Star Wars Resistance Fails to Live Up to Its Predecessors

May the Fourth Be With You!  I think the notion of "Star Wars Day" on May 4th is dumb but I already wrote this, so why not post it today?

The first few weeks of the quarantine, I devoted most of my TV watching to Star Wars on Disney+.  I watched all 8 movies and then the Clone Wars and Rebels series.  Only after all that (and renting Episode IX on Amazon) did I decide to watch the latest Star Wars series, Resistance.  It was created by Dave Filoni who worked on the two previous series so it had a good pedigree, but by the time the show really came together, it was too late.

The series focuses on a young guy named Kaz Xiono who was part of the New Republic Navy until his fighter group is attacked by First Order TIEs.  He's saved by Poe Dameron, who recruits him for the Resistance.  Instead of being put on the front lines, he's sent to a station called Colossus on a distant world.  There he's supposed to go undercover as a mechanic--except he has no idea what he's doing.  And he's supposed to gather intel on the mysterious First Order.

The head of the garage where Kaz works is Jarek Yeager, a former Rebellion pilot who dropped out after his family was killed.  There's also the grumpy Tamara, who dreams of being a pilot, and Neeku, a green-skinned alien who like the aliens in Galaxy Quest doesn't understand things like idioms, exaggerating, or lying.  If you said, "Gag me with a spoon" he'd stick a spoon down your throat thinking that's what you wanted.  There's also Bucket, an ancient astromech droid that's pretty much a skeleton.

And then there are a group of racing pilots known as the "Aces" who race against each other for fame and money but also serve as the station's defense force against pirates.

I think what might have been a problem for a lot of people who started watching was the first season unspools pretty slowly.  The first few episodes are mostly about Kaz's bumbling attempts to be a mechanic and a spy.  So people, like me, were probably like, WTF?  Where are the dogfights?  Laser fights?  Lightsaber duels?  You know, Star Wars stuff.  Despite that there were these hotshot racers, there wasn't a lot of racing either.

The shape of the plot becomes clearer as the season goes on and the First Order uses pirate attacks on the station and a kidnapping attempt of station captain Doza's daughter Torra as leverage to become a "peacekeeping" force on the station.  And then naturally their presence grows until at the end of the season they finally take over the station officially.

Interspersed with this are a couple of episodes where Kaz and Poe investigate First Order mining activity relating to producing weapons--a lot of weapons.  Those are some of the more exciting episodes early on and it was pretty cool they got Oscar Isaac to do Poe's voice for the show, though that also meant they couldn't show him all that often.  They also got Gwendoline Christie to do Captain Phasma's voice in a few episodes when she was on the show.

Near the end of the season Poe leaves to go to Jakku and then it ties into the events of The Force Awakens as the seat of the new Galactic Senate is destroyed by Starkiller Base.  Early in the first season we find out Kaz's father is a senator...but he wasn't on the planet at the time.  I think especially with the Y7 rating they didn't really want to kill anyone off directly.  Stormtroopers fall down, TIEs blow up, and of course a whole planet is destroyed but they don't really show anything in graphic detail and no main characters or their family members are killed.  That way it was more kid-friendly but maybe not adult-friendly enough for viewers of the other series.

The show gets a little better in the second season as the Colossus lifts off from the planet Castilon, into space.  Then it becomes like the Macross version of Robotech as the ship makes a sort of random jump into hyperspace.  There's a large civilian population on board, they're chased by a relentless enemy that has more firepower but never seems to be able to destroy them, a lot of the main characters are fighter pilots, and the captain even looks a lot like Captain Gloval of the SDF-1.  Even the way the ship flies vertically instead of horizontally is like the SDF-1 in its robot-looking "Attack" mode.  It's just too bad the planes and ship don't transform into robots.  When they seek safe harbor at the planet of Aeos Prime and wind up inadvertently causing the destruction of the native population was a lot like when the SDF-1 was seeking asylum in Ontario and wound up causing the destruction of Toronto when the Zentraedi attacked.  (If none of that makes sense, go read my A to Z Challenge entries from 2019.)

Meanwhile Tamara defects to the First Order to become a TIE pilot.  Which was fine with me as most of the first season she was just getting pissed off at Kaz, so if her TIE had been blown up in a battle, I wouldn't have really cared.  We meet the Captain Doza's wife/Torra's mother who's a pilot for the Resistance later in the second season and then she brings some of her X-wings on board as Captain Doza decides he can't keep running and hiding.

With all that there's a lot more action in the second season, which probably would have made it better for a lot of fans.  Like, say, my brother because there are dogfights in a lot of the episodes.  Yee-haw!

The series ends with Tamara leaving the First Order and the Star Destroyer that had been pursuing them being destroyed.  It's too bad there won't be a third season so they could tie it in to Episode IX and do a better ending.

I think this show suffered the problem a lot of shows that fail suffer from in that it took too long before it really hit its stride.  By the time it did, it was too little, too late.  And since Disney owns it, there's no way in hell that it could get a second life on some other streaming platform.  It would be nice if they made a movie or something to give it a better wrap-up.  Which would be nice for Rebels too.  (On a side note, if Ahsoka Tano will be in season 2 of The Mandalorian, does that mean we'll find out what happened to Ezra at the end of Rebels?  Because at the end of that show Ahsoka was going to take Sabine to go find Ezra.  Are Mando and the Child going to be involved with that?)

The other thing that I think held this back is there were no Jedi.  No lightsabers and the only Force used was in the last two episodes when a hologram of Kylo Ren (not voiced by Adam Driver) uses it on a couple of First Order officers, making them like marionettes pointing guns at each other.  Jedi and Sith are a huge part of Star Wars so when you don't have that, you're missing a huge core element.  Clone Wars and Rebels managed to balance Jedi stuff and space battles and such, like the movies.  I think the problem was setting it during the sequel trilogy was that Rey was supposed to be the only Jedi-type in the whole galaxy so they didn't want to have another good Force user.

And we should probably address the elephant in the room:  none of the main characters in the show are white!  Kaz, Torra, and Doza are Asian.  Yeager and Tamara are black.  Neeku is green.    Bucket, BB-8, and CB-23 are droids.  Most of the others are aliens of various types.  Only one of the Aces, a former Empire pilot named Griff, is a white guy.  Really almost all the white people are in the First Order.  For a lot of us that doesn't matter, but you know there's that section of toxic fandom that whines about "SJWs;" the ones who bitched about a black stormtrooper and an Asian woman being given a significant role.  They definitely wouldn't watch a Star Wars show without white main characters.  I'm just saying if you don't think that was a factor, you're being horribly naive.

Oh and it might have helped kids like the show more if they weren't selling 3-inch action figures for $8.  What a rip-off!  Though unlike ones for Solo at least I didn't see any of those in clearance bins at Meijer or Walmart or at discount stores like Five Below and Ollie's.  So maybe Hasbro kept the production run small enough that they didn't have cases and cases to discount.

One thing I will say I liked better than especially Clone Wars was that it didn't have story arcs of more than two episodes.  There was essentially one continuous arc but the individual episodes never went more than two parts.  So you didn't get that feeling like especially with Clone Wars where a particular storyline seemed to drag on one or two episodes too long.  That was probably because it was trying to cater more to the younger viewers than the adult ones.

Anyway, to quote Bad Santa:  they can't all be winners.  I'm sure Disney will have another Star Wars animated series soon enough and maybe it'll be better out of the gate.