't outlaw anything from Thron but that suggests that maybe there was an error when they were being used and they haven't been used since then which could be how they get to that design that has this kind of old-fashioned

besides the obviously the Macquarie art. So that's interesting. Also, the droid talked shit about Chopper and then they just like they just let the droid wander off to begin its inventory because like Zab's like I'm in charge and I've decided this guy has a job now he works for me. He's going to go do a base inventory

and so the guy wanders off. nationally we cut back to the empire and someone's like agent callus one of our droids hasn't reported in and if not for callus being so quick on the trigger to reach out to the ghosts this could go real bad because they're basically like this guy's this droid is a cool guy we like him a lot and then callus calls in and real quick you know we all focus so much on call and the war crimes he was a part of and how quickly we moved on from that. But you know who we never talk about? We never hold him to account for. Who's that? Minister Tua.

That's because we like Minister Tua. That's because she's a girl boss. But he blew her up. Oh, I see. You're going the other way. Yeah. He did kill our favorite. Justice for Minister Tua.

Evil. Yeah. Uh-huh. The debate, like the captain of the debate team. the treasurer of the student council was trying to defect to the rebels. You're right. She was like,

wait, I wasn't familiar with Granmoft Harkin's game. And having seen it, she was like, wait, I'm definitely on the wrong side of this. This is not. I thought we were a big debate squad.

But actually there's something else going on here. You're young Republicans. Right. But before she can get away, Agent Callis is just like, blows her up. up and nobody cares nobody cares because he hit what he hits it off with zeb and no justice for big hat lady yeah no justice for big hat lady sorry you said uh i wasn't familiar with your game i

obviously the shack meme and now all i can think of is get ready to learn jawal buddy said here as tattooing couldn't make it in the chorus on basketball association the way that this droid finds out that it's a rebel base is yet another owl they just ate me fine they just say it out loud just says this rebel base out loud to the guy what the fuck are you doing you don't you you got to get a code name you got to have this right special place this uh this pizza factory everybody everybody's gonna be on board

he's fucking this up Folkrum is constantly like oh we sent you a fucked up bomb droid you couldn't say like there's a package on the way and it's dangerous like you just said exactly the thing that's happening

you're a spy use spy words I guess you're like at this point at the point at which he knows who he's on the other side of this if he sends stuff in code it's just not getting decoded in time he has to literally send the picture

of what happens once he goes evil mode He does literally so the picture So okay so you think it looks like this But then it gets tall And they do it the other way Because he sends him the tall sinewy Like can open a version first Right

And Zeb's like damn good thing We've never seen anything that looks like that But like you've to understand Like the face and the torso We're pretty much the same They're like a little different You're like hmm weird But no problem for us

And then it goes like, but that also walks around in this harmless walk-around mode. And he's like, oh, no, I made a mistake. I messed up. Let's be real. I think there's an episode that demonstrates why all these people are not. Like, there's limited slots on the ex-com mission who gets to go on the Sky Ranger. Not these guys. This is why the show is called Rebels and not Rebel.

It's not the Zep show. You need the whole crew. You do, you do. You need them to balance each other out. You do. Do we think that if AP5, which really, really disappointing moment from AP5 to, let me just say once more, I expect better of AP5 than to just tweet it out like that to to the evil vampire droid. But do we think if no one had mentioned, if somehow we got through. this whole encounter right and you know zeb got to have his little like stray puppy moment where he

brings in the puppy takes it care of it brings it back to you know good health and lets it back out or whatever maybe they bond and it becomes its best friend zeb that's a bobcat Zeb has a wolf in his house and it's like oh they're so cute dog that needs a home somebody just let this husky loose can you believe it Do we think that the, like, what happens if it never activates? Is it just, like, chilling? Like, is it just hanging out, doing tasks? I think for a brief moment, that droid new happiness.

This, to me, is a bit of a tragedy. That's what I thought, yeah. Until he hears this activation phrase, this is Manchurian candidate type shit. We pass this really quickly. But just for the listener who has not watched these episodes, the, this episode opens with the Empire Strikes Back opening. The probe droids go out, except instead of being probed droids. they probe ships with these special droids in them.

But it's like that shot and that music cue and all that. And they go up to a bunch of different planets. They go up to 91 different planets. And this one, crash lands on the planet that Chopper base, the secret rebel base that we have, is at. And this is the planet atollin or Adeline or whatever. And when it comes out, it gets jumped by those spiders. He gets hitchbotted. Yeah, 100%.

Like, yeah, rest in peace to hitchbox. You know, Philly is innocent in everything. but then they find the body of the droid and bring it back to base. And I thought that they just like find the droid walking around and then they like get it back up and running and it doesn't have its memory. It's lost its core mission at that point. So yeah, I don't know what happens if no one ever says the word rebel base in front of it. Though I do think when you're living on a rebel base, someone is going to slip up eventually. You know, you're going to have this guy over for dinner and someone's going to be like, who I sure do love our rebel base.

And then that's that. That's game, you know? In a way, they're lucky it happened in the logistics space where there weren't that many people around to get, you know, killed. So, hmm. Either way, though, I think this droid, like, for a brief moment, new perfect contentment. Yes, it was like, it was having fun, you know,

it shows up, it looks around. It's like, I know exactly how many bombs are here. I can count every single ration pack. I can count, there are 64, there are 175, there are 22. Like, it is so, it is delivering the information with such confidence and satisfaction. And, and AP5 sees, you know, a kinship in that. It's like, oh, let me, it's bringing apprenticeship back. Like, AP5 is like, come with me.

You can help me out, and I'm going to do this whole inventory. of the whole and unfortunately he says rebel base but but it's really it's really you know it's very

it does feel like there's a glimpse at what could be what if AP5 is evil I don't believe it if you can make the case what if it didn't slip up and say that what if AP5 is still you saw a rival I would be so sad

still imperial because AP5 comes from this same culture The imperial culture and he did like his boss, but I don't know that he's like a committed he's committed to the cause, you know? I will be devastated of AP5 betrays Chopper. It does have kind of a jago quality where it's just like, why did you do that AP5? It's a great question. I'm not going to tell you. Yeah. Uh-huh. Yeah, you'll die wondering. Yeah, 100%. Yeah, he's not like in a life debt situation. He just, he's not like in a life debt situation. He just

kind of joined to be buds. Yeah, and he hated his boss. To be in love. Right, but love and politics, you know. Yeah, you know, it's tough. It's like James Carville and Mary Madeline, but like make him. Who? Okay. So

James Carville was a Democratic strategist for the 1992 Bill Clinton campaign. He was the central figure in a documentary called The War Room, which sort of of made him a nationally renowned figure, and he has remained a political commentator on various cable news talk shows ever since. Famously, he is involved with Mary Madeline, who was a Republican political operative.

And so there was sort of acute, like, opposites attract and, like, you know, they're a couple, but they go at it hammering tongs because they have really different values and beliefs. We'll see. Yeah. Yeah, uh-huh, well. Carville's big insight for the Democratic Party was like, you guys should be the less, what if you guys weren't so lefty? That was 100%. Yeah, uh-huh.

And it was one of the wonderful talking heads on Crossfire, along with Paul McGala and Tucker Carlson. And who's the other Republican on that show? Wasn't it just Tucker? Maybe it was just Tucker. Maybe the James and Paul flipped between the, I don't remember. Anyway, hell time. Unlike now where everything is good. It's weird.

These things take on an adenic quality. It's completely undeserved, but like, oh, we never knew this is the best we'd ever have it. And it's like Tucker Carlson in a bow tie. Not yet having embraced the Volk and become a blood and soil nationalist. Anyway, they do it. This is a real simple episode. Oh, wait. So rebels.

Rebel base. And he goes, rebel, base. Yeah. Rebel base. And like, you've seen like werewolf transformation scenes, that but with a droid. Like his limbs stretch out.

And like his chassis is almost ripped apart, but not, of course. It's just like pistons apart to reveal a bigger, taller, walking can opener version of him. And he gets this like glowing red mouth, as if there's blood dripping, from his teeth, which is an important detail that we're going to learn momentarily. Because after he attacks AP5 and right as Zeb shows up and be like, ah, guys, you know, the thing

goes berserk and they have to fight it off and they wound it and it runs away. But it feeds on other droids to heal itself, which is bananas. It's wild. But this thing is running off Resident Evil, like, chomping other droids around the rebel base. and, like, they round corners and find, like, Astromax just, like, ripped apart because this thing's eaten them.

The Star Wars.com, like, episode guide for this, straight up has, um, a concept art of the gunk droid all fucked up. Like, it's like literally, like, uh, you know, in there, you draw things on a show like this, you have to have, like, a,

here's what you should be modeling. Here's our kind of like, um, our, not just like, concept art, but like straight up a guide so you know distances and colors and stuff. It's literally like, all right, here's how to, here's how to draw the dead gongk droid knocked over on its side with its brain open. It's great. You're up to this gongedroid.

So this thing's on the loose. It's feeding on droids. They got to stop it. And they do eventually bring it to heel. There's a whole brawl. They get into a fight. But it reveals its final move, which is. is to activate a self-destruct.

They've got a thing pinned down. It's like, hey, why is this thing got a countdown timer on its chest? Yeah. It's the Predator countdown timer. Like, it's the like the Predator does the self-destruct thing in the movie Predator. And it even has like a very similar countdown clock. And they say it's a proton bomb or whatever, which is the type of bomb that they just stole a bunch of. And they, remember they used on the little interdictor ship or whatever it was coming out of geonosis.

It's like one of those inside of this droid, which again, the Senate did make illegal. So this is not the empire's fault. Theron is a renegade admiral. You know, he's just doing whatever he wants to. The empire would never randomly send 91 bombs to various planets. Do you think that's why they banned it because it's like nasty? and eats people. It freaks people out too much.

Oh, maybe. You know why they'd ban it? Because what it does to droids is so horrifying that it immediately stirs feelings of sympathetic pain and, like, horror, and makes you wonder about the difference you've drawn between you and those droids. You can empathize with its destruction

as you would to the sight of another, like, mutilated human being. What does that say about you? So they had to ban this thing for the same reason they have to ban videos out of, like ag facilities because if this stuff gets out in the world then the entire framework that we built about like hierarchy and like what lot in life is assigned to what being falls the fuck apart this is a great take rob ban that shit we need our droids stay our droids

it's how they it's how they work over the imperial senate that would be wild if we learned that was the type of you know that was the bill that actually passed it was not Not about the devastating power of the bomb inside. It was about how it shook people's belief in the system. Fantastic. They fight. You hold it down. The bomb part comes out.

Chopper has a new ability. Yeah. Chopper's got a freeze ray. You could buy that. Those are just straight up from Cotor, right? You can put it in your droid if you wanted to. Oh, true. Easy droid mod.

Yeah. There is a fun, like, weekend that Bernie's quality of these three assholes trying to figure out any part of this. Where it's like coming down, the panic, like just spiraling, uh, chopper just like suddenly out of nowhere, just like hitting it with the, with the fire extinguisher. And then everyone's all right. Cool. Now what? This is why no one else could be there. Mm-hmm.

It had to be these three. And Zeb figures out, it's a very Star Trek thing where it's like, if we reverse the polarity of the, logic circuits and send it on its merry way it will return to base and when it plugs in it will blow itself up and so they just they sort of like coast along behind it in their car while it walks back to its spaceship and they're making sure that the spiders don't mess with you got one of those little radio ones to make sure the spiders don't come around and then gets in there and like who thank god that went well is a close they've got the ship head. as a radio. So, I mean, they see the communications array. Start to swing around. And so Zad like blows it up. But again, it's like the whole thing's poorly conceived. It's on a wing in a prayer. Like Zeb has to make this shot before it can report back. So now can't send the radio message. It takes off. It flies back to the, uh, the, the imperial, uh, the star destroyer. And you see a bunch of imperial texts like taking these things in as they file the reports. And

Oh, this one, this one has some damage. And then the ice, the ice crystallist chest thaws out. And before it can finish its report, it blows up. And yeah, I was thinking like, okay, I'll pretty mess up that landing bay. Probably kill a lot of like technicians and stuff. But like, yeah, I mean, a cool little win. Didn't expect for that to just rip the ship in half. This is twice now, two weeks in a row.

Yeah? where what a what you think is going to be like a small explosion just turns into just a devastating like nuclear blast. On the animation team, they like cracked how to do cool explosions. Yes. I think they just want to be able to let's do another big one. Let's do another big one. Yeah, why not?

Load it up again. We're in season three. So the thing that this and this is just my hang up, you all shouldn't, you all don't need to share. this and you shouldn't tear it because it's it shouldn't I should just get this out of my head my star wars gaming experience is not more valid or real than yours uh even though of course that lots of source material and you can sort of go into like ship schematics and learn all about their history but the point is when you played the excom or tie fighter games this is just not what proton torpedoes did like proton warheads like yes they were the some of the more

effective like anti-ship weapons but come on this is a little, this is getting a little silly, isn't it? I guess I guess hasn't anything explode inside the ship. Historically, that is the worst place for somebody to explode. Yes. I mean, I was thinking with this in a thing in the third episode where a ship has shields and then someone lands

on it and like takes out its engines with a pistol because they're on the ship. I'm like, yeah, if you can get in or on, it works. The shield stop. Shields don't protect you from the inside. You know? That's the whole, it's a whole plan of the books. It's destroyed an Imperial Star Destroyer. Yeah. Just gone.

and callus talks to thron about it boy tough break huh boss it's fun because like thron knows it's him you notice the thing on the bottom of thron ship yeah so austin your whole point about like nobody can stop thron from just like wilding out that includes painting sick crack and decals on his command ship did you all notice this on the bottom of his ship he just has a big space creature it's it's a crack in or you know what it's probably a chimera it's probably the chimera since that's his ship god yes i'm gonna find out oh sure but is the wait is that is that wrong to you like did he commission someone to do that i don't i don't know you mean the artistic admiral but wouldn't he wouldn't he be like i i don't want to make yeah exactly

exactly i guess he's like nobody nobody has my mind and is going to to figure this out about me, but he should, like, know that, like... He should. That's, like, bearing something, right? Yeah, here it is. Yeah, it is, it's the chimera. It is still the chimera. I think it's, like, a flex.

It's like... It's like... It's, it's... Yeah, I put a vinyl on it. Yeah, exactly. It's like there's a con... I got my Star Destroyer wrapped. Unbelievable.

unbelievable All right yeah Here it is For y'all who didn't see it I'll also put it in the episode notes Along with the gongtroid that's fallen down You see it I mean

It's so sick It is sick More of this please And they are calling this a chimera They are saying that that symbol Is a chimera Which is not what I would call it But it's got like

It's got like multiple big snake heads And like a hydra It has kind of, like, it's weird things going on here. I'm like, this is so weird. Yeah. Because, like, first of all, I'm, like, culturally, the only other people we know who did this were the clones, right? So, like, what's going on there? In terms of, like, stylizing their shit in this way?

Right. Yeah. Or, like, doing noz art is really the only, like, we've only seen clones do that. And then it's, like, the imperial, like, the imperial power is already in symbol. Like, you should be intimidated enough. being a ship in that shape, right? Right. That, like, putting paint on it seems weird, right? Like, what's going on here?

Yeah? What's going on? This guy doesn't give a shit about the empire. Like, everything about this character is like... Oh, I guess. I just want to see how this plays out. Like, this man is not working for... Nothing I have seen has ever felt like this man is authentically working for the empire. Right.

I'm really curious, because we know that there are that other trilogy of, like, the other's on the news on thron trilogy is like a prequel trilogy not a sequel or i don't know if it goes into the later stuff but it's like throne origins is what it is you know what this is like what's that so this is like in the first season of suits uh there is this like there's this motor company that has this like shit heel executive who's like i'm gonna just like i'm to sell this company the highest bidder and is going to destroy it. And Harvey Spector, who ostensibly works for this guy as the incoming CEO, is like, fuck that guy. I actually think I have a better plan for this company. And so while being paid by that company,

he then launches a coup against that executive to install his chosen puppet in as the, well, sorry, the racing engineer he's sort of chosen as the guy who's going to leave this. But this is kind of the vibe I have, is that Thron works for the Empire in like a consulting or like chief outside counsel role. Sure. But beyond that, he's doing what he feels is best

and is most interesting to him. And so like, and also a bit like Harvey Spector, he likes a sweet ride. You're going to know when Thrawn rolls up. Right. So yeah, what is best and most interesting to him for the Imperials

is sick dragon airbrushes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah? Rob, I haven't watched suits, but would you say that this is sort of like William H. Macy's character in Sports Night? Also true, yeah. Okay, okay. Now I understand. Now I follow.

Okay. I feel like I've new head cannon. I feel like somebody did this for Thron. Pelion. Yeah, like I wanted to say Pellion, but obviously Pellion's not here yet. But like imagine, imagine it's like a gift. Okay. Do you remember earlier late last year before the election when asshole streamer Aiden Ross presented the cyber truck and a design a truck that we know Donald Trump hates with the Donald, with the cyber truck, give it to Donald Trump.

And it was wrapped in the moment after Trump was shot at slash grace. and you could see that Trump was like facing like that I almost fucking died and you put a rap on a car of it you idiot I hate this actually I hate the car I hate the rap what if a kind what if whatever this creature has almost killed Thron and then Pelion was like I love this so much I put it on an appearance star is for here for him and every time he sees and he goes like he just hates it he hates it he can't he can't get rid of the gift he can't change it because the chimera is like he's giving him a lot of money. No, no, no, I paid for, I paid for the artist. They'll put it wherever you want. And Ron's like, what about on the bottom of the ship so our enemies can see? Yeah.

Yeah, if they think that they're hitting our weak underbelly, but then they'll see the sick dragon you've painted on my ship. You don't want to put a top side so you can see the dragon? Okay, counterthought, what if the thing happened where whatever this creature is almost killed Thrawn and then when the emperor gave him his own ship he was like oh and I did a little I just put a little thing on there for you just thing that I always think about you when I think about the chimera the creature that almost ate you on the asteroid minds of wherever you know just real power play and I dedicate this ship the chimera yeah exactly

and here's some sick art on it God who wow I love all of this It was surprising to me to see Thron, even though I remember Thron is in this show. But I was like, oh, right, Thron is in this show. We just read all that stuff about Thron. Thron's here. Right. We get more Thron now. I thought we were done with it.

But this Thron is the sort of Thron who'd be like, I love art. And that's why I have this sick tribal sleeve. Thron is not getting a tribal sleeve. Come on. What are we talking about? This symbol kind of has that vibe. It does. You know, like not an actual.

piece of Aboriginal or tribal art but like Absolutely not but like you go in you're like I want a tribal sleeve. Yeah. Uh-huh. And yeah. Yo, that's sick, bro. Put it on my Star Destroyer.

Throne has never said this is sick. No, but the tattoo artist did. It's sick as hell. It's very funny. Yes, it is rather arresting Put it on my star destroy Okay, wait I just saw the car rather ill

Here's the cover of Here's the cover of Thrawn ascendancy Chaos Rising The symbol's in here The symbol's on the cover It's canon Hey actually this cover's incredible This cover's great, it is

This is actually a great cover Yeah That's sick Yeah Oh they all have It on his song We have we have Okay.

Have we just missed it until now? We've even read these. This is the new trilogy. This is Thrawn Ascendancy. Chaos Rising, Greater Good, which is the second one. And the third one is lesser evil. I bet it's there too. It sure is.

Let me grab this one. These covers are kind of sick. What if these books are good? I feel like these aren't the covers I usually see. Wow. I haven't seen these at all. I haven't seen any of the new Thrawn trilogy stuff at all. I mean, these are nice

These are nice No, I'm wondering if the chimera Art has been on the bottom of the ship This whole time and we've never seen it Totally possible Absolutely possible Could be, could be I hope we

I hope we get to see another vampire droid Sometime the future I think it's a very cool Evil And like Evil guy concept vampire droid so was very into that was very very into it agreed i like the bit of the end here where the main crew gets back and everyone's like how to go and zeb is like well i we uh

well what half one was and before he can like try to like beg for forgiveness for the whole encounter with the droid fulcrum calls and it's like good work blowing up the evil imperial ship the one next to the one i'm standing on and everyone's like okay Okay, cool, thanks. Good. Do they know he's fulcrum? They know he's, like, turned his coat, but do they know he's fulcrum, fulcrum? I don't know if they know he's fulcrum,

but I do know that there's evidence in the next episode that people on the ghost, at least, know that he's buddy, buddy with Zep. Okay. I missed this in legacy in Lagosia lore. I had only seen this. No, this is a Trial of Dark Saber.

Can you see it here? Do you see it? Do you see the new graffiti that's been added to Sabine's room? Oh, my God. I think she ships them. That's huge. Yeah. Oh, my God.

Dreamy Lando. Dreamy Lando on the left. Uh-huh. Dingy Lando on the left. One of those puffer pigs in the middle that she dealt with Lando. A Soviet stormtrooper. That's Ketsu Onya, her ex, we think, question mark, remember? From when she was a bounty on her for those six months after being a 14-year-old weapons prodigy. And then, um, we then swore up as a member of Crimson Dawn. I mean, we have to. This is the

episode we have to talk about the Sabine timeline. And then, yes, also on the new graffiti is a Zeb and callous arms around each other like BFF. or boyfriends posing with huge cartoonish grins. That's really, that's really, really, really cute. It's very cute. Good stuff. Do graffiti artists usually have multiple different tags? Or is she just like doing fan art of other people's tags?

Because we have this like F up by the bounty hunter later, right? Which could be their bounty hunter symbol. Yeah. And then there's the like Ava Unit 1 colors next to her. Yeah. And then there's the one under Zeb and... Uh-huh. And the one next to Lando.

And we know that her simple historically has been the phoenixy thing that becomes the rebel symbol, right? So, like, or seems like the rebels, it seems like it becomes her. I don't know. It seems like... She's just trying some stuff out. I think that makes sense. She's trying some stuff. She's doing font studies.

Yeah. Sure. Uh-huh. Speaking of Sabine trying to trying some stuff out. trials of the Dark Sabre. Shall we? Yeah, so... Here we go.

This episode begins with... Hey, remember that Dark Saber? Which is good they remind us, because it's been literally months since this came up for us. But also the show's kind of left this on ice as well. Hey, that Dark Sabre, this is kind of important, right?

And Fenrao is there. It's like, it's the most important. I have prepared a little animation to tell you the history of the Dark Saber. And yep, it's important. Yeah. So then you got to figure out what you're going to do with it.

And it seems like the most logical person to give it to, especially given the, the, the historical ties to the sword and their place in Mandalorian society right now is Sabine. And so if you're going to get someone a lightsaber, you got to train them. And Canaan's like, I'm going to train you, Sabine, because you're not a force user and you, and these things are very dangerous. and, you know, if you wield this blade, you're going to draw the sort of attention that Jedi draw. You're going to face people who are sort of more than you're prepared to handle. So I'm going to be really mean in all our training and really agro. And Harrah is going to be like, are you sure this is the right way to go about this?

And he'll be like, yes. And then she's going to flee and have a dark night of the soul. communing out there among the coral. And yes, if you're wondering, perhaps she'll be given some guidance by our big coral monster, wildebeest friend, who can say? She is, she does, I, Pablo said, no, Pablo said that didn't happen. But he, you know what? We'll discuss, we'll discuss, we'll discuss, I'm with you, always, we'll discuss what we'll discuss

when we get there. Yeah. But she comes back from her Dark Night of the Soul and Canaan's like I figure out how we're going to address this. We're going to do TV show therapy where I just like grab hold

of all your pain points and just like dig my fingers into them as hard as possible. It's like why do you feel unworthy? Why do you let your family down? Why do all the Mandalorians hate you? Why aren't you better? And she's going to find the lash out. out and admit the truth.

And this is a big moment for us because also is going to clarify, like, this is the like Sabine back story, final, underscore rev three, underscore, uh, date, underscore commit change underscore final underscore underscore underscore real this time. Everybody, it's not that Sabine couldn't sustain her own episode. It's that she didn't want the responsibility. Apparently. This whole time, we could have been having Sabine episodes. Oh, God.

But she was running from herself. It was her choice. It's so good we get through these two episodes. And then we're recommitting ourselves to Sabine being in every episode going, what was that? Sorry, what? I have to go. My planet needs me. I'm sure we will get more Sabina for these two episodes.

I'm certain. Because now she's with the Mandalorian, this is all the phone he really wants to make a show about. But the show isn't called Star Wars Mandalorians. Yeah, that's its problem. That's the way to backdoor this in. Why is the Sabine here? We should say this is written by Faloni, this whole episode. It's directed by Stuart Lee.

Sorry, I didn't say the previous one because it was kind of like a fun one-off, but that was Bosco Ing and written by Gary Witta. This is directed by Stuart Lee, who has directed a ton of stuff that we've watched over the last five years or whatever long we've been doing this. Now, including stuff that we've really, really, really loved, like darkness on Umbara, stuff that we, and like brain invaders, stuff that we've had mixed but interesting feelings about, like ghosts of mortis. And every now and then something that we've been kind of like, yeah, that was, that was fine, but mostly good stuff, stuff that we like, generally speaking.

So I think interesting to see Dave be like, I'm writing this one, and we're getting like, one of our heavy hitter directors who's directed a ton of the shows with us and who like gets the big ideas uh to do this one so how about that two-d animation at the beginning it was sick it's so sick uh and it's interesting because it makes me realize we haven't gotten this yet this like what is the dark saber we get a little bit of it you know where it comes from is that the first time the Dark Sabre shows up is the Clone Wars episode where Obi-Wan fights Pre-Visela, like season one, like the first Seteen episode where we learn about Sateen, we learned about Obi-Wan, and it comes out of. It was a George invention, and it was an invention

of George because he didn't like the idea of Pre-Visla having a Vibroblade and Vibroblades being able to duel against lightsaber. George was like, no, a lightsaber would just cut through a Vibroblade. As it would have. Only a lesser director would have said that there's a non-liber lightsaber weapon that like any asshole could wield, including like, including state troopers apparently with their little batons and somehow that's going to stop a lightsaber. What sort of hacky loser would introduce that concept to this universe? I don't know. But they didn't have a lot of the lore about it.

You know, we already have seen the sort of like, if you beat someone who's holding the dark saber, you take it from them and become the new ruler of Clan Visla, which is super powerful. And, I mean, in the past, it seemed even more like, if you take it, you become the leader of the Mandalorians. That's how I work with Darth Mall, right? Yeah, yeah. And so we've seen that stuff. But we didn't get any of this stuff for the listeners not watch this. You know, the way that Fenrao, who is that Mandalorian that, like, got kind of beaten and then eventually convinced to join the rebels, he explains it as like, oh, this thing is wild.

And Cainon's like, well, I didn't know you guys had lightsabers. Like, he knows it's the dark saber. We didn't know that they built lightsabers. And friend around was, we didn't. What happened was there was once a guy, a thousand years ago, over a thousand years ago named Tar Visila, who was the first Mandalorian ever to join the Jedi, excuse me, the Jedi Order. It seems like he had like a sick Jedi night style life. And when he died, the Jedi kept the saber at their temple. Some Mandalorians broke in.

Some members of House Visla specifically broke in, stole the, the, the, the, the, the, Dark Saber, and then they use it to unify the Mandalorians under House of Visla, which, to be clear, Clan Ren, the family clan Ren is part of the broader House of Visla. There's a house and then clan sort of relationship happening here. And all of that story is told in like really fun 2D art of like shadows on the wall as the story goes. We haven't seen them do anything like this, I think ever in this show, right? This sort of blending into a different, in this show or in Clone Wars. I was really, like, excited by the idea that they kind of tried this other medium out,

even though it's like a 45-second clip. It's really cool. And it's weird that the story doesn't get told in The Mandalorian, unless it does and I don't remember it. I don't know that I'd ever heard of Tar Visla before. Maybe it's set in passing. But, like, the Dark Sabre shows up in The Mandalorian, and, They don't, they, we learn what it does and why it's important, but like, there's something really fun about this particular style of telling the history of the Dark Sabre that sets the stage really well.

And it's a reminder that like, oh, right, the Mandalorian is, had a big, has a big audience and at least part of that audience, like, like us until right now has not seen all of rebels, you know? And a little, kind of complicates the, the project a little bit, I think. I also feel like every time I learn more about the Mandalorians I'm less and less sure about these guys like let me tell you about this great awesome legend of our people and it's like so we stole the sword

and then we took over the planet and unified them under our banner which was good because we were awesome and then we wrecked so much house oh like what do you mean other people's houses Yeah. In the Rebels Recon for the next episode, it's explained that there are a thousand or about a thousand planets under Mandalorian control because they are a neutral party in the galaxy. They're not part of the republic. And they've since become kind of like under the empire. But like they have a thousand planets, which we kind of knew from back when Satin was like, I represent a thousand planets who are neutral. What she meant was the Mandalrians conquered a thousand planets and are part, they are part. They are. part of the Mandalorian. Oh, I never interpreted it that way. Me either. But

according to, it was this, again, either Pablo or Henry Gilroy, including the planet that the, that the Wrens are from, that planet is not like, was not, she's not, her family is not from Mandelor. They're from this planet that was conquered a thousand years ago or whatever by an expanding Mandalorian Empire. So, really does maybe recolor some of, we always knew that they were a warrior culture. We always knew that they, like, had history of conquering people. But it's very funny to be like, yeah, Sabine Ren and Ren's whole family is like a descendants of people who were conquered and then assimilated by the Mandalorians, you know? They do have a space Rome thing going on a little bit. Really recontextualizes Satine's dedication to pacifism

in an interesting way. Because it's not like... a thousand worlds is already an empire. 100%. It's wild because it's like, oh, wait, that was not about, like, that war was not just about are we a warrior culture or are we like scholars? It wasn't just like Athens versus Sparta, you know what I mean? It wasn't just like that sort of like pop cultural vision of that. It seems like maybe it was literally, are we going to keep being the sort of people who

conquer other worlds? That was not really framed that way in closing. No, no. I mean, to be fair, we were quite focused on the tea situation, on the children's tea situation instead of like, what the fuck was it? The relationship, of course, between Obi-Wan and Sistine. Of course, which was the priority, even with this information now. So it remains the priority, but, you know. Having learned this information, what do our heroes decide?

is the right course of action. Give it to the 16 year old. No, make the 16 year old take it, though, too. There's a little bit of like, I'm not saying you have to do this, but you have to do this. There's a wild line. Oh, 19.

She's not 19. Isn't she? No, no, no. This is the thing that's fucking me up. This is why she's doing E Oppenheimer, were you not listening? This is the fucked up thing. Wait, no.

What, go ahead. You say, maybe I'm a, Can we find this out? I'm double checking. No, she's, I don't believe she's 19. I'm double checking. Okay. She was born in 21 BBY.

It is now, I believe, three B, B, B.Y. So she is 16. Okay. We got 17. Depends what month we're in. No, you're right. You're right. You're right.

You're right. She's 18. Okay. I think. I'm going to find out exactly what year we're in in Rebel. Okay. Because I thought we'd like triangular. her age with Ezra's.

She is, I think she is like one or two years older than Ezra. Yeah. Let's see here. That sounds right. What's, uh, so three BBY. We have already seen, no, yeah, we, they've established,

they established a base in three BBY, so we might be in two BBY now. So yes, she would be 18 or 19. You're right. She joined up, I'm thinking about when she joined up various things. She was like 14 or 15, when she did something else.

That's what it is, which we'll get to. But the thing that's, I think, interesting is, through the line that we always come back to is, old Jedi love to turn young people into weapons for them. And Canaan is like, oh, she can become queen of the Mandalorians, and the rebels would really benefit by having the Mandalorians on their side, on our side.

The whole thing is framed around acquiring a Mandalorian army, which is for the rebel cause, which is just like, why would, why would this warrior, like, there's just, it's so, it's so poorly thought out in so many ways that it's genuinely shocking. And the fact that it's framed to Sabine, like Canaan says to her at the end of this exchange,

there's they have like sabine is hiding in her room because she knows that everyone is talking about her outside and talking about what to do with her or what to do with the the dark saber and so so she comes out and uh she she she doesn't want the responsibility of uniting house vizla um she talks about how it caused her family like a lot of strife when maul went after it um and And, and then there's like this whole disagreement about Sabine's ability to even wield the, the sword. And I think it's Harrod that says, like, it's not important about her combat. The combat training itself is not as important as what the blade represents. Like, the symbol of wielding the blade is more important than actually being able to physically wield the blade in, like, an effective way. And it's wild. Harris says to Sabine, like, you need to bring us a Mandalorian army. And then Canaan is like, we need to ask you to do this.

But it doesn't mean you have to, which is like, what the fuck? That is not a sentence that makes any sense. Sabine is, of course, learning that even found families can take advantage of your good nature here. She thought she escaped the family that hates her, not that these people hate her. But, you know, you find a family. They're going to make demands of you. And sometimes they're going to demand you go build an army for them. Oh, yeah.

But they are fighting the empire. I understand. I don't know why Fenrow can't do this. That's my thing as well. Because ultimately, we are still trying to figure out something for Sabine to do. I know. Yes. Of course.

Yes. This is the problem. I agree. I was like, I was sitting here like, all right, here we go. We're getting the ship ride it. We're getting the train back on the rails. And this has some of the same deficiencies that have dogged a lot of the Sabine plots, which is like, your key to this plan, man.

It's all down to you. And it's like, why? Right. I'm going to be clear. My point is not Sabine shouldn't do this. My point is it's funny and interesting. Look at how they do it again and again. Look at how Obi-Wan turns Luke into the missile.

that can destroy the Death Star. Look at how Canaan has decided. And it's, you know, Fenrow is the one who pitches it first there. After he tells him the story about the dark saber, when they're still in their own little room, Fenrao is the one who is like, you know, she doesn't want their responsibility. But if she can wield this saber, she can reunite Clan Visla and which is one of the most powerful houses in all of Mandelor. And Canaan's like, you're talking about raising an army.

And Fenrow was like, with Sabine leading it. And then like a scene, and we get like, Canaan goes like. And then a scene later, Canaan is like, yeah, we got to do this. I mean, we basically got to do this. Like, I mean, you know. And meanwhile, Ezra, I think we have not said in the summary yet, I did say last time that I would quit the show of Ezra ended the trials of the Dark Saber with the Dark Saber. And that did not happen, thankfully.

But we also said, I bet Ezra is going to be the most annoying he's ever been on this show. And the thing that he says, what everyone else is like, Sabine, You got to learn how to use the dark saber so you can give us an army. He's like, I mean, come on. She can't use the dark saber. She doesn't know how to. I mean, no offense, Sabine. But I got the force.

And it took me a long time to how to learn how to use a sword. So I, you know, she's not a Jedi. This guy sucks. When they turn the this guy sucks meter or like dial up on Ezra, it's so bad. It's so bad. This kid sucks. It is, but there is such family dynamic.

that's the funny bit is he's like he becomes the most annoying little brother 100% when Sabine episodes are in play yes and it is like oh Sabine's about to get attention on her so it's like he does yeah okay so he becomes the most annoying little stepbrother

uh huh yep that's Ezra sucks so bad no I hate it I hate it I hate it but I actually kind of like the I have to ask, but you don't have to do it thing. Because I do think there are moments where it's like, you are obliged in your role to, like, we're fighting.

Like, we have to ask. Like, if there's a way to bring more weapons online against the empire and go expand, we have to do it. But there's a lot of good reasons you may not want to or you may not be unable to. But the problem is, again, like, I think the Clone Wars version is just longer. I think dealing with all these issues in one episode is just, is. kind of absurd because she's got to say yes and the thing is you don't get any time to marinate with her uncertainty or ambivalence or like his ambivalence in asking instead it's like well you don't have to but I have to ask you're gonna do this or not and I really don't want to

and it's like come on and then she's off the training yeah and so the whole thing does feel like really I wish we'd gotten this I wish we'd gotten this part of the conversation at the beginning of the season and then like part of the question of the season was okay well she's gonna do Is she going to do it? She's hiding something about her family and what her relationship is. We've known that there was some great sin for a while, obviously. There's a point at this episode where she refuses to say it again. I'm like, oh, my God, if we end this episode without learning what she did, I'm going to scream.

We thankfully do learn. And, and, you know, I will say the fact that Faloni made the executive decision to not put a B plot in this episode does let us at least stick with her the whole time. you're right that we don't like get to kind of like languish in her ambivalence and her doubt about this. But I do think that the story that ends up coming out does at least cast backwards in a way where, you know, we have had lots of problems with the way Sabine has been written. And I kind of can see now, if you really love this episode, you really like the stuff that comes out of this and the next episode, her family, all that stuff, that you could rewatch this show and be like, ah, Sabine's all closed up inside.

because she's dealing with this feeling that she has about her family and the betrayal and da-da-da-da-da. You know, it doesn't help us because we're watching it for the first time. We didn't know any of that shit. All we got was another episode where Sabine doesn't get anything to do.

Another time that Sabine gestures at some great sin that either she committed or her family committed or both and we didn't know what that was. And so I think that there is a lot of, I don't know. I think that this episode has to carry a lot. It kind of makes you appreciate a character

who just straight up says. I was the emperor's hand, now doesn't it? No, wait a second. Someone doesn't call the emperor's hand next episode. So, oh my God, yeah. We'll get there. So the other thing is they explore her ambivalence through the guys of her learning

lightsaber forms and doing katas with Ezra. And also we get a little derailed into Canaan being the world's least effective and sympathetic mentor. I love this stuff. Even though, again, he is unsympathetic to her and unsympathetic to us in many ways. I really like how all the characters, positionalities, and histories overlap with each other here. The first time this bumps up, you know, he's having Canaan, he's sorry,

Canaan is having Ezra train Sabine on the basic lightsaber forms. Shout out to the lightsaber forms using a stick, using a pair of training savers, which are just like sticks vaguely made to look like katana or, you know, of like lightsabers, like Bokane, basically. And eventually, Hara calls and is like, hey, it's been a couple of days. I wanted to see how things were going. And they talked back and forth. She's like, you're still using training sabers, the sticks that Zep made?

And he's like, I'm being careful. And she says, were you careful with Ezra? I don't remember him being trained with a stick, him fighting with a stick. And there's a line of truth in his response to this. He's like, I'm trying, maybe I'm trying to do. do something different this time. Maybe I'm trying to, like, correct the mistakes that I made with Ezra. But, but Herra, of course, is cutting through this and is saying, like, maybe you just don't believe she can do it because she doesn't have the force. And where it gets to eventually is

he doesn't like Mandalorians. She's blocked. Her mind is conflicted. She's, quote, she's so expressive, yet tight, like, yet so tightly wound. She's so, and Hera completes Mandalorian. And he's like, ugh, yeah, very. And so I really like the Canaan part of this, which is partly about his relationship to teaching, his relationship with Ezra, and then also his, you know, his relationship to the Mandalrians historically, like not in the Obi-Wan connection, but in the I'm a Jedi, and there's this ancient enmity between us. We, of course, will see this bubble up again when he's like in Kendrick Lamar from Meet the Grams mode, yelling at her. But then we also have Ezra's relationship which is like, oh, I am the Jedi who Canaan trained before.

And we have, we have Sabine's relationship, obviously, with her own family. And we have Harris relationship. The name Cham Sundula doesn't come up here. But when she and Canaan talk later again, she's able to punch through it because she's like, I know what it's like when my family doesn't believe in me or when there's some sort of like weirdness between that. And so it's like everyone is positioned around the core conflict in this episode. based on what we've seen of them before, what their relationships with their families or their

upbringing has been. Obviously, Ezra's own absence of parents comes up in a really shitty little brother way. Or he's like, well, at least you have parents, you know. I mean, it's not a little brother way because that would kind of indicate the same. You know what I mean? A little kid style, like punchback way. I think that that stuff worked pretty well for me, even in the compressed, how do you do the story in 21 minutes version? Yeah, all that stuff, I would agree. I think think going, like, I think the lack of getting to, to be in the ambiguity of what Sabine's decision is going to be in taking up the Dark Sabre or not is like the biggest, one of the biggest strikes against building, like, tension to get to this point. But all this kind of back

and forth, I feel like we have enough information and have enough investment in the characters so far for all this to hit. It's just, it's up until the point where Canaan does the, like, I'm going to ask you a lot of really intense questions really fast while you're under duress to get real answers out of you where like that is, the like, the juice of the moment is again, lost unfortunately to me at least i just i the the rapid succession with in which sabine just like tells us the whole thing um it was like so deflating to the inner like i don't know just the the when when when its first position is she's so mandolarian her mind is her mind is blocked or she has this very steadfast kind of

idea of things or idea of how combat or fighting or training should be. It made me think back to our old Mandalorian buddy from Cotor

what's his fucking name? Candor's Ord. Cander's Ord. Canderous Ordo. Cicester's Ordo. Yes. Just like his whole vibe of being like so combat brain so like

what I'm good at is explosives and and in punching things and I miss it like that it's so it's interesting like it just

it like I actually felt for the first time like Sabine was a Mandalorian like she grew up in the Mandalorian culture and I was like oh this is so cool and then she when when Fenrow

gives her the van braces and she has like these kind of like Mandalorian abilities like the the you know repulsor and the like vibro whip or whatever yeah all that stuff it's like oh okay like these are coming so naturally

to her it's like bringing something back and then Canaan like shits on it it is like the Jedi beat the Mandalorian history lesson it's wild he goes off while. And shout to the funny prince

for delivering these lines with the growl in his voice. He really hits her right up. Uh-huh. History lesson. The Jedi won the war

with Mandelor. These tricks will amount to something. Maybe save you from time to time, but they won't keep you alive in the long run. Only training

and discipline will do that. When he says discipline he puts the lights of your blade like up to her throat as if to say like, it's only discipline keeping me from killing you right now.

Like I'm pissed. Yeah. Which is wild. It's so wild. This is the first time I've really gotten the Jedi Mandalorian beef in, like, a deep way. Like, historically, I've understood what the forces were or whatever that put them in conflict. But this is the first time that I've been like, oh, his, when he's trying to, when he's talking to Tara about it, which again, Hera is right that Canaan is wrong about how he's going about this.

And that he's like, he keeps trying to justify why he's training her with the stick instead of with the Dark Sabre. itself. The truth is he like doesn't trust that she won't hurt herself or somebody else with the thing. That's a big part of it. But he does say like she's like, you don't, you don't believe it because she doesn't have the force. She can't do this. And he's like, no, the force resides in all living things, but you have to be open to it. Sabine is blocked. And that's for me, like the first time I'm like, oh, it's not like the kind of heart of the Mandalorian Jedi thing that's interesting is, and this is like idealized versions of both of them in a way, the Mandalorians are almost like deeply cynical about the world. And they're like, no, we're going to win,

we're going to break in and steal the Dark Sabre. We're going to use flamethrowers and grappling hooks and all sorts of tricks. And like, we're going to fucking win. We're going to get in the mud. We're going to do it no matter what it takes. There is nothing, you know, they obviously believe in family and clan and all that stuff and like a will to win. But they are so like vulgar and gritty and grounding and like closed off because in the way that when you believe when you hold a sort of cynicism or even even more like a sort of nihilism about the world when you fall into like a real politic and it's just winners and losers and I'm going to be a fucking winner like okay you close your mind off to all everything except I'm going to win this fight and the idealized

version of the Jedi which of course Canaan can hold in his head because he in fact didn't finish his Jedi training and he could just be the like a Jedi is supposed to be this a Jedi is open. A Jedi is open to possibility. A Jedi is flowing. A Jedi is like one with the force and one with everything around them and the opposite of cynicism. And so of course those things come into conflict over again in stories, right? Like, of course these are forces that are going to clash over and over. And I somehow had never really shaken that out, even through the candorous stuff in Cotor, even through the Mandalorian and in Clone Wars and stuff. something about this something about the way canaan delivers his positions throughout this

episode help me understand that even though i don't think that that's really what's motivating him it is annoying him it is it does feel like the puzzle pieces aren't going to fit together i don't know how to train her you know so yeah which is interesting imagine you're like imagine you're a jedi and you're one v oneing a mandolarian and you're doing your your your your lightsaber move one move two, move four, move five, and then they're shooting you with the gougon. They got you with the gougar. They hit you with the jetpack rocket.

Like they are also all consumables. It's all consumables. Yeah, they have the, they have the, uh, the like, they're an ammo base class and you're a recharging manipole base class. It'll never work. Exactly. Exactly. Okay.

What's going to happen when your lightsaber whip, when you're, when you're like light whip is just out of energy? What are you going to do? Yeah. Yeah, the force is all around us. I can keep using the force. I knew it's all day, pal. Yeah.

And I think looming over all this is like, things got a lot more real for this group after they encountered Darth Vader. Yeah. And the other inquisitors where it's like, oh, there are just. Well, yeah. Like the origins for Sabine are, we're just going to put one over on these stormtroopers. It's very like war as goofy childish adventure. Yeah. And now.

It's like, oh, there are just people who show up and like they can defeat the greatest Jedi you've ever, you know, you ever knew, the greatest worries you can imagine. And Canaan doesn't know how to beat them either. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. Well, and let's rewind a second. History lesson the Jedi won the war with Mandelaar. Okay, who killed all the Jedi? It was clones of a Mandalorian who killed all the Jedi.

Right? So like, I don't know, man. She should have thrown that back at him. She doesn't know. She doesn't know. I guess maybe she doesn't. She know about Jango Fet? Do people know who Jango Fet is?

I don't. Plan Fet like never shows up. You know what I mean? We watch the book above Fet. It doesn't really pop up in even that. Yeah. What's the deal with the Fet clan? Yeah, he's too busy being daimio.

You're right, Rob. Well, he was a foundling, though, right? Well, I guess he would have been taken in by their whole. So it depends. The whole Mandalorian founding thing the show

alludes to this when Sateen's sister who's played by Starbucks Oh Bokatan was the

Katie Sackles playing Katie Sackoff Bryce Dallas Howard Oh wait No Katie Sackoff Yeah's Katie Sackoff Oh oh I was thinking in real life

in the Mandalorian No, doesn't she... Well, I'm talking about the Bo-Katan, like, she's played by Kaye Zackoff in the Mandalorian. Yeah. Oh, wait. But... Okay, I'm stupid.

But who does... Who does... Who does play someone, right? She pops up. She does. Yeah. What am I thinking of? She directed three episodes is what she did.

Yeah. Either way. The point is, we get this illusion from Boatat, when she meets the, when she meets the, uh, when she meets gin. She says, you don't even know your traditions. Like, you're one of those Mandalorians. Yeah. Never take off your armor.

All the foundling bullshit. Like, you're one of them. And we're the real ones who were actually Mandalorian. There's kind of implied like, oh, I'm sorry, you're a foundling, you're an adoptive Mandalorian. We're true Spartans. We're ethnic, mandolarians. But we never, we never do get into, to what degree did the entire thing run on foundlings?

And they get very handwavy. And maybe the Mandalorian will answer this at some point, but it's very handwavy about like how much a Mandalorian culture is about always co-opting and bringing in new people through the mechanism of conquest and having foundlings and pulling war orphans into your child soldier army. And then to what degree is all this under the control of a hereditary warrior cast that's been,

stable and established for like a thousand years right great question and then like which one is sabine uh like how long ago were the were the wrens brought in yeah yeah great question there are moments where it feels like they're old money oh they really do feel like old money they do i mean i think i think that they are a major family inside of house visla which is an ancient family because the dark saber originates with them right so yeah i also say where did the has come from Freudian analysis, right? This notion that you just have to grab on to a trauma and really just like electrocute yourself with it

until you have a breakthrough. And then the feelings come just gushing out all the things that you've been unable to verbalize and all the things you've suppressed. Now you confront them. Before we get there, though, wait, because has she already wandered away at this point, Rob? No, no, no, no.

It's after that. I see. Okay. We got them to training and then we just kind of like started riffing about how this all goes. Sorry. Okay.

So yeah, no, it's fine. It's fine. But like we, so yeah, it's a lot of, it's a lot of boring training. Uh-huh.

Fen Rouse shows up and it's like, I got something for you, kid. And it is like, they are both paternal figures here. There is Canaan being like playing the role of a hard, a hard-ass Jedi master.

Right? This is not a fun Yoda style training. This is, you know, a lot more, a lot more stick here. And then cool Uncle Fen shows up and it's like, let me give you that, you know, here's the, here's the real trick. You get Van Braces that do all this cool stuff. And that is like, there's sort of the two paths that are before her. And but also, Fen is like insistent that I'm going to be hands off. like she's got to she's got to get some hard knocks here and you know we'll see how this goes

uh also in this so when she when she finally sort of boils over and is like kind of beginning to reject the training that's where ezra's esra tries to reach out to her and she tries to explain uh that he just doesn't get it like she doesn't want to deal with his family She does not want to re-engage with this shit back on Mandelaar, with her family, with, with her past. And that's where Ezra's like, well, at least you've got a family. Right. Right. She doesn't even want to talk about. She's like, I don't even want to talk about this, let alone go talk to them about it. And that's when he drops that, which is, which is shitty and it hurts her because she feels guilty because like, you know, she feels bad for him. But the thing is, and I hope this is not the show's perspective.

Sometimes having a family, there's a lot of people for whom the idea of not having that family, pretty appealing. Like to be someone unmoored from this group of people, to be someone who's sort of an orphan from the ether, who does not have connections to these people and the ties of familial obligation and trauma inflicted and all that context, to not have any of that can be. awfully appealing and sort of the reflexive always better to have a family than not at least you come from somewhere uh yes sometimes you come from a bad place and you come from a bad place with bad people and bad memories and sabina's trying to get that across and ezra's like no you've got a family which means that you've got picture you've got you've got people who are alive who look sweet and loving in a photo that you carry around but you can go see those people and I can't.

Imagine if you, if, like, Savage had been told, at least you have a family, you know, about dead. Yeah. Uh-huh. Oh, yeah. They're dead now, too, I guess. Yeah. Fuck.

Sorry to Savage. Sorry to the night sister. Well, I also think Ezra does not make it through that scene. You're right. Yeah. Oh, he's dead. Yeah, for sure. Makes Ezre and half, like, bated Batman.

It's like, br-cross the knee. Or it's like Taduco At least you've got a family Right I was meaning to do something about it Yeah that's right I forgot

Thanks for the reminder Hey Savage Quick thing I need you go look up my sister I'll tell you what to do When you get there So

She wanders off Into the spiderland And we see Little coral The big big coral beast smile approvingly And I was sort of thinking We get a commune with Coral Beast

Type moment What is it? You're talking about Bendu here The great weirdo who lives in the wastes But instead I still think he mentored her But I think he did it By merely sending good force vibes He watched her walk by

And he looked knowing and approving As she walked by And that's all she did I think a bit like ZZ Top, sort of imparting like an energy or like a seal of approval. Like, yeah, you get it. And she did get it. Nothing needed. And he didn't say anything because nothing needed to be said.

Right. Like Bendu saw that she was going to be okay, sent those vibes. Okay. This is acceptable under what Pablo says in Rebels Recon 317. He says they didn't talk. And that quote, if something that important would have happened, they would have shown it on screen. And this cannot be the way you think about making TV shows. Pablo, I love you.

I know you're not listening to this. But if this gets to you, give yourself the power of ambiguity. The beauty of this scene is it leaves you wondering, did she talk to Bendu? Did she have some sort of connection there? Was there any sort of back and forth? Maybe they talked about nothing. Maybe they talked about art. You know, the Dark Saber is a symbol.

She's an artist. She understands symbols. Maybe there was something. Who could say? Big empty space. You could let fans fill it in in their minds. Not if I had fict writers fill it in. Like let people imagine what would that conversation be like?

Or maybe nothing happened. Maybe as Rob said, it was just vibes. Or maybe truly there was no contact. We could never know. It's okay to let people not know things. And I know that you are beset by people asking you questions like, did Sabine get guidance from Bendu? And you're compelled to answer professionally. It's your job to answer.

Just tell them, what do you think? What would that look like to you? Like laugh and do not answer? You know in this the week after David Lynch has left us. It's okay to laugh and not answer. Wado and David Lynch. I know, back to back. Oh, yeah, horrible week. One with the force together now. Do you have any hyperdrive repair kits? All I have is these imperial credits. Are those good here? Wow. Waddle and like Lynch meeting in heaven, right? And Wado's like, I need something a little more real. And Lynch being like, what about something a little less real? And we walk hand and halve through the gates. Perfect.

Beautiful. Perfect, beautiful. We don't walk because obviously Wado's like flying. Yeah, fine. So she comes back. And then we're going to have the big therapy session where it's like, let's just dig our fingers and all that. trauma and we have the like eventually a cause a breakdown and that break a dramatic trope people love and I can see why they love it right because it also lets your actors on cork you know if you do

this like on stage on film you always just be like and so then you're and get really angry and just like dig in and you're saying all the hard things of this character that they need to hear and the other characters react to that and like go through their their breakdown and breakthrough and to become the character they are meant to be at the end of the story but also that's not how people work yeah

it's really not generally um is it a good story does it work does it work here like let's pause out and separate out that's not how people work we're living in 21 minute long cartoon television

Natalie doesn't work for you Rob Alley does this exchange function on two levels does the scene work and then does the information that we're given work for Sabine. I think those are two kind of different things. I mean, I think that there's, the tough thing that I had about it for me is that, like,

having a big dramatic scene like this, I think works if the story is summed up a little better. Like, there's like, she's kind of really goes into it. Tell me what happens, actually. That's actually a really good thing. Can someone summarize the information we learn in this exchange? So she says, and I might be missing some parts here, but she basically says, I left my family to go to the Imperials, and I had to do that.

And then I was developing weapons with the Imperials, and they used the weapon that I developed against the Mandalorians to make the Mandalorians subservant to the Empire. And she reveals she has a brother. She says, my brother, my father, my friends, my family, they turned the weapon against them. And the Mandalians were fearing the weapon that I made. Mandalorians fearing a weapon. And then she goes back to her family. and is like, hey, we have to rise against the Imperials?

And they're like, no. No, we don't have to do that, actually. They didn't stand with me. I think it's what she says. So she just fucks off. Is it that she comes back as like a whistleblower and is like, hey, I've been making these weapons that have been killing you guys.

And then her family... And she thought that by revealing that the Imperials were coercing Mandalorian labor to make weapons to kill Mandalorians by revealing this information that the Mandalorians would be like, we can't stand for this, but her family chose to stay with the Imperials and and cast her out instead. I have a little more clarity. Just this exchange.

Yeah, I have a little more clarity because I did not fully understand. And I was like, can someone summarize this? And that is, what I will say is I've learned about what the weapon is either. So we have no idea what the weapon is. And I'm not going to talk about the weapon is. I think I suspect we will learn what the weapon is.

I have now, I've spoiled myself on what the weapon is. I wish I had not, but I was trying to understand exactly the thing that you just laid out, which even after reading about it, I did not fully understand because I do think that what you, I think what you said is right, which is when she, okay, so we meet Sabine, this show starts in five B, B, B, B, Y, five years before the Battle of Yavum. But wait, I want to pause. This is information that you have found outside of. Sorry, no, right now I'm just talking about. about timeline stuff because I want to make sure we're all on the same page with how old is Sabine so we can try to do research in order to put this all together I'm saying I've been very little not really because we already knew I do a very little amount of research which was what year was she

for the thing I'm about to say if this is just what year was she born and then what year did the show start which is it starts 5 BBY she is born in 21 BBI which means she's 16 when we meet her which means that before she's 16, she has developed some sort of mega weapon for the Imperials, been cast out slash left her family, and became a bounty hunter for the Crimson Dawn for some amount, and worked for the Crimson Dawn or whatever for a little bit,

and then joined the rebels. So like real busy 13 to 16 years old in there. Somewhere in there, she's developing some sort of mega weapon we haven't learned about. Yes, question mark. I think that what you've, the three of you have just outlined is right. She's there as an imperial cadet. We know that she went to the Imperial Academy.

We know that she specialized in weapons and explosives. She built some sort of while a cadet, while at the Academy, she was running fucking circles around these motherfuckers. Galen Erso, who? Like, I'm building the bomb, whatever that is. Like you said, Dugie Oppenheimer happening over here. And then, yes, it was being used against the Mandalorians. She goes home.

She's like, I don't want to do this anymore. Goes home. Feels bad about this. And then her family says, no, we're actually going to side with the empire. And that's what we know. From both of these episodes, I think this scene does not do a great job of communicating that exactly. There's a lot of open ways to read what happened there. What's clear is it's, I think the thing is like, it seems so outlandish that the empire

would be like using the super weapon that she made on the Mandalorians. And then the family would be like, and we're going to side with the empire on this. And it feels outlandish. Obviously, families do fucked up things all the time. People do fucked up things all the time. But it's delivered so rapidly that it's hard to like swallow what's happened. and it feels like we're missing something. Every Sabine story is both overstuffed

and makes her too important an actor in history to like entirely be believed. Or more accurately, it's like you're giving her so many moments in history. It's like she's like led the entire life of Forrest Gump by the time that we meet her in the story. And it's like, and I think like so much stems from, she has the backstory of a character who's significantly older.

That's right. Like, Sabine Red makes a ton of sense as someone who is middle-aged or in their 30s. In their 30s in a cartoon, you know, like Canaan's age or whatever, right? I mean, we saw that concept art when she was older. When she was older and the crew had a little Twilic girl instead of Hara being an adult. We've seen that concept art. So much of this stuff on the page makes more sense if she's 30, 35, right? And, like, so much of it has felt kind of, like, like built in mid-flight because it's, well, uh, she was a bounty hunter. And so you end up with a lot of these, a lot of these like disparate elements that it's kind of like goofy to imagine like a middle school or running off and like going from doing the Mandalorian Manhattan project to being a bounty hunter and joining the mob and then joining the rebels. But also it's, you can do less, right? I think fundamentally,

the, the thing that is sympathetic about Sabine is this is someone who is, whose loyalties are like divided in triplicate as part of a newly conquered imperial people to begin with. Like, they are nobles within an expansionist empire themselves who recently come under the boot of, of the Galactic Empire, who are in the process of co-opting their young and like making sure that the rest of them, the next generation, Mandalorian serve them and fall in line. Yeah. And the Mandalorian nobles themselves, the parents are jockeying for position in this and trying to situate themselves to the best advantage under in this new order.

And Sabine's caught between all these various forces. Right. And you don't actually need the bomb. You know what I mean? Well, this is the thing. You don't need her to have built the bomb. Right. This is the thing is there's two, the thing that they really want.

I think. And maybe this is, again, why maybe the character does connect with so many people. She built the bomb. And we didn't say this on her summary because the show kind of moves past it quickly. She builds the bomb for her family in the sense that she goes to the Imperial Academy. And to begin with, not because she wants to, but because it's a way to let her family be safe under the empire. Fine. I'll play along.

I'll go build the, again, like Galen Ersoe, hiding his daughter and, like, you know, and fleeing, hoping that she will survive. You know, like, sort of like, but in reverse, here the daughter is going to join the empire, hoping that it will protect her family from their influence, right, and their violence, right? So, like, she did all that for them, and then when it became clear that she was being used to hurt her own people, they would turn their back on her, even though she was already sacrificed so much, but it really gets complicated in a way that's, like, hard

to unpack and really hard to unpack in 21 minutes. minutes, two 21 minute episodes where the end result needs to be, ah, she fixed things with her family. Like the deep betrayal here that if that is the order of events, she joins the military to protect her family, she makes a weapon as part of the military as a 15 year old, that weapon gets used against her extended family. She goes back to her family and says, hey, that sucked. Fuck the empire.

We have to fight them. They say no. we're exiling you when we're siding with the empire who just killed our extended family. Wrapping all that up in two 21-minute episodes. And really, a follow-up episode that's kind of a standalone and the final five minutes, eight minutes, whatever, of this one where it finally starts to come out. It's a heavy task. It's a lot.

And I, yeah, it's messy. It's also confused because she says in her, like, rapid succession trauma dump, She says the truth is that I left to save everyone and then later she says I spoke out to save everyone This is why I mean there's two events I think I understand that those are two separate events But but but did you leave or did you get cast out or is she saying she left the academy or did she leave like I Well because because I'm with you there's something here too like that's she's also an exile from Mandalorians because she built the weapon.

Like she's she is now tainted by the Imperial like by her collaboration. But we have so little detail about the nature of that. And also we've seen her meet other Mandalrians and they have no particular reaction to her. So if you're going to say, I can never go home again because I built the anti-mandelorian bomb. The nuke that kills Mandalorians.

If you're going to say that, well, we've had her meet so many Mandalians. And they're like, What fuck is this kid? Hey, weirdo. Well, they've said, oh, you're part of fucking Death Watch. You're from the Death Watch family. And they have it like that, but that's it, basically.

Which is old Clone Wars business. This is, but yes, we've not had anyone who has the reaction of like, oh my God, you're the person, you're the person, you're the person, you're the, you're the, you're the, you're the, you're the, you're the, you're the, you're the, you're the, you're the, you're the one to kill all those people. nobody has that reaction and so now you have this implied like she's her family turned on her she is disgraced

and sort of unwelcome of Mandalorians but we haven't seen any because this is also kind of a late it feels like a late addition to the conception of Sabine that she designed

this historically important weapon it was deployed turned against her own creation and then was sort of forced to leave the Mandalorian's behind, it doesn't really hang well. And the other thing that, like, makes some of this not work is that, you know, you alluded to Canaan's performance, the Previn's Jr.'s performance when he's, like,

the implied, like, I don't like the Mandalorians, like, the, just the contempt, the anger. And behind it, the fear that is behind that, she is given an exposition trauma. to get through in the scene. That's going to be tough to deliver. It's so hard to deliver something like this. Like partly the writing. It feeds into a problem of I have never as convinced by this performance, this concept of the character as I want to be.

But I don't know if there's anything on the page that like I don't know of anyone. You know what I mean? Like I'm not sure Meryl Streep could be playing Sabine. And you're like these moments are hitting because I think some of it is and here's your big scene and you're sliding a page of like character backstory that should be there to imply like you know part of the exercise of um you know like this is true in acting to a to a degree and also like he's creating an RPG character you create a backstory but you don't say it the backstory the backstory is there for you to guide like how does this character act in this moment what is like what is behind their eyes. in this moment. And with Sabine, too often, it's like, what are we going to do here?

Let's have her read another passage from that character backstory. And that happens here. And by the way, I think this is the best they've ever done in an episode like this. 100%. Well, and I think maybe I like the Hera-Cham mission

where he almost betrays her a little bit more. Yeah. But I do... Oh, wait, wait. I'm not on Sabine episodes. Oh, okay. I thought you meant a character. backstory.

No, no, no. These problems are so easily the best to be an episode. This crushes all the previous Sabine episodes. And again, my biggest complaint is that they didn't, they waited three and a half seasons to get to this. It's a four season show. Like, we need this forever.

Any, like, no seeds. No seeds were planted anywhere. Her just not talking is not a seed. That does not count. Like, that is just not, her just like not referencing her past it's like

I'm open to the possibility that we have forgotten or missed some cues. It's been watching the show on and off for years because of the way the show's broken up. I can imagine the person at home who's like rewatched rebels one or two times. It's like oh no like with this knowledge when you go back and you watch Sabine when she's talking about this this and that when she makes a reference to this like it's there but I should

I should be able to watch something the first time around it's not like some fucking like it's not it's not lynch right it's not like clues that we would have never anticipated

being clues that it's not what the show is doing it's I should be able to watch something the first time around and know that a character has some sort of internal, like, I should know that they have motivations, histories, like, all of those things. Even if I don't have all of the information, I should know enough to, like, be able to

keep track in my mind from season to season, oh, Sabine, I know that Sabine is a Mandalorian. I know that she has a conflicted past, et cetera, et cetera. I mean, specifically if we knew that she had. The next season to follow, okay, I get a little bit more into Sabine now. Like, that is how television TV character development arcs work. And that's my, that's my beef with this, is that we actually, we got it for Ezra. Like, we got the fact that his family with his parents and as time goes on, his relationship with the force, like we, we, and even with Canaan in how he's kind of.

And Zeb, and Hara. But they all have simple backstories that just, like, it's just, you know what I mean? It's like, it's just enough. Yeah. I mean, but the problem is they kept reinventing Sabine as they like went along and plugging. And because of the dictates of a show, like stuff has to happen every week. Totally. And they also use Sabine to slap together, like make plot elements fit together.

And so like Ezra, we got a very simple like, oh, where's this kid from? Those parents are gone. Right. And then later it's like, well, actually his parent. And it all fits together. Well, that's the thing. You could have done this in steps. You could have done this as like, who's Sabine?

Oh, she's a Mandalorian who was kicked out of her family because they sided with the empire and she didn't want to. And then season two, you go, oh, she actually used to be part of the empire. She built a weapon for the empire. And then season three, that weapon was used against the Mandalorians. And that caused a schism between her and her family. And that's why she ended up leaving was like they had to like betray her. otherwise her whole family would have been wiped out, and they had to, like, exile her,

and you did it over three seasons, and suddenly you have like a pretty complex character where that stuff, it doesn't, it's not just, you don't just look at backstory like that and be like, I'm judging it in a vacuum. You say, how does this bubble up whenever there's, this character is having a moment as, you know, in connection to something else in the world? Every time that, you know, Ezra is thinking about the nature of revolution, we can now say, Oh, right, his parents were part of a resistance movement on Lothol. Any time that we think about the Clone Wars and the Clone Wars bubble up, we think about Canaan as a little kid living through Order 66, living through all of that stuff.

Whenever resistance comes up, that's like a local resistance against the empire, we can think about Harris' relationship to the resistance on Ryloth. And that's because those elements were set up earlier on. And like, not even that much earlier on, but early enough that we see. started that we've had over a season of thinking through some of those things. I really think if this story had been delivered earlier, we would be way positive, even in the kind of like big rush that it's given to us now, if this had been a season one or two episode, we would be so much higher on Sabine throughout because we'd have more to chew on already. And so they're feeling

that they were secretly keeping something super, like the degree to which it feels that they went out of their way. And I do know that there are elements that were not decided early. Like early on, we're getting ahead of ourselves on at the next episode, they thought that she was going to have a twin sister. And it turns out she has a brother instead that we'll meet in the next episode. But there are elements to this story that just like really do feel like they built the plane in the air and they weren't 100% sure until this episode. And then they hit the gas as hard as they could to get it all out.

There's actually one of the, there's only one of their character that has some of these issues. And that's callous, right? Sort of mid-series, like, oh. Oh, shit, we got something here. Actually wanted to tell us with this guy. Yeah. And so, and it's a. knowing how they handle it, but to an extent, he basically is like, okay, I really didn't do that.

I may have overstated my participation in the genocide, and they move on from it. And I think to a degree, and maybe they're starting to do that, but like, I think, honestly, some of this is, it's that silly bounty hunter side plot that really, like, causes just having that, the fact that we had this, like, what's the value in that? They had this effort to, like, let's flesh out Sabine. it was a misfire I think ultimately that's it the space they carved out earlier in the series like let's flesh out Sabine

they misfired and they were like she was a bounty hunter and she joined Crimson Dawn and really that episode should have been spent further establishing

that she had this connection to Imperial Weapons programs and was this prodigy and instead they have her like we used to run together as bounty hunters Turn our gap here from Los Alamos.

With the trick that we never saw again. Well, yeah, we'd not seen Ketsu On you again, I think, at all, at all. She popped up in that one scene, Austin, because you said it felt like contractual obligation to get Gian Torres to, like, speaking lines in two episodes. Well, and then the other thing is, like, we learn in the next episode that her brother is part of the group that is like the all white. Yeah, Gar Saxon's group. had a Gar-Saxon episode earlier. Why wasn't her brother as part of that? If we didn't she used that earlier,

she would have even more to chew on in that. You know what I mean? And it's unfortunate because this is just, this is what happens when you haven't figured this stuff out until so late. Yeah, yeah. And so, like, maybe they're getting it on track,

but I think the problem is you can only get it so on track when things are this badly compromised from the start where, like, you're going to be playing around elements like Fenrao and, you know, a lot of this history. but it is also touched on by stuff that didn't quite work or that they didn't figure out until much later. And now you're kind of just stuck with it, right? Like a lot of this gets cleaned up if you're just like, it was like big, right? Everyone wakes up one morning and Sabine is 42 years old.

Right. Everyone has like, and it's a what? What? Yeah. And then she's like, so before I met you guys, I went to the Zoltan machine said I wish I could go back to before this all happened and it maybe a teenager, but we found the Zoltan machine outside ghost base, and I went back and this is who I am now. And everyone's like, that's crazy. And then we move on. Let's watch the Reveld's Recon here about this episode, not the whole thing, but just the section in the middle where they talk about the episode.

I'm going to hit play. In Trials of the Dark Saber, we learn a bit more about the history of the Darksever. How long has this history been developed? When the Dark Sabre was first created on Clone Wars. For a long time, the case of Previsla that first wheels the Darksaber in the show, he had what was called in Star Wars a Vibroblade, which is not a lightsaber. When George saw that, he kind of said, yeah, I've heard of those things, but there's no way it could stop a lightsaber.

Yeah, I heard somebody wrote that shit. As we started doing rubbles and we realized that there was this connection that could quite logically fall out of the storytelling, that Maul was the last person to have this thing, and he could cross paths with Sabine. The need came to like, okay, let's start defining this. Why does this thing? Why does this thing exist?

Where did it come from? This was an opportunity for us to kind of widen the mythology of the Dark Sabre and kind of give an idea of how it was connected to the Jedi. And in this particular case, the ruling parties in the House of Isla had used this sword for many generations to keep power. So there's a sense that people would follow a sword if they believed in who was wielding it. In Trials of the Dark Saver, we see Sabine really come to terms with her mandolian legacy.

What the Mandalorian was going to be? How big do you think that has helped mature her this season? It is who she is at her. core and that is where she came from but I think for the reasons that she left and how painful it was for her to leave she goes with it and embraces it and fully commits to her mandoness which is awesome this is essentially a whole episode about training what inspirations came into creating it I love this episode because it's so different I think it's such a great change of pace from some of our other episodes that are more plot

heavy this is so much more character driven there's a deeper training going on I'm just the clone war training is Canaan learns basically something that this isn't about him that he has to actually let go and allow her to grow up. By the same token, she is actually really preparing herself to face her family. I wanted to impress on everybody the importance of Sabine training with a lightsaber that was going to be difficult for her. So I wanted to spend the entire episode on that. If you tell the story the right way, we don't need a secondary little plot here.

It's not important. Like, the whole thing should be about her training. And it's not about her learning to fight with a sword. It's about her being a character and a person that has feelings and emotion. Right. feelings and emotion and depth and dimension. And all of those things drive her forward, or pull her back and stop her.

This is definitely my favorite episode we've done so far. Dave doesn't like to tell us too much in advance, but he actually told me about this episode quite a bit in advance sort of mentally prep me for what we were gonna be doing. By the end, I wanted Tia to be very emotional. I wanted her to be struggling and to see the depth of the hurt that her family caused her.

And in some ways, the doubt from her friends there like Canaan and that part of her anger and the explosiveness and art is that she's fighting through so many things. It was a little bit of a challenge, but man, it was so nice to just have that time with Dave. I'm really grateful that Dave gave me that opportunity. The first time she got direction from Dave. We don't get that many opportunities to sort of go there.

It's one of the few times that I actually recorded the actors prior to shooting all the scenes. Normally on these, we shoot everything and then we record. But I wanted her emotions to drive everything that we were doing. And I thought, well, I called me to record later, but there was no need to be recorded. She was so good. Yeah. That's animation.

That happens a lot, right? Where they do all the animation already, and then they have to record to the animation. They don't get to. That's what I understand is typical. Is animation first then? Yeah. But for this, they just let her go for it. So the bit where Dave is like, you know, she's a character with emotions.

Like, yeah, dude. Like, that's, you've been giving everyone else on the show some opportunity to be that. You haven't given Sabine that until now. And now you've made her do it all in 21 minutes, which is like trying to run a marathon as a sprint, you know? I'm really glad we got this episode. So now we can live in the Sabine world, the world where we know who Sabine is and what happened to her and what her relationships are. Just in time for her to leave. Okay.

Just in time for her to talk about the third episode. Just in time for us. So not have to give a shit about her anymore. Maybe the story is going to split in half. And this is going to be half like, Mandalorians doing mandonis. No, it's not, Rob. Let's be real.

Come on. We can't live in delusions. She will be back on this show. Let's talk about the third. I'm sure we're going to have like a meetup eventually. It's going to be like, have you heard about what's been going on with the mandolars? She's in one of the screenshots for the upcoming episodes. She'll be back.

I just don't think it'll be next week. We're not going to. get to watch her do this thing that she's going to do. Which I will say really quick, I do think that if what you're making is Star Wars, this big franchise that includes comics and web cartoons and all this other stuff, it can be useful to have little windows where you go, ooh, I wonder what that character got up to when we weren't seeing them. Like, for instance, maybe she talked to Bendy. But yeah, exactly. So I believe there is some stuff after this next episode we're about to talk about, but before she returns to rebels, that there is some fill in the gap type material

there, but I don't believe it's in the rebels itself. Anyway, episode three. So with legacy of Mandelor, now they go in search of, they go and make contact with Sabine's family to begin their sort of recruiting pitch to the rebel cause and to sort of announce that Sabine is now the bearer of the Dark Sabre. And we learn a lot of important things in this episode, like Sabine's family lives in a building that combines brutalism and art deco in sort of an architectural motif that is frankly riveting. It's specifically the prairie style from Frank Lloyd Wright is what it's supposed to be drawing on. So if you want that, Rob, I bet we could find you a prairie house for only five or six million dollars. But they wouldn't let me fuck with it.

Probably not. They'd be like, this is, this house is important. It's like, yes, but it could still be important with cat six running through the walls. And they'd be like, you can't open these walls. And I'd be like, are you going to stop me? And they would. And they would send them back. How would they know?

It's a case study house, Rob. They'll never know. I'll just open the walls and put my little cat six in it. And then I'll seal it nobody will ever know. Oh, funny. Hey, what happened to this paint here? It's extremely funny to me that the Wren clan lives in a case study house. It's so funny.

It's just with like, with randomly like a climped. It's a climp fading, yeah. It's a climped portrait of Mama Wren of, what's her name? These guys rule. They absolutely rock. Like she, they get shot down the surrecy's like. Hey, it's me. It's Sabine Red.

Immediately they get shot down. They crash land. They go see her mom. Her mom is like not happy to see them. But also does shift gears once she's one on one with Sabine and is like, I'm trying to protect you. And then her mom goes and dimes her out to the empire. And then, sorry, what's his name again? Oh, Gar Saxon.

Yeah, Gar-Saxon. Gar-Bel-Iblis. That's Gar-M-Hall-Iblis. Different. Yeah, Gar-Saxon shows up, but he's so dastardly that he fumbles the bag here. All he had to do was just arrest the people. Her mom turned in. Real Niles' Ferrier.

Yeah. Just do the thing. And it's fine. And, yeah. And so her brother turns on him. and they have a big old Donnybrook dust up inside the mansion and then it goes out onto a frozen lake

and you're gonna be like we're gonna do something with that frozen lake right you're gonna be so disappointed you're gonna be spending that entire fight being like fight on the frozen lake it's gonna matter it keeps cracking more

it keeps cracking more is just someone's gonna hold through it somebody cut the ice anyway She wins. They don't do it. She wins. And then Gar, whatever, tries to, Gar Saxon tries to shoot her in the back. But her cool brother, who, her cool brother wearing the imperial uniform, shoots him first. And then they're like, all right, you're going to, let's go back and like begin to fight to free Lothal and take the fight to the empire. And she's like, I have to stay here. I have unfinished. business among the Mandalorians. They're like, goodbye.

Dave said so. We understand. Yeah. Sure. You know? Sure. I really like Fenrow. Let me just say that at the top of you know. You're like I always feel like Fenrao's just got it dialed in on, on what the

assignment is, what the, what the, what the, what the Mandalorian should be up to. He's kind of scuzzy in the way Previsla was. He does have that. Yeah, he has like a little, like, I, There's always kind of an uncertainty of how if he's going to maybe betray everyone in this room right now. But he does. He's on your side, but he also might want to knock over some gas stations. Like pre-visla.

Yeah. That's kind of the vibe. I'm with you guys right now, but also sometimes we're going to be at a roadhouse. And I'm going to look across the way and be like, I have to go take care of something. you'll never see me again. Yeah. Uh-huh. Anyway, so they're flying in.

He sees what them sort of explaining with the, what the situation is. I love the little Mandalorian attack on their, on their spaceship. The fact that they just rocketeer up to, and they can't do anything about it. They're just sworn by these guys. And it's so clinical,

they just dismantle the ship. Chopper's helpless. And they just break the ship apart. And then they fly off to let it crash. Yeah. They land on it and, like, put, they, like, hold chopper up as if they're doing a train robbery. It's so funny. I also love, hey, we got, we got some Mandoah spoken here.

She calls a head to say, hey, I'm Sabine Ren, and then that's what they come to shoot her down. And they're like, oh. I thought they were going to die in this ship crash. I've never seen a ship crash so dangerously in Star Wars, I think. The fact that no one was buckled in. Right? I was losing my mind. I was like, everyone is going to fly across the ship right now and die.

Yes. And they just kind of like, who, hmm, hmm. Yeah, can't hold his arm a little bit as they leave. But like, Samina's like, all right, everybody, buckle in. It's going to be a crash. And everyone's like, okay. And they don't do anything. None of them buckle in.

Well, if you just say brace yourselves and then you sort of like, tense you're fine. That's all you need. It's fine. She tense up before a crash. That's a pro tip. People who ignore instructions. Sabine is like, all right, remember, I could be related to these guys.

So I don't kill anybody. And Ezra's like, yeah, okay, cool. And as soon as they land, he pulls out his lightsaber and activates it. And then they start shooting. And he's like blocking blasts back at them. Bro, chill. They didn't do anything yet. You can't expect a young Jedi.

Yeah. His blood up. You can't expect him. We see his Mandalorians. Right. He's just going to obey instinct. Yeah. He's just going to obey instinct. He's selfless. It's like border collie. He basically is.

Yeah, you're right. Uh-huh. And they're coyotes. You know, he's got to keep him away. Yeah. Well. But, and crucially, all the other Mandalorians that, like, everyone has sort of imperial-ish armor. But one of them is like a glass of milk. Yeah. The silver gray ones, uh, Faloni, I believe, said he liked that.

He wanted to give them a design that made it look like all the life had been in, like, like color had been drawn out of Clan Ren, and so they were left this kind of grayish. It, it rips. It's so good. It's also a great contrast against Sabine, who is like walking color palette, you know, which I can go here or there with the actual design, but I really like it as a contrast to the simple gray and gold of her family, you know. And then, yeah, her brother has on the white Boba Fett look.

It's certainly a Pleasantville situation. It is kind of like a Pleasantville situation happening. And she's coming back with color. Yeah. The movie Pleasantville with the color. You've seen that movie. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. I got that one. It's like a black and white sitcom, 50 sitcom world, and like they don't have sex or music. It's sort of like footloose, but with going into the TV, you know? Right, right, right. Yeah. Anyway, they're going to their cool house. The guy is obsessed with Pleasantville because it's so pleasant there.

Because it's so pleasant there. And then he goes. goes there and realizes there's so much they don't have is it not pleasant there it's not pleasant there

they don't have sex they don't have masturbation it's like an important scene where the mom learns how to masturbate and like color starts entering the world

that movie was hugely popular that movie cleaned up I gotta rewatch that sometimes yeah I feel like that's a good one for my synodian

and I was like I don't know man that was Toby McGuire is that who that was Toby McGuire and Reese Withersp right sure of course what a time what a time uh how about sabine wren's cool imperious evil mom

so i feel like everyone had really done their homework on disney movies this feels like like oh it does this is the most disney episode of rebels i're right seen and she is an evil disney mom and i'm like i'm here for it yep because the thing is those they're those they're iconic yeah right? Like, Curella DeVille, Ursula, like,

you got to, she has evil Disney mom hair. Yeah. Evil Disney mom hair. Yep. The like the, the, clubbed.

Yeah. Even the relationships feel Disney in that way. I had the same exact note that like, oh, the like sort of sympathetic brother, like everything about it

feels like Moulon 2. We just didn't, you know what I mean? I don't know there is a Moulon 2. I haven't seen the directed VHS Moulon 2. But it has that energy or like the Disney afternoon cartoon version of Aladdin.

You know what I mean or whatever? I actually think it works pretty well because it's all pretty straightforward. Like this episode does not really get into who designed a weapon when. What's important is her family doesn't like her. She and her family are at ends, but they're still family. And her family is at like, you know, hard to deal with position because the father who married in to Clan Ren is being held as a hostage. on Mandelor. And so now the younger brother is like part of Gar Saxon's private guard to try to keep them in their good graces. Like it's all fairly straightforward in exactly the way like

a classic 90s to 2000s Disney type movie would be. And I think that that stuff just works. And it also was carried a lot by character design. The family has like a great, great facial features that like communicate a lot about the kind of cartoonish characters that they are. And then great performances. I think her mom especially does like a really good job of mad cartoon mom, you know? Even though again, we'll start getting into specifics, I don't really, she the speed with which she goes from like, I'm glad you're back, I guess, and they kind of like bond on the balcony to selling her friends out to then deciding not to sell her out in the final instance, you know, yeah, it's fine. I guess the brother is on who decides not to, yeah. And

Anyway, Gar-Saxon has to behave this way in order for any of the Wrens to sort of make sense. You're right. The problem there. You're right. That is the problem. Because the thing, but they come very close. This is the thing that frustrates me a little bit. I actually think Ers is a really well-executed character until I actually don't like that she immediately sells them out.

I think that is the, that is the thing that's inconsistent for me. She should have been positioned or pushed to selling them out because that's what historically it seems like she's been doing. because what her reaction is I think what you would have expected when when Sabine shows up it's why are you here do you not understand that the reason you're not you're not just exiled everyone is protected by you not being here you're protected we're protected why are you here you're fucking this up the one thing we need to not do was ever see each other again and now you're here and now I have to do something And so she's very cold and imperious when sort of she's in her receiving room, which has its echoes of Sateen's, like, throne room. And previsalus on the other part. Yeah, they have this ruling aesthetic that they recreate again and again and again that everyone on every, like every ruling house has a similar sort of like throne room, similar sort of like art deco motifs, you know, sort of like sort of mosaic, like abstract mosaics in the, in. in the floor. But when she goes out on the terrace to talk to Sabine,

it's not a complete change where she drops the shields and like she engages more as a mom, but she does become more maternal, where it is like, let's talk, okay. Let's talk about a relationship. I can see you have these feelings and like the, like I understand you're in pain from like the way things like the way things are. But you knew they had to be this way.

And I like all of this carried out that she's one face when she's sort of in leader of the ruling house mode. And then there's a moment where she is trying to reach her recalcitrant child. And then she kind of instantly betrays them, which I don't, it's too many shifts and it's kind of silly and obvious. But also it's reckless. Like we've just had multiple scenes explaining that kind of the thing that is safest is for, for none of this to be happening and telling the empire that the Jedi are here that your daughter's here this is the like clutching a bomb to your chest thing and there's just ursa does it because that has to the story has to go this way and this like her brother has to be like how dare you do this

to my family i'll i'll stand alongside my sister but again the clone wars version of this where you can sit in this sort of awkward family reunion from hell moment and And then something pushes Ursa. She sees a guard who's going to call guard. And she, like, stops that, but then realizes, or maybe she doesn't stop it. She, like, beats him to the punch that way. Honestly, Tristan Dimeing them out would have made way more sense. Like, have him be the mailman, the sort of man, the postman from Sound of Music.

Right. Sure. Yeah. And he, by the way, he has that written all over him. Oh, he sure does. Like the Joker, like I know a squealer when I see one. Like, I know a crypto-fascist when I see one. Tristan, like, Tristan was going to sell you out.

But instead, it's not. It's going to be Ursa sort of making the sort of reckless, reckless move. And I think the story hangs together much better if it's Tristan who thinks that he's doing the right thing by his family, invites the viper into the home. And then doesn't make out of the episode alive. that would have been how I would have handled all this. Yeah, well, unfortunately, it's now on Disney Plus, you know? I feel like the whole family had to get out. This is not the show that Clone Wars was in this way.

We talk a lot about the show being for a younger audience. That feels like a Clone Wars story more than it does a Rebels one. You know, not that family members haven't died here, but they tend to die off screen and you learn about it. You know, Ezra's family, we didn't see it gunned down necessarily. Oh, but we just got to revel in the atrocity that was done to Minister Tua. We just had that seared into our fucking eyeballs. No mercy. I do something else that pops up here.

There's two things. One is we get the, the dark saber is only a symbol, right? We get the sort of like her mom is doubtful of the entire idea around the dark saber. Having a sword doesn't make you the ruler. It's only a symbol. again Sabine is an artist I think that that's interesting and funny I do wish we hadn't like

seen the Mandalorian already because we know what happens to the Dark Sabre at some point between now and later and it went it ends up in Moff Gideon's hands you know holds it over a baby yeah you don't put it if you don't stop what you're doing

the baby gets it that's right I don't know what happens between now and then but that's where it goes also that show establishes that the if you aren't faded wheel the blade, the blade gets really heavy as you use it. And so I'm just sitting here, I wish I didn't know this because I'm sitting here, it's like, well, so one is lights, one's the dark side,

one's a good heavy. Or did they change the rule? Is Sabine supposed to wield it? In the previous episode, what we got was as your confidence in it grows and as you could kind of push your willpower through it, it will become lighter for you because it becomes lighter for her.

But you're right, later it becomes a much different, messier thing in terms of who can wield it. easily. The second thing is, she does deliver the line in this. I didn't know the empire would use the weapon I designed against our people. And I do, I do just have to say that it's not doing the lifting. I think Sabina thinks it's doing. I was only designing mega weapons for the empire to use on other people, Mom.

Like, is not, I get it. I get the, I think, Mandalorian perspective, that's horribly defensive. But not for me, not for Austin at home, right? Like, we've spent a lot of time talking about Callis and how we couldn't get behind Callis and Zeb because Callas, like, particularly genocided Zeb species. How many people have to be genocided we don't know about? I don't, like, she didn't build the Death Star, but like, did she build the robot that just blew up, you know what I mean? Like, I don't know what she designed. Oh, yeah.

I do know what she designed. But at this point, pretending I don't know what she designed, she built like a sort of killer weapon. And we just aren't going to deal with that. And we're just not going to sit with that at all and think about how many people Sabine has indirectly killed. And like, I get it again, this is part of why I wished in the previous episode, they had really like, or a season and a half ago, more, you know, slowly walked through the idea, like, I had to build the weapons as if I didn't, they were going to exterminate my whole family. And so, like, I felt like it was the only thing I could do or even I was a kid and I was being pressured in ways I didn't know how to deal with at the time. All of that would have made, like, and because of what I've done, I am the last person who should be the one uniting the Mandalorians again, because, like, the damage that I have personally done to Mandalorians is so great, like, the guilt that I hold is so great that I could, I could not wield the sword either physically or symbolically. like all of that would be so good if we had any time to enjoy it

yeah so no I'm so cute I'm dying now I'm dying I want to watch so much rebels after this because I want to find out what that weapon is because I'm like she built a big magnet bro I'm trying to figure out like like anti-mandelorian weapons I can't tell you but I do will say one thing I will say one thing can I say this I will say this one thing in this particular way I don't know how she didn't know how bad that it was going to be used against the Mandalorians. That's what I'll say. It's big magnet.

It's not a big magnet. Or big net. I'm not going to say anything else. But it is like, yeah, it's, yeah, that's all I'm going to say. That's so funny. I do maybe, and maybe we'll learn in the particulars that she was kept out of some certain types of information. But yeah, that's all. It's like she designed order 16.

It's like she was a Jedi. Jetpack near it. They explode. It's like if a Jedi had programmed Order 66 into all the clones. Do you know what I mean? I was like, wait, do you get to Jedi? I can't do it.

It's Order 66. Kill all the Jedi. We'll get there. It's the helmets. I'm not saying what it is. So, crucially, when they went on,

when they went to go see Sabine's mom, they were like, Phen, you stay aboard the ship. It might be good for you to pop out of nowhere at some point. So true. Nobody ever checks the ship. Yep. He's sneaking around the woods. Turns out his Mandalorian X-ray vision microphone visor

sees through the walls to where Ursa is on the phone with Gar-Saxon. And then he nages his way into her study, grabs the lightsabers. And so right as Gar-Saxon shows up and is like, aha, they've sold you out. And now I'm going to wipe out House Ren. Now is my opportunity kill all of you and the housewren guards like draw down on him uh you know he's he's got the upper hand and he's obviously tristan's going to help too tristan we don't know that we mentioned this yeah tristan is the brother we kind of passed him he kind of is like y a he kind of is like y a boyfriend vibes you know what i mean like he kind of has yeah yeah like not end game you're right that's exactly right yeah true uh so

Yeah, everyone's pulling guns on each other And then Fenraal comes into the middle of it And it's like, Booker, catch! And lightsabers go flying through the air And then later Ezra mid-fighted, it's like, Booker, catch, and flings a lightsaber in the air So Sabine can stop Gar from cutting from knifing her mom With the Dark Sabre in the back.

And this is, of course, important Because she hasn't won the Dark Sabre from anybody. right Ezra took it from mall's cache of stuff or like found it there and she found it on the ground at the end of that

the Knight Sisters Ghosts episode and so it's important Yeah like the Crown of France Like that's right And or like the The Imperial seal That Sunjian found

Obviously during the Three Kingdoms era But you have to win it You can't just It's the Mandalorians You have to You have to kill someone over You've to at least beat them And take it from them

So you need this scene where this fucker has it and she beats him straight on. And then she does, you know. The ice never comes into it. I know. I know. It's so funny. They go out to a big lake of ice and do minutes of fighting where they're doing things like there's like there's like flame throwers happening.

There's all sorts of, there's a jet pack. Ice is so much ice. Constantly. It's already kind of cracked. And it's cracking more and more. You're so sure something's going to fall. into it. He's going to get Nevskied. This motherfucker is getting Nevskyed. What if he had fallen in and she had to decide either to pull him up or pull the dark saber up? And she pulled up the dark saber up. That would have been fun. That doesn't happen. She just doesn't, she just beats a regular style and almost cuts. She almost does the, the, um, uh, the Anakin cut off Duku's head maneuver, but she refuses to. Like the cross scissors, the scissors, lightsaber attack. But then narratively the thing becomes convenient because then he's, um, uh, the Anakin cut off Duku's head maneuver, but she refuses to. But then narratively the thing becomes convenient because then he's, He's like, I'm going to shoot you in the back and then he gets killed anyway.

I think it's killed anyway. Which is like, no, have that, if this character needs to die, let one of your little heroes get their hands bloody. No. Who's going to do it? Try to sell toys out here. You know? We can't have, we can't, this is a show for 12-year-olds. It's TV something, TV, what is this show?

TV, PG. I think it's Hey I'm trying I'm trying to think that awesome characters who are like willing to be but when did that character

is showing up and like you know it shows up in YA stuff but not this young skewing not this yeah

bro it's TV Y 7 you know because Zucco never marks anybody either who like is is sort of in the gray as he starts he actually never does just like

yeah is he not I guess not but this could be the first show to introduce introduce like children they're never too long to learn totally about decapitation especially in these times

yeah that like sometimes you just have to plunge your hands into the pool of blood right that idiot that the justice demands that you cannot be you cannot be a servant of justice and say

ah but my victories will be bloodless there will be no sacrifice the heavens are going to fall on someone more more people are saying this Rob well it turns out her brother just shoots him so it's fine and she's like there was a split second where it's

like is Sabine dead oh my God I would have like a split second I was like the legacy of Mandelaar was Sabine who is now memorialized in this hologram. And then Gar Saxon was going to take the the Dark Sabre and whatever.

Become a major villain for the rest of the show. It would be so, wow, that that doesn't happen luckily. Thank God. Thank God. But you never know. You never know with these guys. How is Sabine planning on building

Mandelor without killing anyone I think she's probably going to kill people off screen okay but she beat this guy

in 101 combat and he was he was disarmed he was you know what I mean oh so like maybe like

maybe she'll for instance we've seen her kill people we know she kills people she blows shit up all the time but it's the fact that he's like

okay killed me then yeah and he's like and he's he's he's um he's He's unarmed, right? He's defenseless.

She's definitely a defenseless person. She'll wage this war by designing some sort of means at which she'll be able to be remote from violence and it's consequences. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But also inflict untold amounts of it upon her enemies. Yeah. I think she has a skill set relevant to that. Yeah. She was maybe doing that.

Oh, God. But when I use the big magnet, it's for good. she's going to use the big magnet to bring everyone together and everyone will be it's like it's like one shirt it's like one shirt for all mandolarians everyone has to wear the shirt together to get along but it's a big magnet she just turns it down from death magnet to peace magnet yeah she turns on peace to hug magnet yeah everyone goes hugged breathe hug magnet set hydrogen bomb the stun yeah exactly And then they're like, all right, well, we're going to get back to the main action of the show. And she's like, goodbye. She's like, nope. I'm actually, I'm going to go, I'm going to go build Mandelor and I'm going to go get my dad. That's not even what she says.

She says she says she is going to build Mandelor and get her dad. But she does say, I'm not Mandelor's leader. I'll find the person that is. I got to go find out who to give this sword to because it can't be me. So she's like a consultant. Yeah. Doing an executive search. Erdogan, when Andorill is repaired.

Someone should use the sword to bring justice to Middle Earth. Not me. But I can imagine someone using this sword for a lot of good. Maybe they're out there somewhere. Maybe I could find them. Maybe it's a little green baby. Why not you? Why not you?

She has the resume for it. You know? Like actually in her- Academy by 12. Bounty Heard by 15. Crime Lord by 16. Rebel by 16 in two months. Queen of Mandelor by 20.

Why not? Why not? Is she going to go find Boketan? Future episodes. It has to be, but except if Bacetla, Bocatan, I don't remember enough about Manderloreen season 3. Does Boketan say that she had it or that just Klan Vizalah had it? I thought she had it and lost it to...

Then that's what has to be happening, right? Mof Gideon. She's going to give it to Boketan, and then Goketan's going to get her ass kicked off screen? Because Mof Gideon isn't a character before the end of Mandalorian season one, right? He's not in this show? I don't think. That would be wild if, like, If all of Rebels was literally just setting up Mandalorian.

Gus Fring shows up in the final episode of Mandelaer of Rebels. Everything is always just for Mandalorian somehow. Every other show is just for Mandalorian. I mean, I do think that that's kind of like, we really do feel that build start in that last episode, right? Like, Philharian, not stark, because felony obviously has loved the Mandalorians for a long time. But the Dark Sabre stuff really feels like,

oh, it's time to tell the story of the Mandalorians and how they'll become reunited and you probably won't care that much about it unfortunately, even though when you were 13 this is the only thing you ever wanted to see. Yeah. Wow. But I do think they're I think reinvent him as dwarves.

It's just not the direction I would have gone. I think the Mandalorians have so much, there's so much juice there. When Satine's like, I'm trying to like, move was past our warlike history and I'm trying to sell people on this vision where your tea is tainted and you're

all like kind of broken irrelevant now on the galactic stage and meanwhile all the cool Mandalarians are like jetpack fights and Seteens like tainted tea drink your tainted tea I want to finish the show

so bad. Me too I just want to get through it. I just want to go back to Ska. I want to go back to Mall taking over Mandelor. Me too. Which is the most man who would be king type bullshit. It's incredible. I know. That was a great. That was great times.

We are coming up on some more mall. Wait, are we going to watch Clone Wars season 7 after we finish rebels? Yes, that's the whole thing. That's the first thing we're going to do next, right? That is the first thing. Well, we're going to do and or we're going to probably stop watching rebels. But we might make the end of this season.

We will definitely. Because there's only two more recordings. There's only two more recordings of this season. Next time we are watching through Imperial Eyes, secret cargo, no one knows what it's like, and double agent droid. Three episodes. Oh shit. Somebody who said AP4 was it? 85. No, no, no. It was awesome, right? What of AP5? This is not a thing I know. I don't, I hope this isn't true. I would be so upset. I'm going to write a letter. Oh, wait, wait, wait, maybe it's the other way. And it's AP5 is a double agent for the rebel. Oh, sure.

You know what I mean? Because he's an imperial joint design. Oh, they give him the spray paint like they keep doing the chopper. Right, exactly. It's a great idea. All right. So I do have to, so that's three episodes. This was a three episode.

Episode, it was a pretty long one, you know. But these are, these are three one-offs. So there is, we could do four, but I will tell you the fourth episode is like important. in my mind, what I think we should do is these three and then the final three of the season after in the next full episode. We can't do an episode called Twin Sons as part of a four episode now.

But I will say is that the episode 20, Twin Sons is not part of the finale final two. So that's going to also probably be, I don't know anything about Zero Hour, the final two episodes of the season. I know a lot about Twin Sons. Very excited about Twin Sons. This is the episode that you've known about.

This is the episode that I, the first thing I ever saw from Rebels was from that episode. Okay, okay, okay. So I think it probably deserves to have its own, not its own episode, but it be it part of the finale episode. But if y'all really wanted to, we could do these three one-offs and twin sons in the next one. Let's do it three in three. All right. Yeah, that sounds right. Next time we'll do it through Imperialize, Secret Cargo, and Double Agent Droid.

I've something to share with the class in honor of these two episodes Okay Oh Is it What's our doubtful acquisition of the week? It's the dark saber The dark saber

I remember well yeah of course Oh that thing was awesome I forgot to charge it Fuck This ironically is just what happened When they gave it to Boketan Where does it go Hold on

This is a USB C? What is the, what's the charge? Yeah, it's like a USB. It's like a USB. Oh, never mind. There it is. Look at that. It turned on.

Wow. That's really nice. Which one is that? This is. The Dark Sabre, right? It's the Dark Sabre. I actually got it from Sabine. Oh, she gave it to me.

She was like, I can't do this. You go unite them. And I was like, for sure, I'll do that for you. I should just check Wikipedia really quick and see if it says, like, Natalie Watson was a human who united the mandatorian clans. This one, I'll, let me find it on Dark Saber. Let's see, to buy, to buy. I'll find the one that it is. Yeah, I had one that looks much more like a toy.

and I think it's to let my parents have. It does not. Wait, wait. This is a gift. This is a gift someone got me who, like, knew that I liked Star Wars, but didn't know what this, like, doesn't know what this is. And they were like, here's. Yeah, they were like, here's, uh, this thing that I heard is like a really cool thing to have. It's, it's the Hasbro, um, black series.

I see it. Dark saber. And this is like the Mof Gideon version because it's all black. He's had it recast in black instead of silver. I see.

Fun. Nice. It's cool. It makes cool noises. I hear them. It looks dangerous. Yeah, be careful. Sometimes it turns on

in the middle of the night and it freaks me out. It's trying to call to its fate of the wheelwork. It's calling to me. Turn off. All right. So, yeah, That's my show and tell for the day.

Thank you. This time we got the Dark Sabre. Last time we got Crystal Yoda. What will it be next time, folks? Crystal Yoda sounds like a horrible flavor. Yum. Crystal Yoda Pepsi. Green Crystal Yoda flavor.

Yum. So with that. I just wanted to show you that crowds have begun placing flower bouquets outside Wado's home um so if you're find yourself in tattooing um you know go go check it out yeah beautiful site this i really love this next photo on the thread here i don't know if you saw this is

wonder i wonder who took this here a emotional moment of tattooing today hug your your tudarian junk dealers extra close to night gang everyone standing out beneath the binary sons crying the next the next tweet being wait was this fucking real You cannot conceive, nor can I, of the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God. And with that, we reach the end of another episode of a more civilized day. Our show is produced by our producer Cato and supported by our listeners at patreon.com slash civilized. So, yes, next week, what was the trio of episodes again? Oh, sorry, I was looking at memes.

Through Imperial Eyes, Secret Cargo, and Double Agent Droid. Whoop, whoop. All right, so until next time, please rate and review us on your podcast platform of choice, and I'm sorry, I just made this association, but I just have to get out of my brain. So, Sabine's hair, right? like the sort of the feathery purple white hair. So there was a character in the Kevin J. Anderson series named Quezzox. Right, which Kevin J. Anderson series?

Jedi Academy. Oh, okay, right. Trilogy. Yeah. But they stumble across a lady who builds like the works version of the Death Star, the Suncratcher, it destroys the entire systems now. But she is someone who was brought in to design weapon systems as a teenager. But her one defining feature is this kind of goofy, like, purplish, white platinum hair.

And do you think she's... I have a horrible feeling now that the legacy of Quez-Zox. Wait, how do you say Quez-Zux? Q-W-I-X-U-X U-W-I It's a sci-fi name So of course that's how you spell it Oh, but she's like an alien lady

But she does have She's giving Yeah, she has a purple hair Sometimes she's a white hair Drawings of her make her look more alien That I think she's initially described in the book I see The book is just like

Ethereal Weapons Wave Child And But, yeah, I think... I'm seeing some similarities. This might be the blueprint. This might be... This might be the mold from which Sabine was cast.

Could be. And she was based on Mermaia from the Star Wars holiday special, which we have still yet to watch. One of these Christmases... We have to watch... One of these holiday seasons. We have to have like a podcast retreat for that like we have to get a cabin up in like Tahoe.

Oh my god, that'd be so cute. Or like Michigan and just we watch the Star Wars Christmas special. Yeah. Then the exchange life day gifts. Wow, that sounds fantastic. Yes, please. Well. And the BB at your log.

I guess as a reminder, we will be watching a skeleton crew over on the Patreon sometime very soon. We haven't done that quite yet. You guys been scowling it up? I sure have not. I have been traveling across the country and releasing a tabletop game, by the way. You can find that at the calcutech.io or just go to itch.0 and search for Realis, R-E-A-L-I-S. Unfortunately, for me, a big cryptocurrency named Realis also just dropped. I'm fucking cursed.

Oh, my God. That did happen. But thank you for everybody who supported that already. It's fun. You can listen to us play it. Allie and I, I guess, Allie, you're not in these, actually. And you guarantee that if you buy this game, oh my God.

You won't get Rugpole. You will not, because you get a 125 plus page PDF right now. The value will not go up or down on that PDF. It will continue to be a file on your computer that you can access for as long as you have it. And if you lose it, you go back to itch and just download it again. I don't know. I heard a little crew great deal of value in treasured memories and experience. That's true.

There you go. That's beautiful. And that's priceless. True. Anyway, that's what I'm doing. And then you take some of those treasure memories and experiences and have them depicted by an artist and turned into maybe a some sort of token that would also have some unique value that could be assigned to it. And only purchased it with Realis coins. I'm so furious.

Anyway, I've not watched Skeleton Crew. I would like to watch some Skeleton Crew. Oh, yeah, we should do that. Very interesting stuff in Skeleton Crew. I'm ready for it. And some big Disney vibes. Obviously, as you might expect from, like, Star Wars Coonies. But look, I'm now like three, four episodes in.

And I stand by like, okay. Not bad. I'm ready. It has a hired, it's TV PG instead of TVY7. So they can show someone getting decapitated maybe. We'll see. Yeah. Here's hoping.

All right. Well, we'll find out soon. I'm sure when we record that episode. and when we come back for more rebels.