Star Wars Rebels Season 3 Episode 10
It’s been a while since we’ve seen Lothal. At night, the world where Ezra grew up is lit up with menacing neon sights proclaiming the Imperial occupation. Starting from this almost Blade Runner-esque upgrade to a familiar landscape, “An Inside Man” has a little bit of everything: humor, action, and a Thrawn who is a bit more hands-on with his work this week, and more frightening for it. Almost immediately, he plunges the Rebels into a speeder chase while the Jedi take precarious rides on the engine pods. Some scenery appears to be reused from earlier Lothal episodes, and while it might be a case of saving money, it also makes perfect sense in the scene. It’s neat to see Ezra and Kanan do some deft lightsaber work on the same highway where we’ve seen the Rebels get into speeder chases before. We don’t get to know the other members of Ryder’s resistance cell very well, but their quick dialogue and expressions do a fine job of painting them as decent Lothal people who aren’t necessarily essential to the plot. One returnee, Morad Sumar, was from “Fighter Flight,” one of my least favorite episodes in season one, and although he’s bland, he becomes crucial to kicking off the main plot in this episode. We also get to see Thrawn encounter some other familiar characters for the first time. At long last he gets to examine Sabine’s art directly, and his analysis is interesting: in a drawing of the Imperial starbird on a wall he sees not just a message of resistance, but one of loyalty. “They will always return.” It would make more sense for Ezra to have this attachment then Sabine, but it’s still an interesting insight. Although I’ve had mixed feelings about the amount of time Rebels spends on Lothal in the past, placing the planet as a spiritual heart of the Rebels’ activities makes sense. Ezra lost his parents there, after all, and discovered the Jedi temple there, and acknowledging the planet’s importance on a more thematic level helps sell all of those things as part of the larger story. There has been a lot of discussion in the fandom lately about how much each episode should connect to the ones around it. Maybe some characters, like the rather hapless Lieutenant Lyste, were re-used because the character models had already been made, but regardless, it’s fun to spot a familiar face. “An Inside Man” included a lot of returning characters as well as moving the overarching story forward. It’s proof that Rebels can do both, and there’ll be more about that in the spoiler section below. “An Inside Man” also had some very funny lines, especially from the otherwise unremarkable Ryder. Both the timing and the dialogue was exceptionally effective. Some rather dark physical humor near the end of the episode both got a laugh from me and showed off Ezra and Kanan’s relationship nicely. It’s always good when humor can add to characterization too. Rebels is inspired by Ralph McQuarrie’s Star Wars concept art through and through, but I especially appreciated it in this episode, especially in the shot of the entrance to the Imperial factory. A purple dawn sky gives way to a forbiddingly industrial doorway, red light from the banners overshadowing Lothal’s more natural brown color to make purplish shadows that look just eerie enough, but also like they fit the setting perfectly. A fight between AT-ATs and smaller walkers is also colored beautifully, emphasizing the animal-like movements of the walkers and the way the sun bounces off their metal bodies. The color is symbolic, too: because the mission started before dawn, the episode is brighter when the Rebels leave the factory than when they arrive. “An Inside Man” may have reused a lot of assets, but it’s also a very well-paced and well-balanced episode, combining darkness and humor, Ezra’s past and Ezra’s future, into one exciting story. — Major Spoilers —
