Star Wars: Young Jedi Adventures: Season 1: Story 11: Squadron
What is it ? : The Young Jedi are practicing flying with Nash on her ship, and Kai almost crashes it. So Master Zanna sends them to visit her friend Zepher to collect some ships so they can learn to fly properly, Zepher is a ship mechanic who will have some ships he's fixed up for the Jedi.
They travel there in Nash's ship where she shows them the rings that exist around the moon of Tenoo where Zepher lives, and they spot a Space Slug. They arrive and find that Zepher has fixed up three Jedi Vector Starfighters for them.
They take the fighters up into the ring to practice flying between the asteroids there, but the Space Slug swallows Nash, Nubs and Lys leaving Kai outside.
Nash comes up with a plan, and gets Kai to lure the Space Slug to try to eat his fighter, and when it opens it's mouth the other three will fly out. Kai performs the manuever, allowing his friends to escape and return their slightly bashed up ships to Zepher.
Zepher tells them that the damage is fine, these are training ships and expected to get bashed up a little and on hearing how they did, he tells them they are ready to take the ships back to the Jedi temple, which they do, and Master Zanna admires Zephers handywork. . . .
High Points : A decent enough episode, and the plan to help his friends escape from the Exogorth is sensible given what we know about these creatures. Getting it to snap at some other prey so those already inside can escape, is reasonable and fits pretty well with what we saw the creature do in The Empire Strikes Back.
Low Points : The Jedi training definitely seems to be sink or swim, giving a bunch of very young students starfighters seems pretty dangerous, especially as these aren't vessels with Astromechs where you could get the droid to act as co-pilot, taking charge if the kids do anything dangerous, these are single person fighters with no backup.
But if the kids being put into danger is all I'm criticising, then there's not much wrong with this episode, it looks pretty good, passes the time and tells a reasonable story.
So what do you really think ? : Not sure of the message of this one, probably another teamwork based message, or maybe about listening to those who know better? Especially as the reason that the three get swallowed by the Space Slug is because Kai isn't listening to Nash, and the reason they get out is because he does listen to her.
Final Words : While I'm finding these episodes quite entertaining, on their level. I am also finding them quite tiring, the way that watching a kids show can be. There's loads going on, but not a whole load of thought. And while these seem entirely reasonable, I do remember at that age liking the original Star Wars movie along with other things. So perhaps this is speaking down to the kids a little too much.
I've always believed that when I was a kid my heroes were grown ups, as that was what I aspired to be. I loved Captain Kirk, Doctor Who, and Han Solo (preferring him when I was young to the obviously nearer to my age Luke, who I now prefer). So perhaps producers should make so many shows where the heroes are kids, and should give them heroes they want to grow up to be like, instead of characters they relate to?
Score : 8/10
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