4 hours ago, Sturn said:

This part I did like. It had me thinking it was a Gozanti with several sensor and comms attachments from various books.

I am loving the use of the Gozanti in Rebels. Lets see how else we can modify a Goazanti now!

3 hours ago, SEApocalypse said:

Odd, not the episode I have watched, but maybe you had a different lense to view the episode through …

OK, I'll bite. Tell me about the episode you watched.

Whomever designed that ship with signal amplifier circuits that had a maximum power higher than they could contain really screwed up! They must have had a batch of Star Trek exploding computers too!

The implications are that Chopper has a subspace transceiver installed and that slicing can be used from beyond the local star system. Also that transmissions on that transceiver can produce destructive feedback vastly out of proportion to the power put in. In effect, the Death Star's superlaser is obsolete as this is by far a more deadly and insidious WMD. Want to kill a planet? Just hack the planet...

Dumb.

12 hours ago, HappyDaze said:

So somehow running a power surge through the slaved droid blows up the remote operating ship but not the droid itself... Stupid. Really, really stupid.

Considering what we're talking about, how is this anymore stupid than everything else shown in the rest of Star Wars? Seems like an arbitrary line has been drawn somewhere.

Sure, but I think that line needs to be drawn, and Rebels continually pushes past it in horrible ways.

I'd just argue that the modified Gozanti uses some kind of uber-hypermatter power relays to allow the signals to be routed through subspace. When the power surge came back, it overloaded the hypermatter containment fields, which collapsed, causing a matter inversion cascade failure that blew up the ship.

(I think I'm having Star Trek: The Next Generation withdrawals...I might need to watch it again! )

Personally I think the explosion was unnecessary. Overloading the memory on their computers and wiping them would have been fine, and had the same plot effect.

8 hours ago, HappyDaze said:

OK, I'll bite. Tell me about the episode you watched.

I am not really tempted to bite to be honest. So I keep it brief.

If you change the handshake between something like two usb connected devices and increase the power output you can literally blow up the battery. That is something which happens all the time tanks to faulty firmware. Hera did change the directional connection the gozanti had to chopper in a similar magical way. What the details are is not at all important (dozen of reasonable options come to mind, but they all are based on assumptions how FTL communication works, which for all practical purpose has been just magic in star wars) , but she was well aware that she is making a change with catastrophic effect in specific systems. That is the textbook description of an exploit because we can safely assume that blowing up is not part of the intentional functionally of such an FTL connection. Chopper getting fried was a side effect, not the actual damaging effect passing through chopper.

I don't see any problem with what happened. Outside of imperial cyber security being weak as always, this time on very fundamental level, because as other said, hardware is not supposed to blow up because of software, it does happen IRL, but is normally a very rare case, even when we have seen in the last two years some spikes in occurrence, mobile devices are so power hungry that battery tech is a pretty hot topic these days, even literally.

Alas, you already rejected this perspective, so I really don't know why I am biting. ;-)

1 hour ago, HappyDaze said:

The implications are that Chopper has a subspace transceiver installed and that slicing can be used from beyond the local star system. Also that transmissions on that transceiver can produce destructive feedback vastly out of proportion to the power put in. In effect, the Death Star's superlaser is obsolete as this is by far a more deadly and insidious WMD. Want to kill a planet? Just hack the planet...

Dumb.

How would this be used against a planet? The thing that destroyed the ship was the fuel cells being compromised.

I'm just going with the dumb answer of the Imperial ship had a lot of uber hyper equipment and systems on board and being on such a small ship as well as already downloading and processing a lot of data and controlling Chopper, the system just surged and created a system wide failure that resulted in the explosion. Dumb I know but so was the plot contrivance.

In the end I don't think this is a tactic that can really be employed outside of the situation it was used in on the show.

Everybody, this is Rebels! It's a fun cartoon for kids and people who like kids' cartoons. It's just one part of Star Wars, just like Edge of Empire. As long as the flavour and tone are consistent throughout the greater franchise, I'm willing to let some technical impossibilities slide. My players [hopefully] know they can't blow up an entire ship with lethal feedback, and I doubt we'll ever see such a thing in happen in a feature film.

Interestingly, what was most unsettling about that scene for me was the way Hera just KILLED all those people, knowing they were watching her kill them. That's a little chilling, because Hera's never really done anything so cold-blooded up to this point. No, I didn't need the big dumb ending with an exploding spaceship, but that's just me. All in all, I thought this was a nice little episode that illustrated the way the Empire sees droids as appliances, while the Rebels see them as colleagues and friends.

20 hours ago, Sturn said:

This episode is going to be considered non-canon for me. It didn't happen, at least not this way.

So much wrong with it. Real-world lyrical references, hacking can blow up a starship using some sort of droid-transceiver feedback hand-wave, and no one noticed the shuttle pilot was wearing a TIE pilot uniform. Entire episode was just silly like one of the usual writers decided to let his 12 year old child give it a go*.

*The more I think of it, that would explain the entire tone of the episode.

This part I did like. It had me thinking it was a Gozanti with several sensor and comms attachments from various books.

They lost me at 'we're locked in the cargo bay and Ezra doesn't have his lightsaber'.......

Well, the problem with that is if Ezra cut open a door to the inside of the ship, then they just have two holes open to space, not one.

They were locked in before the hatch was open...no points there.

Ezra's probably a little leery about cutting through locked doors that can be overridden. What happened last time he did that?

1 hour ago, Superunknown said:

Everybody, this is Rebels! It's a fun cartoon for kids and people who like kids' cartoons.

See I know what you're saying but kids are typically smarter then they are given credit. many things have changed since I was one but I know I would've been just as frustrated by the ending as a kid as I am now. It has nothing to do with the techno-gibberish its that its poor writing and again shows the Empire being dumb.

For me I could live with the Clone Wars making Grievous a terrible villain because he's both awesome in Revenge of the Sith, so you can watch that movie and ignore TCW, and despite my not hating the prequels, he's not in an era I personally care to revisit. The Empire, when you diminish them that's when I start to get really frustrated because this effects the OT.

The kids show argument doesnt work with me because there are a plethora of kids shows, ones considered the best kids show, that do not exhibit this same level of writing.

1 hour ago, Superunknown said:

Interestingly, what was most unsettling about that scene for me was the way Hera just KILLED all those people, knowing they were watching her kill them. That's a little chilling, because Hera's never really done anything so cold-blooded up to this point.

Hera says something like say goodbye to your memory banks before she sends the power surge. I think the implication here is pretty clearly that she didn't expect to blow up the ship. And there's no reason to assume she even knows that it did. From her POV, the transmission would have just cut out.

I wonder if a very secret intelligence ship has some sort of failsafe to keep it from falling into enemy hands, and the surge caused that to go off.

Just random speculation. And still disappointing that the audience needs to come up with excuses.

16 minutes ago, MaxKilljoy said:

Just random speculation. And still disappointing that the audience needs to come up with excuses.

They say that the ship's fuel cells have been compromised, while electric discharges cover half the ship. What more explanation do you need?

14 minutes ago, Stan Fresh said:

They say that the ship's fuel cells have been compromised, while electric discharges cover half the ship. What more explanation do you need?

How they design a ship in such a way that the system for compiling data can "compromise the fuel cells".

I think they're grasping for filler episode stories. Just get to Obi Wan and Maul and what happens with Madalore please.

21 minutes ago, 2P51 said:

I think they're grasping for filler episode stories. Just get to Obi Wan and Maul and what happens with Madalore please.

Coincidentally enough, on this week's Rebels Recon, Dave Finloni noted that he's aware a segment of the audience sees episodes like this one as "filler."

Mostly because that's what they are, plot holes not withstanding.

7 hours ago, 2P51 said:

They lost me at 'we're locked in the cargo bay and Ezra doesn't have his lightsaber'.......

7 hours ago, Desslok said:

Well, the problem with that is if Ezra cut open a door to the inside of the ship, then they just have two holes open to space, not one.

Obi Wan to Anakin: "Next time try not to lose it. This weapon is your life."

Anakin to Padme " When I finished constructing my lightsaber. Ob-Wan said to me: Anakin, this weapon is your life. This weapon is my life."

Ahsoka to Younglings : "This weapon is your life, but it is also your responsibility. Don't let it out of your sight."