If Sabine has to have the force, they shouldn’t have made her terrible at it in the beginning. The show spend it’s first few episodes basically telling you she’s terrible via Huyang. Instead she should have been able to use it to a small extent from the start, which could have easily been hand-waved away as something she learned how to do from her previous training with Ahsoka.
But that’s exactly what it’s about and why adults have always made terrible Jedi students since ESB. She’s spent her life not using the Force so will be terrible at it because she’s got 20 years of mindset to undo. Then, when it matters the most it clicks for her.
She’s not lifting an X-Wing, she’s accelerating a 70 odd kilo human who’s already magically levitating themselves, the extra dozen or so metres into a slowly moving wide target. That is in no way not possible for somebody who has probably been taught the theory of levitating even if she couldn’t do it herself until then.Maybe they could have focused on her PoV for all this a bit more, but, at the end of the day, it’s not Sabine’s story.
It’s not just that she’s an adult. Luke had extreme potential in the Force and it still took him time to fully unlock it. The problem is Sabine’s prior training is all offscreen, with nothing to back it up from Rebels (and no, training with the Darksaber does not count). And even still, they still bumrush her from barely being able to pull a saber to throwing Ezra through the air in the span of a few minutes. It took Luke at least days of training to get to where he is by the end of Empire and he’s still not great at it. And he has much more potential than her.
They needed to sell it much better than they did. Sabine honestly shouldn’t have unlocked anything this season tbh. It ends in a failure with Thrawn escaping anyway. Let the audience feel the amount of time and effort she had to put into it rather than one single training sequence and some offhand remarks to OFFSCREEN training. The way they presented it, I just don’t buy it.
I don’t get what the issue with it being offscreen is. It’s not like Luke’s five mins of backflipping in a swamp acually explains any of the skills he has in RotJ or The Mandalorian, you have to assume Yoda acually tought him useful stuff off screen.
Sabine has already done the start of the combat training way back in Rebels and I’m perfectly happy with her having had the Force related bits off screen between then and this show. Fits with Luke and most of Anakin’s training (you know, as we don’t see any of the bits between TPM and AotC onscreen).