I love the bickering between our three heroes, and especially AP-5's digs on Zeb. Good stuff, and a significant plot development at the end, as well.
I have to admit AP's puns against Zeb were rather funny.
Why does Zeb randomly go between understanding and not understanding Chopper?
This was a close one. The Rebels are so lucky that the infiltrator droid had no long range communicator and got damaged by the spiders (+ tripped the alarm!).
AP-5 calling Zeb a Grunt was funny.
And bringing a random droid into a Rebel base indeed wasn't the smartest idea.
"Sorry for my delayed response, I was just rather stunned by the fact that you had a good idea."
"Which I can recall every detail of." xD
Thrawn is getting closer though... :o
Review by Andrew BloomVIP 9BlockedParent2017-01-18T22:38:27Z
7.0/10. Perfectly acceptable Rebels side-adventure. Nothing groundbreaking here, but pairing up Zeb with a pair of irksome droids is a recipe for a solid episode. I admit, the Alan Rickman bot (I mean AP-5, not Marvin from Hitchiker's Guide) tickled my funny bone a lot here, playing the sort of snooty, self-assured droid next to Zeb's slightly more rough and tumble style.
Of course, they have an adventure that teaches them to appreciate one another. AP-5's portion of that is pretty undercooked, with Zeb only throwing in a token "I admire that you always get the job done" response to the droid's uptightness at the end. But Zeb himself shows that he's more than just muscle, coming up with a clever solution to the Imperial protocol/assassin droid problem (which I have to imagine was included for toy sales, right? I mean, that thing just screams "Transformers Imitation"). The action with Zeb fighting the Imperial droid was pretty static after a while, but it worked for what it needed to be. Again, not my favorite episode of the series or anything, but very solid and amusing enough.
The part I did really like, though, was the end with Thrawn. Again, showing that Thrawn is smarter than the average bear is important to establishing and reaffirming his character as not just another baddie. Taking what appeared to be a clear victory for Zeb and the rebels -- getting rid of the imperial droid without allowing it to beam their location to the empire by sending it on a kamikaze mission -- and making it something that played into Thrawn's hands was a very nice touch. Thrawn using the fact that it was one of the droids from this group that was killed to isolate the system in which the Rebel base is located works well to show him tightening his grasp and, to the theme of the episode, using brains rather than brawn to advance his agenda.
Overall, a pretty standard-if-good character story of the week, with a particularly nice capper.