As is traditional with a new Star Wars animated series the new art style takes some getting used to. It’s bright and colourful, and the backdrops in particular Ghibli-ish with some Akira-y station details, though the human characters mostly look a bit too blank for me.
It’s very much for kids. The humour tends towards slapstick with the main character Kazuda Xiono being comically inept, and trades on audience affection for BB-8 by sending him in to help Kaz on his mission with Poe Dameron looking in every few episodes.
Unlike The Clone Wars and Rebels it doesn’t use a snippet of classic Star Wars fanfare for its theme tune, and the theme sounds oddly like Back To The Future to me, which does fit its comedy teen hero.
The basic setup has a giant fuel station turned freeport in neutral space, with the Resistance, the First Order and other factions all having spies there. It’s like a space Casablanca, a series hook I’ve always wanted to do, but it’s been noted that Kaz is more a teen detective protagonist rather than one of the central figures there. Add the racer element for extra action.
The neutral space plays up the early difference between the Rebellion and Resistance eras, and it’s a very game-friendly premise for an ongoing series with a central location.
It starts before The Force Awakens with the Resistance quietly spying on the First Order as it slowly builds to make its first big strike, closer to the level where Rebels starts. It moves past The Last Jedi as the second season progresses and it shifts in tone quite heavily with more space battles and the like. Its second season ran from autumn 2019 to winter 2020 but doesn’t go all the way to The Rise Of Skywalker. An epilogue set after that finale could have been a nice capper, but it ends pretty solidly.
More spoilery thoughts, even though it’s been over a year...
The Colossus is set up as a rough place which it really isn’t. The first thing Kaz sees when he arrives is someone getting thrown overboard for backing out of a race, which we never see anything like again, and the guy doing the throwing becomes a grumpy fishmonger a couple of episodes later. There are still bookies, but it’s hardly the wrenched hive of scum and villainy that the opening two-parter suggests.
And indeed we don’t see anybody racing apart from Kaz, Yeager and the Aces.
Likewise Captain Doza turns out to be a pretty chill guy, though this feels like an intentional mislead rather than Early Installment Weirdness.
And the season two format change moves the show into a Battlestar Galactica type setup which in Star Wars reminds me of the RPG series setup for The Far Orbit Project, especially with bringing in some sketchy allies.
And we get through a Star Wars series without a lightsaber being used! There’s one episode about the Force and some side characters who might have a touch of it, but that’s a nice change.
And of course the Quarren pirate captain betrays somebody.
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