Star Wars Rebels Season 2, Episode 11
Sabine’s story has been revealed very gradually, with pieces of her backstory slowly coming into view. That’s an unusual amount of interconnectedness for Rebels these days: the second season has tended more toward standalone episodes than a gradual arc. However, this season has been good at giving out Sabine’s story in particular in controlled amounts. That continues in “The Protector of Concord Dawn,” which finds the young Mandalorian back among her own people. Sabine and Kanan share the spotlight, but Sabine has the most growing to do in this episode, and has her relationship with an aspect of her own culture at stake. So what has changed for Sabine from the beginning to the end of the episode? In the last episode to focus on her, “Blood Sisters,” we learned that not only was she a highly-capable Imperial Academy escapee, she had worked as a bounty hunter with her friend Ketsu Onyo. Over the last season and a half Sabine has also learned to trust Hera, which occasionally means obeying Rebel plans blindly. Now she comes in conflict with the crew again in part because of her loyalty to Hera, since Hera is wounded and both Kanan and Sabine are thrown for a loop by their own fear for their captain’s life. In “The Protector of Concord Dawn” we see an aggressive side of Sabine that certainly existed before, but wasn’t as focused. After she decides to kill Fenn Rau, she’s focused wholly on him, and she declares her Mandalorian house name — the familiar Vizsla — with ringing confidence. Both she and Kanan change their minds several times during the episode, or appear to. While some of their thought processes aren’t quite explained — Kanan seemed pretty set on revenge when he set out to talk to Rau, to the point that he the person he chose to come along with him was Chopper — they both come from places of understandable emotion. Kanan is particularly bitter in this episode, and the almost gleeful sound in some of his most bleak lines (“Jedi philosophy doesn’t work for everyone.” / “That’s why we’re at war.”) really showed how he was stretched thin. However, I also found his rush to confront Rau to be one of the weaknesses of the episode: it appears at first that he’s going to get revenge, only for the tables to turn when he tells Sabine not to kill anyone. It isn’t that a darker Kanan would be more interesting, just that his initial reaction to Hera being wounded looked a lot more like the dark side than the show seemed to consider it. The Mandalorian camp was another weakness; except for some aggressive styling it looked pretty much like the same Imperial bunkers we’ve seen on other worlds. The appearance of actual Imperials was brief and generally unremarkable except to confirm that the Mandalorians were indeed working with the Empire. Sabine’s movements were very quick and her action chreography very cool, but her footfalls looked too light even for her quickness. It is the sparsity of the animation that the budget for Rebels is really showing, which is unfortunate. (Sabine’s paint-splattered armor is still cool.) “The Protector of Concord Dawn” benefitted from Kanan’s dialogue and history, but it was Sabine’s story through-and-through, with Kanan serving as the other side of the coin for her. She learns exactly where she stands among (a certain faction of) the people who make up a significant portion of her personal history. I have a feeling the ideas put in motion in this episode — Sabine’s loyalty to the Mandalorians of her own clan, the Empire’s alliance with Concord Dawn — will resonate through the show even more as it goes on.
