Review: Star Wars Rebels “Secret Cargo”

What’s so secret about it?

Spoilers Below

The Ghost (minus Kanan) is hiding while waiting for a transport ship to arrive. They have order to refuel said transport ship, even though they have no idea what is on it. While they wait, a tracker droid happens to come by and notice them. Unfortunately, the droid manages to transmit the ship’s coordinates before the Rebels can destroy it. Suddenly, the transport ship appears. The Ghost quickly begins refueling it, in the hopes that they can finish before the Empire shows up.

Of course, the Empire shows up. They attack the Ghost and the transport ship while they are attached, damaging the release mechanism. As Hera attempts to manually disengage from the transport ship, that ship is heavily damaged. They have no choice but to move all personnel to the Ghost. It turns out that the secret cargo on the transport ship is none other than Senator Mon Mothma, a vocal opponent to the Emperor. Hera is given the coordinates to Dantooine and orders to get Mothma there. She decides the best route is through a nebula, where the Imperial ships will have a difficult time following them.

The Empire has brought their new TIE fighter, complete with heavy shields capable of mostly protecting it from the nebula. This new fighter is able to easily dispatch most of the Gold Squadron fighters that are protecting the Ghost. Thankfully, Ezra is flying one of the Gold Squadron’s Y-wing fighters. He helps Gold Leader disarm the TIE fighter. Then, together, they disable the rest of the Imperial ships with a proton torpedo into the nebula, allowing the Rebels to jump to lightspeed.

Once they reach Dantooine, Mon Mothma broadcasts a speech to all of the planets held hostage by the Empire. Her rousing speech brings more planets into the Rebel fold. Things will be very different from now on.

While it was awesome that Mon Mothma was an actual participant in the episode, a lot of it was kinda boring. And that is probably because so much of Mon Mothma is rolled up in political battles. Sure, we had the fight with the TIE fighter but it wasn’t really a fair fight and most of it was spent watching the Y-wings either running away or getting blown up. There wasn’t a strategic dogfight or anything. Even chasing down the droid in the beginning of the episode was boring. It’s almost like the writers are bored of writing fight scenes or something. C’mon, it’s called Star WARS not Star Let’s-Talk-About-This. The show keeps hyping the upcoming episodes. (I swear there was a spot for them during every commercial break.) I can only hope that they live up to that hype.