After a mid-season hiatus so we could all go see a movie, Star Wars Rebels came back Sunday with a two-part episode called “Ghosts of Geonosis.” Not only did it bring Forest Whitaker back to voice Saw Gerrera, it helped fill in a crucial link between Attack of the Clones and Rogue One. It also included one of the all-time funniest lines in Rebels history.
Rogue One, obviously, is about the first few times the Death Star is used and the Rebels who steal the plans for it. We also know, , that the bug-like Geonosisan aliens helped build the planet killer. Well, this episode of Rebels features the Rebels heading to Geonosis to find Saw Gerrera, who is missing after going there on a mission to discover why the Empire wiped the Geonosisans out, believing they’re hiding some kind of big secret.
One thing not really covered too much on the show (but tangentially touched on in the Darth Vader comic and Catalyst book) is that after helping build the Death Star, the Emperor did not trust the Geonosians to keep his secret and sterilized the entire populace, effectively killing them off. Yup, just another genocide thanks to the Empire. (This is also covered at length in the Rogue One Visual Dictionary.)
However, the Empire wasn’t totally successful. Saw has found a surviving Geonosian and, with the help of the Rebels, captures him. When they do, Saw asks what secret he’s hiding. The Geonosian, nicknamed Klik Klak, draws a circle inside a circle. You know, something like this.
No one has any idea what it means. That is, until they realise Klik Klak has an egg for a Geonosian queen. This is the key to repopulating the entire race and, wouldn’t you know it, it looks like a circle within a circle. Later, they find two huge Imperial poison gas canisters, which were used to kill the population. These, too, look like circles in circles so, all the Rebels assume Klik Klak was either talking about this important egg or important clue to his species’ demise. Not that other huge secret that will become important in due time.
It was an awesome use of dramatic irony, linking several movies, all wrapped around a fun story on its own (one that included jet-packed Stormtroopers!). We also got to learn a lot more about the person Saw Gerrera is, which is to say, someone who is very scary and maybe not exactly trustworthy.
But the icing on the cake came when, after a planetary sand storm renders their guns unusable, Sabine declares, “Stupid sand, it gets everywhere.”
Epic troll, Rebels. We love it.