Rebels: "Through Imperial Eyes" (Ep. 3.17)

-- "I haven't been summoned by a ranking officer since that incident with the princess from Alderaan."

We're closing in on the end of season three, and things are beginning to get serious. Which is not to say that things haven't been serious, but there's a real lack of the overall humorous tone developing.

Thrawn has decided he has a mole and even knows that mole's call sign: Fulcrum. Have I mentioned who Fulcrum is? I can't remember, so I'm not going to give it away just in case I haven't mentioned it before. Not that it actually matters, I'm sure, but that's the way I am about it.

Ezra heads up a mission to get Fulcrum out before s/he's discovered while Thrawn brings in Colonel Yelaren to help ferret out the mole. Hmm... Do ferrets eat moles? I actually have no idea what ferrets eat, now that I think about it. As it turns out, Yularen was one of Kallus' teachers at the Academy.

Mostly, this was a very interesting episode. Tense. I have just one quibble, which I could probably solve by doing some research but, instead, I'm going to let it nibble at me because I don't care to go to the trouble to look it up. In the episode, Thrawn, unarmed, takes on a couple of assassin droids all by his lonesome. Thinking back to Zahn's books, the ones that introduced Thrawn as a character, I can't think of any precedence for him being any kind of physical personality. He's a cerebral character; at least, that's how I remember him, so I'm a little annoyed by them making him some great hand-to-hand combatant, too. Seriously, Thrawn doesn't need to have all the skills.

Or, maybe, he has always been that way and I'm just not remembering it. I suppose it doesn't matter, since those old novels have been kicked out of the canon. But Rebels is canon, so it is as it is.

Anyway... Interesting episode. Can't wait to see where it leads.

Clone Wars -- "Cat and Mouse" (Ep. 2.16)

-- A wise leader knows when to follow.

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"No ship that small has a cloaking device."

It's amazing the kinds of things that have come out of Star Wars from just a passing line or a brief glimpse. That's probably the real genius behind the movies, the flashes of the universe that Lucas imagined to hold his characters. Excuse me, galaxy. So, in this episode, we get our first look at what a cloaking device is and just how small a ship can be to have one.

The villain in this episode is a spider alien, Admiral Trench.

He's sort of considered a military legend and genius. And he happens to be someone who has developed an effective strategy against cloaked ships. All of which leads us to the title of the episode: "Cat and Mouse." It's rather like ships hunting a submarine.

The more interesting aspect of this episode is that we get to see Anakin working with Admiral Yularen for the first time. I mean working with him, not just operating off of the admiral's ship. Anakin and Yularen have had a... I'm going to say contentious relationship up to this point with Yularen saying things like "What did you break this time?" to Anakin with a greater frequency than he would probably like to. "Cat and Mouse" gives Yularen the chance to appreciate the way Anakin works in a whole new way.

It's a good, solid episode and one that can easily be watched without any other background.