Luke Skywalker is the key to destroy the Sith.

The answer to Maul and Ezra's magic holocron questions both ended up on the same planet - Tatooine.

Maul wanted to find out what happened to Obi-Wan. Now he knows, and he's going to do his darnedest to tie up that loose end, even though we know he will fail because canon tells us that he will.

But in the meantime, what Ezra was seeking - the thing that will destroy the Sith - is also on Tatooine, even if he doesn't know it yet.

Like Maul, whatever Ezra does will not have any real impact on the fall of the Sith dynasty. That's not his destiny, and it was never meant to be. But what it does set up is an appearance by Obi-Wan "Ben" Kenobi on Rebels - and quite possibly Luke "The Chosen One Done Right This Time" Skywalker himself.

The show's strictly about the journey that Ezra and the others make - if finding Luke and Obi-Wan are the end goals of these characters in this season, then there's absolutely no reason to not show that as a part of this show's overarching narrative. Ezra gets to meet the real hero of the story and Maul faces off against Obi-Wan once again.

And it all fits.

I thought this little twist was brilliant. It gives the characters an excuse to go planet-hopping from episode to episode and establish that yeah, what they do is not going to be as important in the cosmic scheme of things as what Luke and Obi-Wan will do, even though what they have yet to do will still be important relative to the actual fight against the Empire.

"The Holocrons Of Fate" is already one of my favorite standalone episodes of this show, and we still have dozens of episodes left to go before it ends.

 

This, I agree with!

This, I don't.

I firmly believe that DarthBowl is going to be a thing, since Darth Maul was originally slated to die in the Season 2 finale before they decided to cut that out. You know what else got cut? The Darth Vader/Darth Maul showdown they had planned, which they needed to cut for time and because they decided that Maul running around during this time period would make the most sense for the story. So it's not hard to put two and two together here.

In the meantime, Vader isn't expected to show up in a significant capacity in this season and it might be a bit too soon to kill Maul. I think he'll make it through Season 3, but his number is up come Season 4, and Vader will be the one to collect his due.

I don't think that they're going to make Ezra evil. He'll go dark, sure, but at the end of the day he still hates the Empire and the Sith. He's not in a "kill your allies to save the ones you love" situation.

But I totally think that before the series ends, we'll have a major Ezra/Kanan duel, and possibly more than one. I just don't expect anyone to die in that fight.

 

While I do think that they could be scheduling an Obi-Wan movie for the 2020 or 2021 slot, the gap in time between the end of Rebels (which will be 2019 at the earliest) and then would be way too long to drag that particular story arc out. And it would also necessitate turning Maul into a mustache-twirling "Curses! Foiled again by those meddling kids!"-type baddie, which the writers of the show have noted that they want to avoid (and they've been successful in that regard, other than with the Fifth Brother and criminally-underused Seventh Sister).

I'm of the conviction that the hypothetical Obi-Wan movie would have to take place earlier in the timeline - most likely a bit earlier than the period of time that Rebels started in, to be specific. Ewan McGregor's face hasn't really aged a whole lot, and it wouldn't make sense to put him under extensive makeup to make him look old. But even then, as cool as it would be to see another live-action Maul fight, people who aren't familiar with the animated series would have no idea about how he came back to life after being bisected and shoved down a bottomless chasm, and considering that they barely explained how he came back on The Clone Wars itself. Honestly, Rebels would be the perfect medium to show that confrontation, and that's because the audiences for both shows overlap.

I don't think we'll be seeing a lot of soul-searching for the man who became the Dark Lord of the Sith on Rebels - mainly because the Darth Vader comic already did that. But this really would not be the place to tell that kind of a story, which I feel would cheapen the impact of the Galaxy's biggest secret if everyone knew about it. (What I'm really saying is that they shouldn't do that at all.)

Dave Filoni has emphasized that this show is about this merry band of six misfits who take on an Empire. That's exactly why Season 2 didn't become Ahsoka & Friends (as much as many of us wanted it to be) - it's not her story, it's theirs. Rebels was just a convenient medium to answer the question of what happened to her after Order 66 due to the fact that it's set long after The Clone Wars and it involves a group of characters that would have reason to meet her. (On that note, I do hope that they go forward with the whole "Ahsoka Tano becomes the Gandalf The White of the Star Wars Universe" thing that they've been alluding to, what with those weird trading cards and her Convor familiar that looks like the Daughter.)

 

And Anakin never would have fulfilled the prophecy without his son, or the love that he had for him. (He was pretty awful at showing that love, granted, but blood's still thicker than the bond you had with a creepy wrinkled warlock-dictator that used to be your friend.) Darth Vader probably would have killed the Emperor himself at some point if he were given the opportunity, but the Sith line would still continue once he found a suitable replacement. Luke was the one to help Anakin realize that he didn't have to keep being awful and that there was still hope in him yet to set things right. And Luke was proven right when Anakin died a Jedi.

Just because one's a key to destroying something doesn't mean they have to be the one to strike the final blow.