It’s now been ten years since Star Wars Rebels first premiered on Disney XD. As one of the first major projects to debut as part of Disney’s revamped Star Wars timeline, it’s safe to say the series ushered in a whole new era for Star Wars. And even a decade later, it remains one of the best examples of how to expand and enrich the Skywalker Saga.
To celebrate this anniversary, let’s take a look back at the game-changing storylines and new ideas that helped Rebels reinvigorate Star Wars at a pivotal time for the franchise.
Warning: this article contains full spoilers for Star Wars Rebels!
Kanan Jarrus: Learning How to Teach
Rebels may be a followup to Star Wars: The Clone Wars, but it quickly proved to be a very different beast. Not only is the series set during the period between Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope, it’s one that maintains its focus on a single, core cast, rather than repeatedly jumping from one batch of characters to the next. That allowed fans to really settle in and get to know the Spectres and become invested in their guerilla war against the Empire.
If there’s any one character whose arc really ties the series together, it’s Kanan Jarrus (voiced by Freddie Prinze, Jr.). Kanan is introduced as a former Jedi Padawan who escaped the wrath of Order 66 and has been surviving on the fringes of the galaxy ever since. Though Kanan never completed his own Jedi training, he finds himself unwittingly becoming a mentor to young Ezra Bridger (Taylor Gray), an orphan who shows strong potential with the Force.
The Rebels saga unfolds more or less in real-time as the series progresses and draws closer to the events of A New Hope. That allows both Kanan and Ezra to grow in profound ways. Rebels is, if nothing else, a series about learning and the ways in which a teacher can grow through the act of teaching. Kanan starts out as a broken man haunted by the tragedy of his past. His story ends with Kanan becoming a fully realized hero at peace with himself and his place in the galaxy.
Speaking of that ending, Rebels arguably peaks in Season 4’s “Jedi Night,” where Kanan makes the heroic sacrifice that saves his found family and keeps the spark of rebellion alive. That episode serves as a tremendous payoff to the series’ best arc, and it casts the remainder of the series in a darker and more emotional light.
The Evolution of Ahsoka Tano
If The Clone Wars has a main character, it’s definitely Ahsoka Tano (Ashley Eckstein). That series showcases her journey from bright-eyed newbie to battle-hardened veteran to disillusioned Jedi exile. Unfortunately, fans were left in a bit of a lurch with Ahsoka when Cartoon Network originally canceled The Clone Wars in 2013. What became of her after she left the Jedi order to seek her destiny elsewhere?
Thankfully, that’s a question Rebels eventually set out to answer. Following a surprise cameo appearance in the Season 1 finale, Ahsoka becomes an integral member of the team in Season 2. The series immediately begins to show a different side to Anakin Skywalker’s former Padawan. Where once Ahsoka was an untested, headstrong student thrust into war, Rebels shows her as a fearless, confident leader who helps shape and guide the fledgling Rebel Alliance. The series also paved the way for the release of the Ahsoka novel, which bridges the gap between The Clone Wars and Rebels.
Two Ahsoka-centric moments from Season 2 still stand out. One comes in “Shroud of Darkness,” when Ahsoka has a vision about Darth Vader and is finally forced to come to terms with what her former master has become. The other comes in the Season 2 finale, “Twilight of the Apprentice,” when Ahsoka finally confronts Darth Vader in the Sith temple on Malachor and literally and figuratively cuts through his mask. If Star Wars is all about rhyming, that showdown makes for a wonderful companion to the Vader/Obi-Wan duel in the Obi-Wan Kenobi series.
A New Side to Mandalore
Early on, Rebels viewers are introduced to Sabine Wren (Tiya Circar), an authority-defying Mandalorian with a penchant for leaving colorful graffiti in her wake. While an essential member of the cast from the very beginning, Sabine truly comes into her own as a character in the latter two seasons, as Rebels explores the state of Mandalore during the Imperial era.
Viewers had grown familiar with Mandalore in The Clone Wars, with the world wracked by civil war and becoming drawn into the galactic conflict against the better wishes of Duchess Satine Kryze (Anna Graves). Rebels greatly expanded on the Mandalorian setting by revealing what happens when Mandalore becomes a pawn of the Empire. This is also where Clone Wars veteran (and Satine’s sister) Bo-Katan Kryze (Katee Sackhoff) returns to the spotlight in a more heroic role.
The Mandalore conflict remains one of the most memorable storylines in Rebels, both in how it elevates Sabine and explores her family struggle, and in how it adds new layers to Mandalorian culture. It’s safe to say that Star Wars: The Mandalorian couldn’t exist as it does without the foundation laid in Rebels.
The Menace of Grand Admiral Thrawn
One of the best things about the Disney Star Wars era is seeing beloved characters from the Expanded Universe books and comics come alive in animation and live-action. Never has that been more true than with Grand Admiral Thrawn (Lars Mikkelsen). Thrawn was officially inducted into the Disney canon in Rebels’ third season, where he emerged as the latest and greatest threat to the growing Rebel Alliance.
Right away, Rebels captured what makes Thrawn so appealing in books like Star Wars: Heir to the Empire. He’s a cold, calculating, and ruthlessly efficient villain with a knack for out-strategizing his opponents. He’s a contemplative foe who believes understanding the enemy’s art and culture is the key to their defeat. In Rebels, Thrawn was basically the antithesis of the overconfident, blustery Imperial characters fans were used to. He became an ever-present reminder of just how overwhelming a threat the Empire posed to the Spectres and their dwindling allies.
Much of Rebels’ success with Thrawn is thanks to Mikkelsen’s captivating vocal performance He plays Thrawn as a man who is both wholly alien yet entirely comfortable in his surroundings. His quiet, almost soothing voice belies his fearsome battle prowess. It’s no wonder Dave Filoni opted to cast Mikkelsen as the live-action Thrawn in the Ahsoka series. Who else could bring this iconic EU villain to life?
Finishing Darth Maul’s Story
Like Ahsoka, the ex-Darth Maul (Sam Witwer) is a major Clone Wars character whose story was left frustratingly unfinished after the series’ untimely cancellation. When last we saw Maul late in The Clone Wars: Season 5, his victorious rise to power as head of the Shadow Collective was cut short by the intervention of his former master, Darth Sidious (Ian Abercrombie).
Rebels finally picked up that baton and ran with it in the Season 2 finale, where Maul is revealed to be a hermit trapped on Malachor and briefly joins forces with the Spectres before betraying them. Maul goes on to play a recurring role in Season 3, where he has only two things on his mind - turning Ezra to the Dark Side and vengeance against Obi-Wan Kenobi after what the Jedi did to him in The Phantom Menace. If so much of the series is about Ezra’s rise in the Force, Maul’s malignant influence becomes a necessary counterpoint to Kanan’s teachings.
Those subplots come to a head in the incredible Season 3 episode “Twin Suns,” where Maul and Ezra both find themselves on Tatooine searching for Obi-Wan. The ensuing duel between Maul and Kenobi is as brief as it is emotionally satisfying. If any moment in the series can rival Kanan’s sacrifice in “Jedi Night,” it’s the one where a dying Maul tells his old nemesis that Luke Skywalker will be the one to avenge them.
There’s still a lot of Maul’s story in the years between The Clone Wars and Rebels that remains untold, even with the belated The Clone Wars: Season 7 filling in the most important blanks. But what’s most important is that Rebels gives Maul’s story the ending and the closure it needed. It’s a fitting end to a character who gained a surprising amount of depth and complexity in the years after The Phantom Menace.
That Is How the Force Works
One of the most dominant themes in Disney’s Star Wars line is the idea that the Jedi and Sith don’t have a monopoly on the Force. There are other ways of using the Force that can’t be easily bottled up into good and evil categories. We have to credit Rebels with getting that ball rolling early on and paving the way for shows like Ahsoka and The Acolyte and movies like Rogue One to showcase other sides of the Force.
Certainly, there’s Ahsoka herself, who openly declares, “I am no Jedi.” She’s become something else entirely in the years since her exile from the Jedi Order, wielding unique white blades and becoming the closest thing the Disney universe has to the popular EU concept of a “Gray Jedi.”
Rebels, like The Clone Wars before it, also dug deeper into the nature of The Force itself. Where The Clone Wars gave us the ethereal world of Mortis and The Father, The Son, and The Daughter, Rebels introduced fans to the Bendu, a mysterious, animalistic being who embodies the balance between the Light and Dark Sides. Even Ezra himself proved to be something new, communing with the animals of Lothal in a way we had never seen from his fellow Jedi.
Rebels went especially big in its fourth and final season, introducing an entirely new realm called The World Between Worlds. When Ezra travels there, he’s able to pierce the boundaries of time and space and save Ahsoka from what seemed like her certain doom in Season 2’s finale. Even Emperor Palpatine shows up to muck about with time. For Star Wars - a franchise that has always veered more towards space fantasy than science fiction - to deal with a concept like time travel was novel indeed.
As the Ahsoka series has shown, Filoni is hardly done exploring Mortis, The World Between Worlds, and the strange mysteries of the Force. Rebels opened our eyes to a larger universe, and it continues to inspire new Star Wars stories a decade later.
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For more Star Wars goodness, check out the Ahsoka, Hera, and Sabine episodes to watch before seeing Star Wars: Ahsoka and brush up on every Star Wars movie and series in development.
Jesse is a mild-mannered staff writer for IGN. Allow him to lend a machete to your intellectual thicket by following @jschedeen on Twitter.
