Star Wars Resistance Season 2 Episode 8 Review: Rendezvous Point

This Star Wars Resistance review contains spoilers.

Star Wars Resistance Season 2 Episode 8

At the risk of damning it with faint praise, I can at the very least say I have no idea what’s going to happen in Star Wars Resistance’s endgame.

I was thinking that these final fourteen episodes would buckle down and primarily focus on how everyone on the Colossus would be clinging to life and hope, lost in the middle of intergalactic nowhere with the First Order on their tail, making high risk decisions for scraps of food, fuel, and supplies, while also maintaining some sort order among an increasingly agitated citizenry. Instead, we seem to be getting what feels like a series of random ideas that were stuck on the corner of a writers’ room board, shoved into the forefront as we head into the series finale.

The last three episodes (including this one) have introduced new characters and new concepts into the proceedings, and while one introduced even higher, unique stakes into the core dilemmas of our Colossus crew (“The Engineer”), the other felt deeply superfluous (“From Beneath”). “Rendezvous Point” is somewhere in between – a solid, fun exploration of a (yet another) new character to provide mild insight into some characters we already know. And as much as I appreciate the character beats here, it still fails to provide an overall purpose to the overall season/series. Where are we going with this?

To be fair, Venisa Doza, mother to Torra and wife to Captain Imanuel, has the energy, the chutzpah, to be a solid player in the end, what with being a feisty, sharp, and gutsy member of the Resistance. She’s cool, calm, and collected, and within moments of her inevitable capture, she’s already working in tandem with her droid to escape in over-the-top, action-hero-quippy fashion.

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The scenario that brought her into the picture is wildly suspect though. Think about it: Captain Doza had resolutely committed to protecting the people of the Colossus, explicitly so at the end of “Hunt on Celsor 3.” So what in the world possessed him to expose their coordinates out in the open, just so he and his daughter can see their wife/mom again, if briefly?

They nearly get wiped out by the First Order, barely jumping to lightspeed before their final moments. He tells no one of his actions, save for Yaeger (who has become a completely nothing character this season). Outside of some grumbling from the Aces, no one else expresses how insane and reckless this idea is. The episode specifically avoids any interaction with anyone outside the tower or the control room. “Rendezvous Point” wants to be a soft, endearing love letter to the closeness of family despite differences of ideologies, of locations, and of personalities – and it is that – but it’s at the expense of genuine danger to the rest of the people. Captain Doza at no point gets called out for this!

The witty tension and snappy action and feats that Venisa and her droid perform are genuinely fun, what with her entire persona clearly built of a Han Solo-type, by way of Princess Leia’s dedication to the cause. She’s a clear foil to Kaz himself – although, so was Mika Gray – but that only really serves to expose how little Kaz seems to function as a driven character currently. Sure, he’s in every episode but this show is no longer about him really. There’s a moment where he and Torra almost rush off to find Venisa, but they just don’t go?

Still, Venisa’s role here feels more designed specifically to provide even more doubt, more second thoughts to Tam’s already established reluctance in being part of the First Order. I wish we had more of Tam’s indecisiveness. Part of the problem is we haven’t seen her in so many episodes, but also, we’re working through the same exact beats we’ve seen before – she feels betrayed by Yeager and Kaz, she wants to belong to something, she doesn’t know how to forgive them or herself.

Tam aggressively “owning” her First Order designation, a series of random numbers, is a solid, symbolic moment for her, but again, with so few episodes left, it’s about time these characters, this show, make things happen. Agent Tierny may finally “compel” Tam to talk more via her usual manipulative ways, but again, this has been a steady drum beat for several episodes now.

The scant few dramatic moments “Rendezvous Point” has are fine. Torra missing her mother on her birthday, she and her father sharing a moment while watching the hologram of her decision to leave, even Torra’s odd blow-up early on during the scene where the Aces were complaining all work well enough. They also add to the strong work the series is doing to make Torra a real, fleshed-out character. I’m still not too sure why it’s doing all this work for Torra,, as opposed to doing this for anyone and everyone else, including and especially Kaz, but that’s fairly moot at this point.

“Rendezvous Point” is a decent episode despite the deeply troubling set-up and the sense that nothing is building up towards anything, but sadly, that’s been this show’s MO for a while now.

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