Summary
“Fuel for the Fire” was probably the strongest episode of Star Wars Resistance yet, and played up the high-school analogies to develop its central relationship.
This recap of Star Wars Resistance Season 1 Episode 3, “Fuel for the Fire”, contains spoilers.
With “Fuel for the Fire”, it seems like Star Wars Resistance is really starting to find its feet, even if it still isn’t entirely clear yet where its feet are going to take it across the rest of the season or, perhaps more importantly, within the broader Star Wars continuity. But it isn’t in my nature to ask too much of things, so in the meantime, we can enjoy what was, on balance, probably the strongest episode of Star Wars Resistance thus far.
The central conflict facing Kazuda Xiono (Christopher Sean) is still, and will likely remain, his desire to be a hotshot pilot vs. his newfound role as a spy vs. the necessity of him becoming a halfway decent mechanic in order to accomplish those things. To him, devoting all his time to mastering his cover profession is a waste of time, but Jarek Yeager (Scott Lawrence) knows better. The only way he’s going to survive on the Colossus is by making himself an integral part of the weird community and class-based hierarchy, but with Star Wars Resistance obviously skewing towards a younger audience, the show’s priorities are in transplanting what feel like high-school moral lessons into Star Wars fiction.
So, Yeager fulfils the role of teacher in a more literal sense, and his urging of Kaz to become a better mechanic is not dissimilar from insisting he complete his algebra homework or something like that. In “Fuel for the Fire”, Jace Rucklin (Elijah Wood) represents the lure of the “cool kid”; he’s rebelling against the arbitrary rules and restrictions that Kaz resents, so its no wonder that he’s drawn into Rucklin’s scheme, even though it’s blatantly obvious that he’s up to no good.
These two sneaking around behind Yeager’s back is classic stuff, and Star Wars Resistance has a decent enough grasp of slapstick humour and comedic timing to make it more or less work, but what’s more important is that “Fuel for the Fire” spares time for some (brief) backstory on Yeager, and makes a point of acknowledging that, at least on some level, Kaz knows what he’s doing is wrong.
This means that when it all quite literally blows up in Kaz’s face, one of the show’s fundamental relationships has still been developed; the episode wasn’t spent entirely on bumbling comic sequences that didn’t amount to anything. It does, admittedly, still feel a bit aimless to me, and as a character, Kaz continues to be slightly disappointing, but “Fuel for the Fire” at least shows positive steps in the right direction, as Star Wars Resistance continues to have a surer sense of what kind of show it wants to be.
STAR WARS RESISTANCE IS PART OF THE CURRENT STAR WARS CANON. CHECK OUT THE TIMELINE.