Worried that their very presence is attracting the Inquisitors and putting the rebel fleet in danger, Kanan and Ezra are joined by Ahsoka and go off on their own to the Jedi temple on Lothal to seek the council of Yoda, but once there each one of them must confront a different vision and learn a different truth.
Wow! A lot of things happened in this episode and it was an amazing installment of the series, not only linking Rebels back to the Clone Wars and the Prequel Trilogy, but also revealing some interesting backstory about some characters we’ve seen in the past and having Ahsoka finally confront the fact that Darth Vader is actually her old master, Anakin Skywalker.
“Shroud of Darkness” had it all: Drama, humor, action, darkness… a sense of maturity that the recent episodes have been missing. Yes, I know that Star Wars Rebels is a show made for kids, but just because it’s made for kids doesn’t mean it has to lack sophistication or complexity or be completely formulaic and predictable. This episode was constantly surprising and going places I wasn’t certain it would.
What’s more, also unlike some previous episodes, no time was given to silliness or cuteness. Every scene flowed, every scene was important, and every scene was used to move things forward. As I said, a lot of things happened and they didn’t have a lot of time to dwell, apparently, but the pace was suitable for an important mythology episode.
They even allowed some heart-tugging moments as well. How awesome was it to hear Frank Oz as Yoda again? Wasn’t Yoda’s wave to Ashoka at the end just the greatest thing?
The only thing that I found frustrating was the ending as the temple guards cornered the inquisitors. Um… what happened? Did the guard merely distract them? Did they knock them out? All we saw was a flash of light I assumed meant that the inquisitors had been bisected from butt to adam’s apple, and then in almost the very next scene, they’re just standing there right as rain.
A moment of bad editing, but it can’t dull the shine of this episode.
Jason Gaston 