Hello there!
I’m back with another episode review for Star Wars Resistance. This is the second and final season of the third animated show in canon, focusing on Kazuda Xiono and his friends on the Colossus as they attempt to get away from the First Order and find the Resistance. These will take a very similar format to previously: an overview of the plot (so it goes without saying, there will be spoilers!), my thoughts on the episode and a few Moments in Canon – things I picked up on that linked to other stories or the larger galaxy as a whole. Today, I will be looking at episode 7: “The Relic Raiders”
Plot Summary
Captain Doza instructs Kaz, Torra and Freya to go to a trading outpost on the nearby planet Ashas Ree in order to buy supplies. While Kaz is prepping the shuttle, Kel and Eila ask if they can come down to the planet with him. Kaz initially refuses, but quickly changes his mind and allows them to stow aboard the shuttle, provided they are not spotted by the other Aces.
Making their way down to the planet with Freya and Torra providing a fighter escort, they are unable to make any contact with the outpost. Arriving at the village they find it abandoned for no apparent reason, though there are warning messages written on some of the walls. The group split up to find supplies, but as Kaz and CB-23 go off alone, the pair realise that the children have ran off.
He chases after them outside a large building that Kaz recognises as a temple of the Force. The group enter the temple, where they find a black pyramid. They hear a voice calling out for help from inside the pyramid and the children run in to help, Kaz and CB-23 chasing after them.
“Look at these warnings: ‘Beware… Evil… Get away’.”
Going through the corridors, Kaz steps on a floor panel that closes a blast door, separating him and CB-23 from the children. Kaz and CB-23 try to find another way around, while CB-23 detects another life form further in. As they come towards the middle of the temple, Kaz steps on another floor panel, activating a device that electrocutes him. After making a partial recover, Kaz makes his way into a chamber with a black relic on an altar in the middle of the room. Still dazed from his shock, he ignores a voice telling him not to touch the relic, and as soon as he touches it, he falls through a trapdoor, where he finds the woman who had been calling for help.
On the surface, Torra and Freya have brought supplies back to the shuttle, but are unable to reach Kaz. The shuttle’s sensors pick up approaching ships and Torra confirms Freya’s fears that Doza was not sending additional ships.
The woman demands to know who Kaz is and if he works for the First Order, but Kaz tells her that he is just a pilot trying to find his crew. The woman explains that they are now in a Sith temple, which she broke inside to get the relic. The villagers had fled after she excavated the Sith temple, believing evil forces would be unleashed. She has been trapped in the temple for 2 days. While offering to help her find a way out, Kaz steps on another panel, which causes the floor to begin spinning and open up to reveal a giant grinder. The pair are saved by Kel and Eila (who CB-23 found and led back to the chamber) following the woman’s instructions to press certain symbols with in the trailer, then CB-23 send out a grappling line for the pair to climb up. Carefully, the woman returns to the altar and takes the relic. As they go to leave, Kaz accidentally touches a hieroglyph which causes the temple to collapse, but the group make it out just in time.
“Torra, was your father sending additional ships here?”
“No…”
Getting back to the village, they find that Torra, Freya and their droids have been captured by First Order Raiders, who are hunting down relics. They begin to make their way to the woman’s ship but see it get blown up. The woman disappears and Kaz, Cb-23, Kel an Eila are captured by the raiders. As all of the raiders’ prisoners are grouped together, Kaz claims that they were just picking up supplies, but the commanding officer says that their scans indicate someone has been in the temple. He demands to know what they found, but at that moment, the woman reappears and reveals that she has the relic, which she activates and throws towards the raiders.
At the woman’s instruction, Kaz and the others run and hide in the temple, while the raiders go to the relic, which unleashes a wave of red energy that kills the raiders. Returning to the relic, which has been destroyed, the woman explains that it was a power source from an ancient time. With her ship destroyed, she accepts an invitation to join the group on the Colossus and introduces herself as Mika Grey. On the shuttle back to the Colossus, the children apologise to Kaz for the trouble they caused. Eila then goes to Mika and asks about her knowledge of the Force. Mika explains that she knows a bit, but is neither Jedi nor Sith. She explains that the Force is inside everyone and that people find it in different ways.
Review
When I realised that this episode would be including a Sith temple and relic, I got pretty excited… Unfortunately this episode left me rather disappointed.
It feels like almost every week, I have some complaint about Kaz being too goofy to be believable. This week, it went into overdrive. This is someone who was part of the New Republic Navy and now fights for the Resistance. He has watched his home planet be destroyed. He knows the danger of the First Order more than most… and yet eh agrees to let a pair of children who he knows are wanted by the First Order to come down to an unknown planet with him, despite knowing that his commanding officers would not approve. And if that wasn’t bad enough, he is unbearably clumsy in this episode, putting himself and often his friends in danger on no less than 5 occasions! I want to make clear, this is nothing against Christopher Sean’s performances, but more the way the character is being written. I know that the show is made for children rather than myself, but even so, there needs to be some believability (if that’s even a word) to the hero.
“Yeah, I know you told me we shouldn’t have brought them along. You know, you’re very opinionated!”
On a similar vein, the children felt so much younger and more childish in this episode than they have previously, running off to chase butterflies and then going off on their own in the Sith temple after Kaz tells them to stay put. They have watched their village be slaughtered by Kylo Ren and the First Order, who then chased them to the Colossus, so they know the danger they are in and yet still choose to run off. I understand they are children, but I feel that a child would still be more cautious after everything they’ve gone through.
Kaz and the children aside, though, there was still quite a bit to like about this episode, and I think this will lead to something later in the series. The Force has not really been a part of Resistance so to see it have a larger role here in the form of a Sith temple was really good, as we get to see it from the perspective of characters who on the whole have a limited understanding of the force. The black pyramid immediately looked reminiscent of Sith holocrons and the temple on Malachor, as did all the red hieroglyphics inside. Kel and Eila also made references to the temple on Tehar and this, combined with Eila’s dreams and her questions to Mika about the Force make me think that we will get confirmation as the season goes on that Eila is Force-sensitive.
The First Order raiders looked cool and I like the idea of them travelling the galaxy hunting for Sith relics as we know the power they have, but I couldn’t help think that it was somewhat unnecessary for them to have different armour (the cynical, business part of my brain was just screaming “another toy”), while I also felt that they should have been a bit smarter about dealing with the relic after it had been activated. If they had survived then I could have imagined a storyline that involved Kaz and Mika racing against them to finding some other artefacts, but considering this is the last season and they all appeared to be killed, it feels like they were somewhat wasted.
“Jedi? The Force? I never really believed in any of it.”
“Just because you can’t see something, doesn’t mean it’s not real, Kaz.”
A few final thoughts from the episode:
- It was nice to see that Kel and Eila don’t speak binary, as previous episodes have suggested that their village was probably not as technologically advanced as some planets
- I liked seeing Freya have a larger role in this episode to take advantage of Mary Elizabeth McGlynn’s talents, but I can’t help wonder if it would have worked better expanding on a character who has already had a more prominent role, like Synara or Hype
- Some of the dialogue between Kaz and CB-23 in recent episodes has been great: first finding out BB-8 and CB-23 have been swapping stories about Kaz, now Kaz calling CB-23 opinionated
Moments in Canon
“The Force doesn’t belong to any one person. It is something that is inside all of us, we just find it in different ways.”
- The Supreme Leader (I would assume Snoke, given the timeline) is sending out First Order Raiders to find Sith relics
- The red lightening was reminiscent of the Son’s Force lightning on Mortis and the superweapon on Malachor
- Jedi temples are sometimes built over Sith temples as a means of purification. As well as the temple in this episode, this was also the case on Coruscant
What did you think about the episode?
Thanks for reading. May the Force be with you…
The Canon Padawan 