I don’t want to write this review.

There was a time when Star Wars Resistance was my favorite thing happening in Star Wars. Great books, The Last Jedi, news about new TV shows – none of it topped watching what Kaz, Tam, and co. got up to every week. I woke up early on Sundays to watch it (and I don’t wake up early).

And now, in the year of our Force 2019, watching Star Wars Resistance is a chore. This was a bad episode, and this has turned into a bad TV show.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately – in the wake of The Mandalorian, and looking ahead to The Rise of Skywalker – about what makes something “good”. It’s more than just “I enjoyed it” or “it was cool” – quality means writing, editing, and visuals all coming together into a finished product. It means knowing what you want to do with your characters, and making sure that everything you write has a point. That point can be advancing a larger plot, just taking a minute to dive deep into characters, taking time to center on anxieties; the possibilities are endless. All you need is to have a point.

I don’t know what the point of Star Wars Resistance is anymore.

It wasn’t always like this. Look back at my former reviews – I raved about how some of the best episodes had nothing to do with the galaxy at large, about how much I loved delving into this microcosm of the galaxy trying to stay out of the war and just live their lives. I devoted literally thousands of words and time on multiple podcasts to my love for Tam as a character, and how she was quickly becoming one of my favorites not just in the show, but in the entire franchise. I talked about how much I appreciated Kaz’s character arc, and his growth from klutzy derp to legitimate pilot and, once in a while, a real hero. It was a kids’ show, but man, the depth. The thought that was put into these characters. The quality of this show and its writing was masterful.

Fast forward to now: Tam, the character that we spent so much time getting to know, who we begged not to join the First Order but understood why she did, might as well not exist – I think she’s been in 3 episodes all season. Yeager, the reluctant father figure who was the glue holding Team Fireball together, is a glorified navigator with 2 lines, max, every week. What do those two characters have in common… I can’t quite put my finger on it… oh, wait, I figured it out. After being lauded for the diversity of its cast last year, this season of Star Wars Resistance, in addition to being rudderless, is the epitome of racist writing – ignoring your black characters instead of putting in more effort to center them. I have no reason to think that this is intentional – Justin Ridge and Brandon Auman, two of the show’s lead writers, have spoken at length about what the show’s commitment to diversity means to them. But the impact of these exclusions of two of the most complex black characters in Star Wars history is to turn them into mere plot devices, something that fans are all too familiar with (remember Val No Last Name, who got killed off in Solo‘s first act just to show that Beckett had feelings?). At the end of the day, racism exists regardless of intent, and the message that we’re receiving is that Tam and Yeager no longer matter. But hey, don’t worry, viewers: we have newcomer Meeka Gray here, whose type of facial tattoos are often indicative of indigenous characters and is very clearly coded as a woman of color, combining racist tropes by being a mystical psychic (something she wasn’t portrayed as when we met her, so I don’t know why we’re seeing it now) AND an unrepentant scam artist. That’s a replacement for Tam and Yeager, right?

Another reason why the terrible A plots are just so grating this season – there are no B plots. The First Order took them hostage when Tam joined up.  Now all we get is 22 minutes of Kaz falling over (seriously, why is there so much pratfall humor this year?), with no examination of any other character that isn’t interacting with him at the time. This is TV writing 101 – what happened? And the lack of B plots all year means fewer opportunities to learn about other characters. It’s such a waste of the amazing voice cast, and I worry that we’ll never get to see fantastic actors like Suzie McGrath (Tam) and Myrna Velasco (Torra) get the spotlight they deserve (I will note that I don’t blame any of my frustration with Kaz on Christopher Sean, who continues to bring emotion and depth to the character far beyond what is written for him).

I suppose I should actually review this episode, since that’s the point of this post: the animation is still really pretty, and Synara got like 2 lines so I guess that’s something. Other than that, the plot was boring and derivative – how many times are we going to see the same space battle of the Aces defending the Colossus with Kaz swooping in to save the day with the power of teamwork? The intended humor fell flat, and I don’t think a single character other than Kaz or Neeku spoke more than three times.

The main plot device of the episode, a “curse” put on Kaz by a disgruntled pirate, felt like a miss to me. Superstition is a tricky thing to tackle in Star Wars – were we supposed to interpret this curse as the will of the Force? Or, are we, the viewers, supposed to understand that there are no such things as curses and, like Kaz, attribute its affects to a series of coincidences? It was a choice that didn’t feel fleshed out enough; this is a kids’ show, but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have to make sense on a plot level, and this felt like a point that would have fit better in a different story. We did get to see the Guavian Death Gang again, but even that felt shoehorned in, to me – there was nothing about them (aside from very cool ship designs) to differentiate them from any other cookie cutter villains.

The difficult part of reviewing this episode is that… nothing else really happened. We got a lot of Neeku being scared of Kaz’s curse, which I’m not sure how I feel about – I know that many have seen Neeku as having behaviors associated with autism spectrum disorders, and how childish and afraid he was this episode, in addition to feeling out of character, made me feel… squicky. I need to think on that point some more but it appears that Neeku has gone from being trustworthy, loyal, sometimes comedic partner to just being comic relief.

When the season started, I was heartbroken that we were only going to get one more year of this show, but I was excited to see what the writers could do with a set time to finish the story they wanted to tell. Now, it feels like a second season was one too many.