Star Wars Rebels second episode for this week is “Crawler Commandos”. Following on the heels of “Kindred”, this episode was an excellent way to balance out the major revelations that were dropped in “Kindred”.
Now taking up camp in the ancient ruins that they were led to in the previous episode, we find Ezra (Taylor Gray), Kanan (Freddie Prinze Jr.), Sabine (Tiya Sircar), Zeb (Steven Blum), and Ryder attempting to establish communications with Yavin IV. Sabine winds up picking up on a signal that’s not too far away, prompting the group to go and check it out.
What they come across is a burner ship that’s being used to burn away the top layers of Lothal’s surface to pull up any raw materials that can be used in the Imperial’s factories. Luckily, Sabine spots a long-range communications device on the top of the crawler.
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TIE Defender plans are finally in Rebel hands.On Lothal, the Ghost crew is quickly aboard the crawler. A few droids are taken out by Sabine, allowing them to quickly slip inside the control room. The pilot doesn’t notice them at all due to the headphones he’s wearing (Yes, they canonically have portable music players in Star Wars!) and he’s taken out fairly easily. Though that’s not to say he doesn’t cause problems.
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He activates an alarm, letting the Mining Guild (who own the crawler) that there’s something going on. Quickly, an Imperial officer comms in, prompting Ezra to launch into a mimic of the pilot’s voice. Unfortunately that doesn’t get rid of suspicion, and an Imperial technical team is dispatched to the crawler.
Quickly, the crew has to figure out what to do. Some highlights from this section of the episode include:
- Kanan stumbling upon a group of slaves, including Vizago.
- A Trandoshan foreman takes Kanan out before Zeb appears to finish off the fight.
- Sabine works to encrypt their outgoing message to Yavin IV while Ezra tries to keep the pilot quiet.
- Mon Mothma tells Hera that an Imperial plan – “Protocol 13” – has been put into place. This means that an immediate evacuation of Imperial personnel has been called for, though they aren’t sure what planet.
- Hera goes into the meeting, giving a powerful speech on just why they need to step up and destroy the factories on Lothal.
- 2 Imperial transports quickly arrive to the crawler, dropping Stormtroopers off.
- The group and Vizago manage to pull off a convincing enough act that Vizago is the pilot and that nothing is going wrong on the crawler.
- Unfortunately, once the troopers leave, they discover that the real pilot has escaped from a storage room they locked him in.
- He comms in and threatens to destroy the crawler, prompting Sabine to point out that he’ll be targeting the main reactor on the ship.
- Ezra, in a throwback to all his many escapades, is sent after the pilot through the ventilation shafts.
- Ezra and the pilot ultimately end up in quick fight with the pilot falling into the furnace. And essentially ridding the group of their only real issue aboard the crawler.
Aboard the top of the crawler, Vizago actually comes out and thanks the group for rescuing him. Though Vizago was never a huge main character, it was nice to see a little bit of a different side to him.
“Crawler Commandos” might not have had too much in the way of major plot to drop apart from the “Protocol 13” bit (could they be talking about Jedha, from Rogue One?). But it stood on its own as an interesting episode. We see the crew working together to outsmart the Empire once more and the attack on Lothal we’ve been gearing up for since Season 3 is finally going to be happening!
Read all Star Wars Rebels recaps, here!
- STAR WARS REBELS Recap: (S04E08) Crawler Commanders - November 9, 2017
- STAR WARS REBELS Recap: (S04E07) Kindred - November 7, 2017
- STAR WARS REBELS Recap: (S04E06) Flight of the Defender - November 2, 2017
