2x17 The Forgotten Droid

7.2/10. Oh good, a Chopper episode! Sarcasm aside, there are a number of difficulties involved in trying to tell a story where your main character is essentially incapable of delivering dialogue, and Rebels didn’t exactly overcome them with ease here. Chopper can be kind of annoying in large doses, and the story with his new robot pal had a fair bit of schmaltz involved.

But it also touched on an interesting topic, one that’s been very scantily explored, even if parts of the Star Wars franchise like The Clone Wars which dug into some of the troubling implications of the universe – droid sentience. We see characters like C-3PO and R2-D2 have desires, goals, feel pain, affection, sadness, and a variety of other qualities that suggest they’re something at least approaching personhood. But we also see droids being barred from many facilities, having their memories wiped with regularity, and generally treated more as tools than as people. There’s a sense in which they are second class citizens, something that Star Wars never really engages with, (beyond one interesting set of episodes in Season 6 of Clone Wars where the life of a droid is juxtaposed with that of a clone trooper).

But it does here, even if the returns are hit and miss. We learn a bit more about Chopper’s backstory, something that makes Hera look better by the reveal that she basically treated him as a person, an ally, rather than a piece of equipment. And it comes through in the new droids story, a pathos-ridden tale of someone who was, like Chopper, a part of the Clone Wars, who is now saddened and even resigned at the prospect of his continued underappreciated menial labor. Chopper offers the idea that droids can transcend that station, that they can pursue their own projects, resist the people who order them around, and even have friends.

Again, it’s all done in a pretty cheesy fashion (albeit on that syncs nicely with the plot of the Rebels needing to find a base and using the new droid’s intel to avoid a trap) but the ideas at play are interesting enough to push this one into “good” territory. There’s some stakes in the pair’s great escape and attacking of the Bluto-like captain of the Empire ship they’re stuck on, even if the show dumbs things down at times. And as the banter that closes out the episode suggests, it even gives Chopper a C-3PO-esque protocol droid equivalent to his R2-D2 like astromech mischief.

Overall, there’s a better version of this story possible, one that really chomps down on the meat of the droid issues grazed, but the themes explored, and the passable kiddie adventure used to explore it, are enough to make this one solid, if not exactly Rebels at its best.