Hello and welcome to Laughing Place’s regular weekly recap of the Disney XD animated series Star Wars Resistance from Lucasfilm Animation. This week’s episode, entitled “Kaz’s Curse,” marks the halfway point of Resistance’s second and final season, and if you think The Mandalorian doesn’t move the overarching plot along enough with each new chapter, you should try watching this Star Wars show.
“Kaz’s Curse” begins with Kazuda Xiono (voiced by Christopher Sean) gambling with the pirates aboard the Colossus. He’s having an unusual streak of good luck until one of the buccaneers named Leoz (voice actor Steve Blum of Star Wars Rebels fame) gets fed up with Kaz’s repeated winnings and puts a curse on the young Resistance spy.
When he immediately spills a drink on a nearby angry Gamorrean, Kaz begins to wonder if the curse might be legitimate, instead of blaming it on the obvious factor of his already well-established clumsiness we in the audience have endured for a season and a half at this point. Neeku (Josh Brener) is even more convinced of the curse’s efficacy– especially when a recently installed light fixture explodes above Kaz’s head– to the point where he refuses to eat with his friend.
Mika Grey (Tudi Roche), the old woman the crew picked up in the ancient Jedi/Sith temple a few episodes back, watches from afar as Kaz and Neeku argue about the curse. It seems she has set up shop as the Colossus’s resident mystic seer, with residents coming to her for cryptic glimpses into their futures. Meanwhile, when Kaz nearly gets crushed by a pile of falling crates, it almost seems inevitable that he may succumb to the curse. The Ace pilots are called into the briefing room and told by Captain Doza (Jason Hightower) and Jarek Yeager (Scott Lawrence) that the station has entered into Guavian space, and in order to avoid the local death gangs they’ll have to navigate through an asteroid field.
The Aces are sent out to run a reconnaissance mission hunting for threats, Kaz’s starfighter the Fireball gets hit by an asteroid, causing it to malfunction. He spots a Guavian ship fly by, loses it because his seat presses him up against the Fireball’s canopy, and of course he blames the error on the curse. Fellow Ace pilot Hype Fazon (Donald Faison) resurrects Kaz’s “Kaz-tastrophe” nickname after the mission is botched and aborted.
Back aboard the Colossus, Neeku wants Kaz to return to Leoz and beg him to remove the curse, but when he does the pirate instead spreads his saliva on Kaz’s face and declares him “double cursed,” prompting Kaz and Neeku to agree the next logical step is to speak to Mika Grey. Of course, the archaeologist and treasure hunter already knows about the curse because of her earlier observations and because everyone on the station is talking about it by this point. She tells Kaz the curse only works as much as he believes in it, and sells him a charm token to serve as a defense against the jinx.
When the Colossus then comes under attack by the Guavians, the death gangs demand a payment of one million credits or they will take over the station and turn everyone aboard over to the First Order. The Aces are scrambled to fight this threat, but Kaz drops his new lucky talisman on his way to the hangar, and while in space his laser blasters refuse to fire. Then for some reason he simply begins to believe in himself and becomes convinced that the cursed was made up all along. He scores a few direct hits against the Guavians, and then directs the other pilots to outmaneuver their clunkier enemies, using the asteroids to their advantage to take them down.
Finally, the Colossus breaks through the other side of the asteroid field, the Aces land safely back aboard the station, and our heroes jump into Hyperspace. Kaz learns the predictable lesson that he was never really cursed to begin with, gives the totem to the pirates and tells them it itself is cursed, and thanks Mika for her help. She says pilots are a superstitious lot, but then the episode casts doubt on the moral of this story by showing the marketplace’s holoscreens as Kaz walks away. Was the curse real after all? Did Mika’s talisman help Kaz somehow? Does the old woman have some kind of connection to the Force after all? If we do get an answer to that last question, it will likely come up at some point in the back half of Star Wars Resistance season two.
Next week: “Station to Station”