Synopsis
Hera leads a courageous attack against Grand Admiral Thrawn's forces, but when things go awry, her battle to win must become a daring escape if she is to survive.
What I thought
After a season of two episodes back-to-back every week, we get to the mid-season break and ... it's just one episode. This is a hard pill to swallow after we had been spoiled with 40 minutes-ish of Star Wars each week recently. I feel that didn't help with my enjoyment of this episode as we were thrown straight into a Rebel Assault on Lothal. Well, on one compound on Lothal. What also didn't help was that it looked like such a whack assault. A few X-Wings and Y-Wings attacking an almighty mass of Imperial ships around the planet. This feels like such a badly thought out plan. What the heck were they thinking this would gain? Sure, they had one target of destroying the TIE-fighter construction yard to stop more TIE Defenders being built, but really? This had disaster written all over it from the word go.
Sure, enough, the attack fleet is destroyed in almost record time, and Hera, who was leading the attack, is shot down, crash landing somewhere in Lothal. She's ok, of course, and so is Chopper (phew!), as well as another Rebel pilot who she finds nearby. As the forces of the Empire surround the fallen ships searching for survivors, Hera, Chopper and the other pilot try to escape via the sewers. Yup, the one classic plot tactic and only place the Empire have not bothered to seal off. Trouble is, it proves increasingly more difficult, as Rukh intercepts Hera and Co. As she and Rukh have a good fist fight, she sacrifices herself to let the pilot and Chopper get away. Hera is now a prisoner of Thrawn! Woohoo. This is going to be interesting ...
The other part of the assault plan, which did mostly work, was to take down the gun turrets, which Zeb, Ezra, Sabine and Kanan deal with. This is rather straight forward as they use explosives to deal with this issue, yet they soon see that things are going badly for the Rebel attack. Kanan initially goes off on his own to try to help the fallen Hera, but a Lothal-wolf ultimately stops him, has a sort of spiritual force moment with him, convincing Kanan that he shouldn't even try to help Hera, which he strangely very quickly accepts.
So, that's about it this episode. It was fast-paced and naturally quite action-filled, but knowing we only had 20 minutes or so of action, and that it just looked like a foolhardy plan, really filled me with negative feelings. There was a lot to like, what with Thrawn looking menacing again, Rukh kicking ass, the Empire looking seriously mighty, and the mysterious Lothal-Wolf interaction. With Hera captured, I hope for some seriously entertaining moment between her and Thrawn when this show returns after the break. Even so, I was slightly disappointed, but it was a decent episode.
Rating = 6/10 - A foolhardy plan and the decision to just show one episode after weeks of two, didn't help me get too high a feel for this episode.
