1x07 Gathering Forces

6.4/10. Overwrought melodrama is not really a great look for Ezra Bridger. Don't get me wrong, dealing with the emotional turmoil of deciding whether you want to know what happened to your parents is big stuff, but Taylor Gray goes a little too big and hammy with it for my tastes. The dialogue also does him no favors, with some pretty clumsy exposition and blunt didactic exchanges that turn the subtext of Ezra's reluctance to know into text in a heavy-handed fashion.

I do appreciate the central idea of the episode, that it takes Ezra recognizing his own fears about learning what happened to his parents for him to be able to find peace enough within himself to use the force, and his acknowledgement that he couldn't countenance the possibility that they were alive and would one day come save him or else he wouldn't have had the mettle to survive on his own (however ham-fistedly this info was delivered). Seeing the bat-jaguars attack the storm troopers was cool. And the idea that there is great power within Ezra, power enough to sic some superbeast on The Inquisitor, but power that wipes him out physically and which comes from negative emotions that point him toward the dark side is an interesting one that puts him in the company of Anakin Skywalker -- young (practically) orphans with abandonment issues who have power but also strong emotions they can't always control.

But the execution is pretty off. The Inquisitor offers some standard bad guy dialogue; Ezra's realization is pretty rushed, and the whole exposition about Ezra's emotional state routine gets tiresome quickly. There's ideas here, but the way they're presented needs some work.