Ariel: Big time spoiler warning right here, folks! If you don't like spoilers and haven't seen the Star Wars Rebels cartoon, get those spoiler blankets and put them over your heads -- no, wrap them around and around your heads, faces too!
Sasha: You really weren't happy about how hard it was to avoid spoilers last time, were you?
Ariel: That hasn't got anything to do with it.
Sasha: Uh-huh.
Ariel: No, really! This time around, we're not trying to convince people to watch the show by telling them how great it is without any spoilers. Either they took our advice and already watched The Clone Wars, in which case for sure they've probably already watched Rebels, or else they didn't take our advice and they're going to totally miss out by not watching either show on account of they don't know good advice when they hear it. Whichever one, there's no point in doing for Rebels what we did for The Clone Wars, so why bother?
Sasha: I'm not arguing.
Ariel: Plus, I don't want to talk about Rebels overall, I want to talk about Darth Vader in Rebels.
Sasha: Go on, I'm listening.
Ariel: He's SO SCARY!!!
Sasha: I mean, hasn't he always been scary?
Ariel: Not like this!
Sasha: I think I know what you're talking about, but maybe explain it some more for our readers.
Ariel: Okay, so like, first we saw him was in Episode Ai-Yai-Yai when Big Evil Space Politician gives him his Darth Vader name, but he still looks like Teen Hottie from the second movie, only with a scar and hoo, boy, so much hair!
Sasha: Hey, I just realized, Helm Solo from the last three movies is Teen Hottie's grand-kid, and he also has quite the head of long flowing locks.
Ariel: Kind of skipped a generation in Farmboy Luke, though.
Sasha: No, he got his grandpa's hair from his mom, Cinnabon-Hair Girl. Farmboy Luke is just his uncle.
Ariel: Oh, right ... hey! Stop that!
Sasha: Stop what? Seriously, why are you making that face at me?
Ariel: Because you're distracting me from the whole point of this post, which is how scary Rebels Darth Vader is!
Sasha: Fine. I'll just shut up and let you talk while I nod for the whole rest of the post.
Ariel: Well, you don't have to be a spoil-sport about it.
Sasha: No, but how is it my fault that you're distractable?
Ariel: Because you know I'm distractable, and you should know better than to start talking about distracting things, because then ... HEY! You're doing it AGAIN!
Sasha: Can you please go back to how scary you think Darth Vader is in Rebels?
Ariel: ...
Sasha: I apologize for distracting you, too. Go on. Any time now. Whenever you've got your breathing under control.
Ariel: So. I was
saying ... omg, what
was I saying? Wait, wait, I remember. Episode Ai-Yai-Yai, where at first he's Good-Hair Vader, which was not as scary because I was way in shock over him going to the Dark Side anyway, and even though he chopped up all those kids, at least he had good hair while he was doing it.
Sasha: You mean, good hair makes a bad guy less scary?
Ariel: Less scary than an inhuman robot-looking black mask with scuba-breathing sounds coming out of it! Which, we got to see a whole
one scene of him in his scary outfit in that movie.
Sasha: Sure, but he showed up again in Rogue One: an Everybody-Dies Star Wars Story, and didn't you think he was pretty scary in that?
Ariel: I probably would have thought so if he hadn't said that weird asparagus line while he was choking Look-at-My-Cape Guy.
Sasha: Asparagus?
Ariel: You know, "Be careful not to choke on your asparagus, Look-at-My-Cape Guy."
Sasha: I'm pretty sure he said a totally different word there, not asparagus.
Ariel: No, I was listening really careful while I was in the kitchen popping more popcorn, and I totally heard him say don't choke on your asparagus. It really took all the evil menace cred out of him for the rest of the movie for me.
Sasha: Let's ... let's move past that, or you're going to end up complaining about me distracting you again.
Ariel: Thank you for being thoughtful about it! Anyway, then he shows up at the start of Episode Ivy, and he's for sure really bad-ass and intimidating, but you know, in kind of a chill way. He spends most of the movie standing around talking to people and then choking them. And like, Oldster Jesus tells Farmboy Luke stories about him that sound a little on the scary side, hunting down all the Jedi and whacking them and betraying and murdering Farmboy Luke's father ... but we know Oldster Jesus is playing kinda loosey-goosey with the truth there, and it's not like he gives any details.
Sasha: You are totally establishing that he could be scarier than he is in Episode Ivy.
Ariel: Right! I mean, he's an awesome super-cool villain and the meanest dude ever, especially after CGI Guy gets blown up with the Death Star, but ... more intimidating and ominous than scary.
Sasha: He got scarier in Empiresode V though, didn't he?
Ariel: Eh, sure, a little. He totally ruled in that movie, don't get me wrong. But once again, until the final fight with Farmboy Luke, it's really all talking and choking. And even in that fight, he does a lot of talking, like, just calmly sizing Luke up and saying, "Obi-Wan has taught you well," and "Seriously, did the Wise Old Gnome-Toad not warn you I could throw things with the Force like this?"
Sasha: He didn't say that.
Ariel: No, but by the time he got to the "I am your father" part, it was pretty obvious he wasn't even trying to kill Farmboy Luke, so how scary was that?
Sasha: You don't think the possibility of being tempted to join the Dark Side and become super-evil forever is scary?
Ariel: Well, when you put it that way, I guess. But come on, this is Farmboy Luke we're talking about. He couldn't evil his way out of a paper bag. Even in Re-Teddy-Bear of the Jedi when he's dressing all in black, I never bought that he would go bad. And in that movie, Darth Vader is already starting to waffle about being bad by the time Luke surrenders to him.
Sasha: I'm totally sold on this "Darth Vader's not so scary in the movies" angle now. Great job.
Ariel: BUT THEN!!!
Sasha: Hey! You can't jump-scare me like that!
Ariel: Why not? The whole point of this post is scariness.
Sasha: Darth Vader being scary, not my girlfriend being scary!
Ariel: Haha, Elle is going to make so much fun of you for jumping like that.
Sasha: No comment. And now who's distracting you?
Ariel: Oh, right. So here comes Star Wars: Rebels. And almost the whole first season (which is really really good!) is just about these new characters we never heard of before, with a couple of guest-star episodes where Lando and Shiny Butler-Bot and the Rolling Bleepster show up.
Sasha: Wasn't there one scene with Darth Vader in the very first episode?
Ariel: Yeah, but it's just him bossing some Inquisitor guy around, not even doing any choking. At the
end of the season, though, Ahsoka Tanho shows up! And then Darth Vader takes over from his Inquisitor who got kind of killed, and pretty much as soon as he's there, the people who've been the big villains all season long are peeing their panties over having to deal with him.
Sasha: That's true. Throwing that power shift in there really upped the stakes for the good guys and also showed how scared most everybody on the Empire's side are of Vader.
Ariel: I know, right? And then at the start of season two, he's literally giving orders to terrorize the entire population of the planet they're on, like mercilessly. In the movies, we mostly see him dealing with his own troops and generals, or with the people fighting against him, but in Rebels we see him squeezing the whole planet! And you know the good guys will probably run into him at some point, but the way it happens ... yikes!
Sasha: I admit, that was pretty scary.
Ariel: The good guys are about to take off with some stolen fuel, and the two Jedi-type characters are like, "Do you
feel that?" and "Oh, shit!" It's like he's radiating so much evil they know they're screwed before they even see him.
Sasha: Intense!
Ariel: And of course, I'm thinking, yeah, he's Darth Vader, so they're going to fight him and barely hold him off until they can get away in their ship, and I'm not expecting to be surprised by that -- only, then the fight starts and he literally plays with them like they're toys.
Sasha: Yeah, you can see he's not even taking them seriously, he just blocks all their lightsaber swipes and tosses them around like ping-pong balls.
Ariel: And then they drop a whole Imperial walker on him --
Sasha: Two walkers at once, wasn't it?
Ariel: Oh yeah! Wham! And Ka-Boom, the walkers catch fire! And the good guys are limping back to their ship like, "Whew, thank the Force we got out of that," ... and then the walkers start rising up and Vader's not even scratched.
Sasha: It's a kids' show, but I kinda thought they were going to shit themselves right then.
Ariel: I know I would have! The Jedi guys know they'd better get the heck out of there, and the ship's taking off, and all the other characters are blasting at Vader, and he's just calmly reflecting their blaster shots back to knock them out. And then they fly away and you think he's going to be all pissed at his troops like in some of the other movies, and instead he's just like, "Don't worry about it. They're not going anywhere."
Sasha: It was almost like he didn't even care whether he beat them right then. All that mattered was scaring the crap out of them.
Ariel: Exactly. We watched all seven of the movies he appeared in, and for sure, he's badder than bad in them. But this was the first time I was really like, "Holy moley,
this is the dude who hunted down and killed all the remaining Jedi after Emperor Prunepatine won the Clone Wars."
Sasha: Wow, I wasn't even thinking about it that way, but you just described how I was
feeling through that whole couple of episodes.
Ariel: And then at the end of the season, he's even scarier!
Sasha: Yeah, case closed. Do we need to go on and spoil that part too?
Ariel: I don't think so. It gives me the heebie-jeebies just thinking about it. I want to go watch something less scary now, in fact.
Sasha: Like what?
Ariel: Duh! One of the other Star Wars movies!
Sasha: Okay, I'm in!
