Review: Star Wars Rebels “Warhead”

Everyone except Zeb and Chopper go on a training mission. As the security chief, Zeb is left behind at Chopper Base.

Spoilers Below

In an attempt to find the Rebel base, the Empire has launched infiltrator droids to scour the galaxy. One of the droids lands on Atollon. It is attacked and damaged by a couple of krykna, the spidery creatures on the planet. Of course, Zeb ends up finding the droid and, deciding it is harmless, takes it back to Chopper Base. Zeb has AP-5 repair the droid. Amazingly, the droid seems to be able to scan and classify the inventory much faster than AP-5. So AP-5 takes the mysterious droid on as an assistant while Zeb returns to the command center.

On the Imperial ship that launched the droids, Agent Kallus finds that one of the droids has gone missing. He tells his men to forget one lost droid before calling the Rebels (as Fulcrum) to warn them about the missing droid. Zeb realizes his terrible mistake and runs off to warn AP-5 about his new assistant.

While showing his assistant around, AP-5 manages to set off the droid’s battle programming. Eventually, Zeb and Chopper manage to catch the Imperial droid, allowing AP-5 to turn it off. But this sets off the droid’s self-destruct mechanism. Chopper freezes the droid’s countdown, giving the group time to figure out what to do. Zeb has AP-5 reset the self-destruct countdown and the safe mode on the droid. Then they get the droid to go back to the Empire, where the self-destruct countdown begins again, destroying the Imperial ship it was on.

Zeb does call Hera and the gang back from their training mission to tell her what happened. Before he can begin his story, Fulcrum calls back to let them know that their plan worked. Little did Fulcrum know that the loss of one Imperial ship has now narrowed down the location of the Rebel base. Before, it could be anywhere; now, it could only be on one of the planets the droids visited.

This was a rather boring episode. Zeb is better than any of this. He should have known better than to bring some random droid he found in the desert back to the secret Rebel base. It’s almost like he completely forgot the Empire was looking for them. And I don’t understand why Chopper or AP-5 would have gone along with his plan to turn the droid back on in the first place. I suppose this does give Thrawn some insight as to where the Rebel base is but they could have accomplished the same goal a different way. Thrawn has shown us that he is a brilliantly evil man. He would have come up with a better plan than this.