The final season of Star Wars Rebels begins this month with the fourth season premiere on DisneyXD.  Star Wars Rebels is set 14 years after the Star Wars prequels and leads up to the events of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, and just as a few Rogue One elements were shuffled into last season’s story, a new trailer hints at even more from Rogue One coming.  Notably Star Wars Rebels’ R2-D2-like orange astromech droid C1-10P (aka Chopper) appeared in Rogue One, as did a loudspeaker mention of Rebels series lead Hera Syndulla, and its ship, the Ghost, can be found at the battle of Scarif.   So one question from fans is how far Star Wars Rebels will be stretched into the future of the Star Wars timeline.  Will it have any actual overlap with Rogue One?

Returning from the Empire from last season is Grand Admiral Thrawn, but so is Grand Moff Tarkin, and he’s seen in a new trailer discussing Director Krennic–the white garbed villain of Rogue One, and he mentions Krennic’s “Stardust” project, which we learned was both Galen Erso’s nickname for his daughter Jyn and the code name of the Death Star weapon file at the Imperial archive at Scarif.   Deathtroopers and X-Wing fighters appear in the animated series–and the Star Wars timeline–for the first time, plus the Rebel mercenary Two-Tubes.  Saw Gerrera is back, too, with Mon Mothma, Rex, Bail Organa, and General Dodonna.

Star Wars Rebels is at its best when it sticks to following the tightly-knit team on a single rogue ship flying mission after mission, a formula that Joss Whedon built so well with his Firefly series.  Last season’s best episodes were the standalone episodes outside the ongoing narrative.  All the crewmembers of the Ghost are returning this season, Ezra, Kanan, Hera, Zeb, Sabine, and Chopper, but the crew is fair game to meet their ends for the writers, except for Hera, Chopper, and the ship itself, since we already know they appear later.  Thrawn could potentially be written out of the Star Wars timeline this season, too, since he makes no appearance in Rogue One or A New Hope.   It’s been speculated that the Imperial conference room on the Death Star had an unoccupied seat in A New Hope that belonged to Krennic.  Could it have belonged to Thrawn instead?  Maybe we’ll learn that and more this season.

Check out this trailer for Season 4 of Star Wars Rebels:

And here is an earlier trailer for the season:

Star Wars Rebels returns with a one-hour event show September 23, 2017, followed by the Season 4 premiere episode, “Heroes of Mandalore,” on October 16, 2017, all on DisneyXD.

C.J. Bunce
Editor
borg.com