Star Wars: Resistance season 2 episode 1 review: Into The Unknown
Star Wars Resistance returns with bigger stakes and mysterious implications, but you wouldn’t guess that from this premiere. Spoilers...
This review contains spoilers.
2.1 Into The Unknown
Welcome back, Star Wars Resistance, and welcome back to the Star Wars Resistance reviews! This second season is the show’s final season, a truncated, 14-episode run that’s aiming to wrap up the narratives to ultimately tie it to The Last Jedi and The Rise of Skywalker.
Really though, ending the show like this feels twofold: one, with Disney putting so much emphasis on content for Disney+, particularly with Star Wars shows, the company is more or less is moving on from it, changing its overall focus in regards to this specific IP. But secondly, the bottom line is that Resistance… isn’t really that good, or memorable. More specifically, it’s a show that really doesn’t know what it wants to be. Is it a more light-hearted romp in this galaxy? A careful exploration of another side of the First Order conflict? A more casual look at people outside of that conflict? It’s all over the place, and that lack of focus really just makes Resistance feel unnecessary, as a show and as a piece of the whole Star Wars universe.
For example: there was a sense that the Aces, those race-loving, Colossus-protecting pilots, were meant to be a fairly significant part of the show, and they are… just not. One of the Aces, Torra, was an overly-enthused pilot who, almost sociopathically, was amused by death and crashes, particularly over Kazuda’s antics. She was also a bit young and naive.
In Into The Unknown, Torra comes across weirdly serious and grown-up, clearly annoyed by everyone around her. It’s a sudden shift of the character, and while there’s something to be said about how the battle with the First Order and the sudden displacement of The Colossus to outer space could definitely change a character, Torra’s shift doesn’t seem to be at all connected to this. She never opens up about how all this is affecting her (she was always a chatty one), and no one else on the ship/base seems particularly affected by the change in circumstances.
As the gravity turns off and on (via a couple of slapstick scenes at the bar which, by the way, show that slapstick doesn’t not work for the show’s animation style), no one on board seems to even care what happened. It’s funny, broadly speaking, that a good number of the populace are just drinking at the bar, but if anyone else in the public is shaken by these current events, we never see them.
Captain Doza at least is taking things seriously. He and Yeager man the newly found controls for the Colossus while Neeku, Torra, and Kaz head down below to fix the communications and the gravity problem. At the very least, the scale of all the specific issues The Colossus is experiencing is palpable. Besides gravity and communications, the warp drive, shields, and cannons are out, leaving them sitting ducks in case the First Order finds them.
If this final season is about restoring the Colossus before the First Order arrives, in the middle of galactic nowhere, then that would be intriguing. This episode doesn’t provide a lot of hope though, on an episodic basis. Mostly this episode involves a faux-horror battle with a First Order bot that wasn’t fully destroyed at the tail end of last season. It captures CB-23 and Neeku, and then it chases Kazuda around a bit in mostly slapstick-y ways.
The lack of gravity makes the droid seem more like a menace, and he is sort of a nasty little bugger, but the overall vibe leans more comedic, adding to the show’s struggle with maintaining any kind of consistent or adequate tone. They end up sending that drone into space. That’s really it.
Perhaps the most potentially dramatic beat in the entire episode outside of the state of The Colossus itself is watching Tam reject all of her former friends and embrace the First Order fully. I have had issues with the way this fallout has been portrayed, but the show at least embraces it fully now, and it should lead to some interesting interpersonal conflicts if and when she runs into her former squadmates again. Tam tossing aside Kazuda’s pleas to reach out to her, and putting on the First Order helmet, is a richly dramatic moment, and hopefully it’ll lead to some richly-defined conflicts in the final stretch of the series.
In the run-up to Rise Of Skywalker, revisit all the Star Wars films to date in our debrief, starting with The Phantom Menace.