Star Wars Rebels Recap: ‘The Last Battle’

Back at the end of the first season of Star Wars Rebels, I was anxious about the amount of connective tissue the show would end up sharing with Lucasfilm Animation’s previous project: The Clone Wars. Beyond my own personal grievances with the series, it would have done an enormous to Rebels and its cast of characters to suddenly morph the show into The Clone Wars Episode II. And with characters like Ahsoka Tano, Captain Rex, and Hondo Ohnaka all featuring prominently in the trailer for Season Two, that was a very real fear.

But, of course, those fears wound up being unwarranted. The six-and-a-half seasons of The Clone Wars provided some interesting context for these conflicts, but never became a prerequisite text for Rebels. At their best, these links between the two shows added interesting layers of depth for our core cast of characters to mine and at their worst they were little more than disposable fan service that didn’t dramatically impact the Lothal rebels in any meaningful way.

This week’s episode is thick with fan service (so much so that the standard credits cue is subbed out in favor of The Clone Wars theme), but this time that fan service doesn’t feel quite so disposable. What we have instead is an episode focussed primarily on examining a single member of our main cast – the kind of episode we’ve seen a dozen or so times for characters like Sabine, Ezra, and Zeb – the only difference is that this time the character being explored was literally (in and out of universe) created for The Clone Wars.

The framework for this story is familiar. The rebels are on a mission to retrieve supplies from a seemingly abandoned asteroid/space station/military base, but upon arrival they find the asteroid/space station/military base is not quite as abandoned as they had expected. The specifics this time are that the rebels are raiding the wreckage of an old Separatist supply ship on the planet Agamar in search of explosives, but they soon find that the ship’s complement of battle droids somehow avoided the universal shutdown order sent at the end of the Clone Wars. It turns out that Kalani, the tactical droid running this ship refused to accept defeat and ignored the shutdown order. Now that a pair of Jedi and a clone commander just so happen to show up, Kalani sees it as a chance to achieve some sort of victory – to end the Clone Wars on his terms, even if only by simulation. To that end, he offers the rebels a challenge: Kalani will hold Zeb hostage (as the Lasat were not fighters in the Clone Wars) while the two Jedi ‘generals’ and their clone commander attempt to fight through Kalani’s forces to rescue their friend.

While the scenario may be silly, it quickly becomes clear that Rex takes it very seriously. Even though Rex stumbled into this, this idea of a real end to the war he was bred to fight consumes him. I’ve talked before about the way one of The Clone Wars biggest successes was the characterizations of the clones themselves. By giving these machines of war personality, individuality, a soul, it presented some intriguing questions – not the least of which is what happens to a man whose entire reason for existence is war once that war has ended?

For most clones, the answer involved a control chip that forced them to participate in the dissolution of the Republic in favor of a Galactic Empire, but Rex managed to maintain his own agency. He was not loyal to the Empire, but there was no longer a Republic for him to defend.  Joining up with the rebel cause in fighting the Empire provided him with some sense of purpose, but it still didn’t satisfy his ultimate goal, his entire reason for being. Much like Kalani, the idea of being able to end the war on his own terms is too much for him to pass up.

Because, you see, even though the Clone Wars stopped it never really ended. The whole thing was a ruse – a smokescreen that disguised Palpatine’s efforts to establish himself as the ruler of the entire galaxy. Once that end was met, the Clone War just sort of quietly went away. The Jedi were eliminated, the clones replaced by stormtroopers, and the separatist army deactivated.

There’s an interesting meta-narrative wrinkle here in that, much like the military campaign it’s based on The Clone Wars itself never actually concluded, but rather stopped due to behind the scenes machinations and a change of regime. The team behind The Clone Wars transitioned to working on Rebels and ended up creating, frankly, a much better show, but it was clear that both the creators of the show and the fans were still seeking some sense of closure for this six-and-a-half year affair. Darth Maul got a comic book, Ventriss got a novel, the end (with caveats) of Ahsoka’s story played out over the previous season of Rebels. But more so than all of that, this episode seems to exist to definitively put a bow on the whole Clone Wars affair by having a story that is about ending the Clone Wars.

To that end, the rebels meet Kalani’s challenge, defeat their opposition, and confront him in the command center, but Kalani argues that their victory was invalid, that his droids have deteriorated over time and that, had they been operating at peak efficiency, the victory would have been his. This debate is cut short, however, when Imperial forces arrive on the planet and begin laying siege to the base. After a quick the-enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend pep talk from Ezra, Kalani agrees to assist the rebels in escaping the planet, concluding that by setting both sides up to fail in a phony war, the Empire is as much an enemy to the Separatist cause as the Republic ever was.

With the political machinations laid bare, Ezra is able to essentially broker a truce between these two factions who have been at war – officially and unofficially – for the better part of two decades. As they escape the planet, Kalani deems the odds of a successful rebellion against the Empire too low to be worth aligning himself with their cause, but acknowledges that this, at least, is a satisfactory conclusion to a decades’ old conflict. Rex echoes that sentiment, thanking Ezra for helping him find some sense of closure.

And as the episode ends with the main theme from The Clone Wars, hopefully fans will have some sense of closure as well. While the legacy of The Clone Wars will more than certainly continue to play out in comics and novels and video games and what-have-you, this seems to close the book on Rebels being a vehicle through which to tie up its predecessor’s loose ends. I mean, we’ve still got Maul and all his silliness to sort through this season, but I’m optimistic that whatever his function is here, it’s not just a rehash of the same scenarios we’ve already seen play out in The Clone Wars. If nothing else, this episode at least frees up Rex to find a new purpose as a core member of the Rebels cast rather than being a perpetual guest star ported over from a different show. There can be value found in looking at the past, but for now, I’m looking forward to see whatever Rebels has up its sleeve that’s entirely new.

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