Falstaff and Me
The Clone Wars by a (non movie) Star Wars Noob
by Roscid cup
Overthinking — Like, Seriously Overthinking — the TV Side of the Force
In which I explore the curious allure of TV’s occasionally brilliant tragedy Star Wars: The Clone Wars.
Note: I recently reviewed my older blog posts and found that my two-years-ago self was wrong on many of them. This post, originally written in 2020, was one. I’ve almost completely rewritten it here. In the spirit of George Lucas, I deleted the old one, so now you may only read this one.
I’m not a noob, of course. With Star Wars, who is? I have lived in more than just caves during my existence, so naturally I’ve seen Star Wars and its sequels and enjoyed most of them, some of them even to a fault. So by all rights, I can call myself a fan.
Well, there are fans and then there are fans. For my part, I’m a nerd, not a geek. (Maybe I will explain the difference in a future blog post.) I never read a Star Wars book or comic, never played a Star Wars video game, never bought any Star Wars merch (unless you count the movie soundtracks) and — what I’m getting at — I never saw any Star Wars on TV.
But during the 2020 pandemic lock-down, when I had an extra two hours of not commuting every weekday, I dialed my TV set to the Disney Plus Internet Station. For months, people just wouldn’t shut up about Baby Yoda. And for several years, people wouldn’t shut up about another show, a cartoon called Star Wars: The Clone Wars. I finally caved in and watched them both.
First, A Point About The Mandalorian
<rant>
I ought to call it The Mand–it–orian.
For months, all I heard was
“Baby Yoda this,”
“Baby Yoda that,”
“I made some Baby Yoda hand soap for my Etsy store,”
and “Dude, have you seen The Mandalorian yet?”
Apparently The Mandalorian is to neckbeards
what Lin Manuel-Miranda is to married women.
</rant>
Disclaimer, I have to admit a huge bias: I don’t like TV shows. They’re banal and cheap. Even the new Netflix/Amazon megabudget TV shows have mediocrity forced upon them under pressure to stretch their runtimes across a full season. And, borrowing from an obnoxious 2022 meme, The Mandalorian was one of the TV shows of all time.
There was all this publicity about what they called “The Volume,” how it’s the next evolution in special effects. “The Volume” is a high-falutin’ backscreen that gets realtime data from the camera so it can simulate parallax, giving the camera some tiny degree of freedom. It also places actors in a set that bears some faint resemblance to what the audience will see, so they don’t have to play make-believe in a sterile green room.
But that just shows how unimportant special effects are for adding visual interest to a picture. No matter how good the special effects were in The Mandalorian, it just looked like a TV show. It had too many mid-range shots, flat angles, and scenes shot from one side, and too little blocking, except for a few awkward action sequences. For a dialogue-heavy drama like Law and Order (which, incidentally, had way better camera work than The Mandalorian), this is just fine. But if it’s about a space-faring bounty hunter and his magical wizard baby, you really need to go for broke, or else it will just be cheesy, like another Xena: Warrior Princess.
Of course, if you liked Xena (and this post will eventually reveal that I’m not immune to guilty pleasures), then you will not take any of this as a legitimate criticism of The Mandalorian. The only reason I bring it up is to illustrate by contrast what I liked so much about The Clone Wars.
Alla Prima Animation
How do I describe the way The Clone Wars looks? Comparing it to something more polished like a Pixar movie is like comparing an Alla Prima oil painting to a more photo-realistic painting — say, comparing a Richard Schmid painting to a Bouguereau painting. Schmid and Bouguereau were both masters, so this is a comparison of style, not skill. I’d say that Bouguereau was more obviously impressive, while Schmid was more sneakily impressive. An alla prima oil painting has the charm of simultaneously showing the illusion of the subject being represented and also the means of creating that illusion, since many of the brush strokes maintain their abstract form all the way to the finished product.
The Clone Wars has a similar rough charm. The textures and finished rendering and some of the finer details of character animation all look quite bad, like a previs shot. But the composition, the lighting, the color palette, and the blocking (or motion in general) are all so good, and the environment design is so imaginative and diverse from one story thread to the next, that I very quickly forgot I was even watching an aughties cable TV show. Instead, each three-to-four-episode story “arc” looked and felt like a cinematic feature film made by people who had way more ambition than budget. They probably actually had a pretty sizeable budget, but when you have to animate and render that many episodes, you must cut corners. They knew exactly where to cut corners and where to spare no expense [*2].
I’m trying to avoid superlatives, but my description really doesn’t do justice to how good this show looks. The visuals would pull me into that world and make me want to see more of it, no matter how bad the episode was otherwise. I only intended to watch a few “key” episodes, but I ended up watching the entire series, all 133 episodes. This was no chore. Indeed, the chore was pulling myself away (I have a life, you know). I finished the whole series in only a few months, which for me counts as binge watching.
But while I have a lot to emphasize about the visuals, I can think of little more to say about them. The visuals are really all that kept me watching (certainly not the writing!). So do not take the length of this remaining post to imply that the visuals were not so important. The remainder of this post is really just an after-thought. [1*]
[*1 I must admit another quick bias. I never cared about the deep lore of Star Wars or the Force or all that Joseph Campbell nonsense. I only liked Star Wars for the light show and the pew–pew and the John Williams… you know, the spectacle. The story was only good if it was fun. Fun is an advanced concept that hard-core fans can barely wrap their serious little brains around.]
[**2 Everyone credits Dave Filoni for how good this show looks, but I think fans are snubbing George Lucas his due credit. He was probably the driving force that made the show so ambitious. He had done this with TV before: Young Indiana Jones Chronicles wasn’t quite movie-theatre tier, but there was nothing else on TV that looked anything like it, not even the big-budget miniseries of the time. The Clone Wars would have hit the chopping block under any other management. In fact, that’s what happened. As soon as Disney bought Lucasfilm, they replaced it with a cheap and lazy kids show.]
How Not To Make A Kid’s Show
How do I describe the writing for a show like The Clone Wars? It takes those Star Wars prequel movies and amplifies them — the good is ten times better, the bad is ten times worse, and the cringe is bad enough now to make you blush even if you’re watching it all alone. The writing mostly stunk, except for a few rarely sublime moments and threads that I’ll mention in a few moments.
If I have one criticism that stands above all the rest, it’s the show’s bad taste.
In addition to there being a massive body count, some kind of heinous atrocity is committed, on screen and uncensored, nearly every episode. The show doesn’t look away from things like slavery, torture, or genocide. One episode even invents a creatively horrible way to die: having the Force ripped from your body. I’m not quite sure what that means, but it sounds bad. In one scene, scores of innocent people are lined up, with the ones in front being pushed down a slide to receive this strange form of execution, assembly-line style. It’s an absolutely horrific scene, and the show is chock-full of this kind of terror. Yet, the bad guys committing these atrocities are your vanilla Saturday Morning Cartoon villains, all some variation of Skeletor or the Decepticons. All the characters, good or bad, talk like they’re in some Nickelodeon cartoon from the nineties.
Imagine how inappropriate Schindler’s List would have been if Amon Goeth (the Ralph Fiennes character) was replaced by a man in an opera hat who had a diabolical laugh and a posse of comic-relief henchmen. Although The Clone Wars was not about the Holocaust (a real-world event that actually happened), that’s the best way to describe the kind of bad taste found in The Clone Wars. Just who was this show made for? It’s too R–rated for kids but too puerile for adults.
How To Politicize Fantasy
If there is one thing about the show’s writing that stands out as good, even sublime in places, it’s the show’s apparent message about civilians in wartime. I say “apparent,” because I may be giving these writers too much credit to imply that they wrote something great intentionally.
There’s a certain kind of politics that annoys me in entertainment. I’m not talking about keyboard warriors, anti-SJWs, their woke nemeses, or the Twitter mob. That’s a can of worms I’d rather not open here. No, I’m talking about the kind of politics that gives you a geeky history lesson about a place that never existed. Rogue One was this for me. So was another animated TV show I recently watched, Arcane. I have not seen Andor or Game of Thrones, but I suspect they too have this problem. I just don’t care about the intricacies, intrigues, and complex hierarchy of your very fictitious political system.
One of the charms of fantasy storytelling is how far you can push the boundaries of verisimilitude and still tell a story that is believable and relatable, so long as you get the human element right. (Perhaps that’s why Tolkien’s Ring and Hobbit resonate so well, while The Silmarillion is nearly unreadable.) Sometimes I think fantasy storytellers forget that, and dive too deep into world-building, producing a lifeless story that’s about the setting rather than the plot or characters.
Nevertheless, politics is a part of the human condition. Even a fantasy can have an engaging political story, if it’s in some way topical, allegorical, or parable…ical.
I was surprised to find within The Clone Wars a geopolitical tale whose relevance was actually kind of terrifying. But how!? The show is so puerile in almost every other respect. Did the writers actually realize how good of a story they had, and how well they presented it in places? Probably no, or else it would have been better. There were a lot of cracks in this story. But to not yuck someone else’s yum (ahem Dave Filoni fans), I’ll assume the best about the writers.
To begin with, there was no indication of an author surrogate. Author surrogates are among the worst kinds of characters. They are unrealistically wise, almost as omniscient as the narrator. Whenever they speak you could tell this is the author inserting their own commentary on the plot being narrated. A much better author will simply narrate the events and then trust the audience to draw their own conclusions. Thankfully, The Clone Wars has no such character. Even Yoda has blind spots in his wisdom (and boy does the show expose them!). This is all the more impressive since, unlike the movies, you can still understand the worldviews of a lot of the characters in it. This Guy has This Opinion, That Guy has That Opinion, and so on. But it’s always That Guy’s opinion. You are never led to believe that this is what the writer wants you to think.
The thesis of the show, if I read it right, concerns the fog of war, how it corrupts the civilian society that wages it. (“The fog of war” could be replaced by “hard times in general,” since a prolonged period of the latter has a similar effect as the former, at least when the war is being conducted by a professional military class.) The Clone Wars depicts this in many ways, always following the show-don’t-tell principle.
First of all, public opinion becomes more volatile. Very evil people gain mainstream followings in the show. This is more than just Palpatine, and it takes place on all different scales.
In peaceful, prosperous times, it’s easy to dismiss people who are clearly false prophets. The stability of the world around you does a lot to keep the baddies in check. But when times get rough, people get confused and don’t know who they should listen to. Some people need, or feel they need, a charismatic leader to show them the way. These are not stupid people. When a hysteria comes around, even the most brilliant minds are vulnerable. Don’t believe me? Just Google “Isaac Newton” and “South Seas Bubble.”
Here, Padme finally has a use as a character (since she failed both in the movies and in this show to be a believable foil for Anakin). She’s the most visible moderate on the show, always speaking to reason, and always getting shouted down by demagogues who equate reason with Hamlet-like indecisiveness, diplomacy with weakness, compromise with capitulation. Their message is “Enough with your words, we need action! Don’t stop to think it through, that just wastes time! We need action now!”
Second, young minds become radicalized. There is a young Jedi on the show who concludes — and she is not entirely wrong — that the Jedi have fallen to the Dark Side. Does she protest, whistle-blow, or resign her position to become a public opponent? No, these things are too middle-ground, and the day belongs to extremists. She becomes a terrorist instead.
Third, lots (and lots and lots…) of collateral damage is done to innocent societies caught in the middle of the conflict. Many must choose a side, sacrificing their sovereignty and neutrality. Others fall prey to opportunists who exploit their lack of allies; in war, there’s too much on the Major Powers’ agendas to fuss with the struggles of some neutral third party. This is mainly depicted in the Mandalore episodes, but it seems that every season had at least one episode that shows some civilization getting turned upside down through no fault of its own.
Fourth, the Jedi become corrupt and self-serving over time. Of course there is no such thing as a Jedi, but here they represent the established institutions of a real-world society. Since Jedi are more or less the show’s protagonists, this deserves its own section.
The Tragic Hero(es, Not Anakin)
Where the writers failed with individual characters (who are often just as illogical and poorly thought out on this show as in the movies), they succeed, mostly, in writing groups of people, from large mobs down to pairs. According to the rules of mob psychology, a group of people is only as smart as its stupidest member, so a writer doesn’t have to make the effort of writing an intelligent character! And as for smaller groups like duos and trios, an interesting relationship is easier to write than an interesting individual, at least in a visual story.
The Jedi as a whole made better tragic heroes in this show than Anakin did in the movies. They were not bad people, per se. Some of them were great. But a good tragedy involves a situation that plays to the heroes’ weaknesses rather than their strengths. A better tragedy will add to that some bad luck, and an evil manipulator who knows the heroes better than they know themselves. Palpatine is to the Jedi like Iago to Othello (may the Bard forgive me for such a comparison). He knows how to set things up so that all he has to do is step back and watch the heroes shoot themselves in the foot. This diabolical side to Palpatine does so much more for him as a character than that dumb writer’s cop-out, Order 66.
The Jedi’s strengths are obvious. Their weaknesses are more interesting.
First of all, they are fish out of water — Romantic-era chivalrous knights, ill-suited to the very non-chivalrous murkiness of war. They should never have rushed into the war, but at every step of the way, it wasn’t too late to back themselves out of it. Heck, they even had the benefit of military officers who actually wanted them to back out of it and leave the warfare stuff to the pros.
Their second weakness prevented them from doing that. They had planet-sized egos and a chauvinistic world-view. I don’t mean male chauvinism. I mean the chauvinism of people who assume their way to be the way, and therefore all other ways must be inferior. The Jedi were incapable of admitting they were ever in the wrong. Perhaps they once had the ability to step back and re-assess themselves, but now they had too easy of a scapegoat in Darth Sidious. (This is comparable to my own inability to cook a healthy breakfast when I still have pop tarts in the pantry.)
A third weakness had a delicious irony to it: they had such a fixation on not forming attachments to people and things, yet they did form an attachment to something more abstract, their political clout. Their fear of losing it led to some of their worst decisions. Contrast this with the life-saving attachments formed by Anakin and Ahsoka.
And so the Jedi went down a slippery slope of compromised morals and rationalization. By season four they’re keeping secrets even from each other. By season five they’re throwing scapegoats under the bus, waiving due process, for political convenience. By season six Yoda pulls a Nixon and orders a cover-up on a scandal that on one hand might expose the Sith plot but on the other hand would have uncertain political ramifications for the Jedi. (Jedi may be brave in the face of laser guns, but they’re cowards in the face of political ramifications, however vague they may be.) By the end of the series they had completely lost their moral bearing as well as their backbones.
In season seven, their chauvinism is most plainly exposed to the audience in a simple condescending gesture, when Yoda addresses Ahsoka by a Jedi title even though she is now a civilian. The encrypted message: Wayward Child, you will one day see the error of your ways and return to us.
That scene in particular — Ahsoka’s last conversation with the Jedi Council — is also one of the best uses of dramatic irony I’ve seen outside of a great piece of literature. Ahsoka had an opportunity to warn the Jedi about Anakin’s pending betrayal. But they once hung her out to dry on a false accusation, and she certainly thought they would do the same to Anakin. Betraying him to the Jedi was out of the question, anyway. So she did the perfectly natural thing and chose to warn Anakin instead. Hence the tragic irony: she didn’t know (but the audience did know) that she had just enough time to warn the Jedi, but not enough time to warn Anakin. So she was too late, and it all went down the way it happened. What a great way to polish off the statement that the Jedi were destroyed as much by their own actions as by the actions of the bad guys!
Sympathy for the Darth
Ahsoka Tano has a huge fan base, but if we’re honest, she is not that interesting by herself. I suspect most of her fans are really fans of Anakin and Ahsoka as a team-up.* In context of just the show by itself, their friendship isn’t the most compelling part — I’d give that award to the clones — but it is one of the most compelling parts of the larger “Skywalker Saga.” Because their friendship is convincing, and because the audience knows it must come to a bad end, it carries a weight that gets heavier the longer the show runs on.
[*This is somewhat unfortunate. I’m still not sure what to think about Star Wars being reduced to a story about a twenty-ish man and his fourteen-ish platonic workwife who calls him Master. He, married or not, should not be given so much autonomy over the supervision of an adolescent, nor be allowed so much alone-time going on adventures with her. But since I seem to be the only one who even slightly acknowledges this abuse-prone elephant in the room, I shall move on…]
I never bought that cock-and-bull nonsense that Anakin and Obi-wan were friends, definitely not in the movies, where it seemed like they couldn’t even stand each other, nor in The Clone Wars, where at best they were like Clint Eastwood and his barber in Gran Torino, always trying to one-up each other with the better trash talk. I also never believed that cringey romance between Anakin and Padme. It was as unconvincing in the TV show as it was in the movies. So there was no pathos, no heartbreak, no sense of tragic loss. Since Anakin himself was unlikeable (insert obligatory it’s-not-the-actor’s-fault statement here), these characters needed to be more believable for a semi-intelligent viewer to care about him.
But those prequel movies now seem like mere live-action companion pieces to The Clone Wars, where the real meat of the story could be found. Ahsoka did for young Anakin in The Clone Wars what Luke Skywalker did for old Anakin in the original trilogy, transforming him from a sometimes insufferable plot element into a sympathetic character. These two — Vader’s son Luke and his prodigy Ahsoka — are the only emotional nodes connecting the audience with Anakin/Darth Vader.
I cannot pin down why Ahsoka was such a convincing best friend for Anakin, nor why their friendship was so poignant. After all, most of the time they were like Linus and Lucy if both of them were Lucy. Their pet names for each other, Skyguy and Snips, force involuntary grimacing. Nevertheless, she seemed like an anchor to him and he… is it a stretch to call him a good role model for her?
Hear me out. The Jedi are weirdos, especially in the movies. They are incomprehensible, on some abstract plane of existence that the audience cannot relate to. They have no business being protagonists. To make Ahsoka be like one of them is to remove whatever qualities make her likeable. (I suspect the live-action series will make this very mistake, but now I’m too StarWars’d out to watch and find out.) Ahsoka was from the start thin-skinned and kind of petty — a refreshing, if sometimes annoying, departure from the boring, stoic Jedi. Her development from this starting point was further influenced by Anakin, the only other Jedi who had a personality. She clearly idolized him*, and tried to model herself after him.
[*How’s this for show-don’t-tell animation? Very often when a scene focused on Anakin instead of Ahsoka, Ahsoka would remain in the shot’s background, batting her starstruck eyes fondly at him and beaming like a kid sister whose big brother just defended her from bullies — but only when the audience’s attention is directed away from her, otherwise she is shown to be more combative towards Anakin, ready to snipe back at one of his criticisms. Clever. You can tell that despite all their bickering she idolized him, but you pick it up subconsciously rather than hear it from awkward dialog.]
So maybe Anakin was not a good role model for her in the how-to-be-a-good-person sense. Rather, he kept her on the audience’s side of the story. He taught her how to be a free thinker, something that the Jedi would disapprove of but which the audience would appreciate. There did seem a point — in fact, quite early on in the series — where Ahsoka’s loyalty was directed more towards Anakin than towards the Jedi. He repaid her loyalty with his own.
The audience knew all along how it would end. Rather than this inevitability being a spoiler, I think it added emotional heft to the show. In the series finale’s closing scene, Anakin as Darth Vader finds Ahsoka’s rusted lightsaber in the snow, regards it for a minute, then carries it away with him. Although the scene contains no dialogue, it reminds me of Macbeth’s “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” speech. Here is the moment where he knows he blew it, and his abject misery is all he has to look forward to for the rest of his life.
So Now I Get It
I finally understand why so many younger fans (which include many people well into their thirties by now) prefer the prequel trilogy — yes, the one with Jar Jar, Rob Roy, mitichlorians, that geisha, and that embarrassingly bad “love story” — even to the point that they say it’s better than the original trilogy!
They’re wrong. But you see, if you say “Star Wars” to someone between the ages of thirty-five and fifty-five, they will probably think of either the 1977 movie or one of its immediate sequels. If you ask who their favorite character is, then (unless they are some kind of completionist freak who will name someone you never heard of like Chelli Lona Aphra) they’ll probably tell you it’s those two robots, since they’re more lifelike than the human characters.
If, on the other hand, you ask a younger person who Ashoka the Great was, unless they’re from India, they will assume you mean Ahsoka Tano. They will have never heard of the 3rd century BC Mauryan emperor who converted to Buddhism after waging a battle that killed a half a million people. After all, the only books they read are series fiction, Percy Jackson, and graphic novels. (We’re all going to hell, by the way.) Zoomers and the younger half of Millennials have grown up in a time when movies no longer dominate pop culture. A brand like Star Wars, to them, is a mash-up of all different kinds of multi-media, no one medium taking precedence over the others.
The prequel movies were bad, at least to someone like me, who until watching The Clone Wars had only ever watched the movies. They were so bad, in fact, that something as banal as a Cartoon Network TV show (now a Disney+ TV show) was actually way better. Like I said, the prequel movies are merely live-action companion pieces to this one show. If you like Anakin in the TV show, you will more quickly overlook his, uh, Anakin–ness in the movies.
With The Clone Wars wrapped up, is animation the way forward for Star Wars (rather than that straight jacket of a “Volume” that the live-action shows are using)? Well let me see… I recall that when Disney bought Lucasfilm, the first thing they did was cancel The Clone Wars and replace it with a cartoon called Star Wars: Rebels. I’ll watch that show and see.
[Three and a half minutes later…]
Well, that’s a nope, I think I’m done with Star Wars for quite some time now.
My Viewing Guide
If You Can Only Watch Eight Episodes
| Season | 5 |
|---|---|
| Episodes |
Revival Eminence Shades of Reason The Lawless |
| Season | 5 |
| Episodes |
Sabotage The Jedi Who Knew Too Much To Catch a Jedi The Wrong Jedi |
These eight episodes are the most compact form of what I consider to be the show’s thesis.
If You Like the Droids Best
| Season | 4 |
|---|---|
| Episodes |
Mercy Mission Nomad Droids |
| Season | 5 |
| Episodes |
A Sunny Day in the Void Missing in Action |
These episodes are a hidden gem. In the season 4 episodes, C3PO and R2D2 go on an adventure that borrows plot points from The Wizard of Oz and Gulliver’s Travels. The satire is a little dated (like, 18th-century dated), but C3PO and R2D2 can make anything funny again. The scene where C3PO tries to establish a Lilliputian democracy, and the conditions leading up to it, is the sort of morbid humor that hardly anyone ever seems to be good at anymore.
Everyone hates the season-five “droid arc,” but everyone is wrong, except me. The two episodes that take place on Abafar are the most enjoyable. Colonel Gascon (I had to look it up) and his droids crash land into “The Void,” whose atmosphere and geography are such that you cannot see the sun or any landmarks. It’s just a flat white plane and an orange sky. It’s so indistinct that Gascon even conjectures that he has died and is in Limbo (which I guess is part of Star Wars theology). As Gascon descends into madness, the droids coldly and indifferently rationalize his behavior. Trust me, it’s funnier than it sounds.
The Crème de la Crème Essentials
These four arcs — sixteen episodes — are the ones to watch if you want to see the best of the show and you are not weird like me (ie you prefer bombast to droid humor). You would get a better appreciation for these episodes if first you are more acquainted with the characters in them. See Other Good Ones below.
The Umbara Arc
| Season | 4 |
|---|---|
| Episodes |
Darkness on Umbara The General Plan of Dissent Carnage of Krell |
Captain Rex and his clones are pressured to mutiny against General Krell, a Jedi who was more than a little inspired by William Bligh. At four episodes, it drags in places, but it is the most interesting and thought-provoking story in The Clone Wars.
Ahsoka Framed
| Season | 5 |
|---|---|
| Episodes |
Sabotage The Jedi Who Knew Too Much To Catch a Jedi The Wrong Jedi |
The Jedi let their virtues shine throughout the show, but their systemic weaknesses are also exposed in ways the movies never made clear. This arc exposes them better than any other.
In addition to being one of the most entertaining arcs in the series, it fills in a huge missing piece of the Anakin puzzle, and informs everything about Ahsoka’s character in the final season.
It’s not the most original man-on-the-run story. One scene in particular will take you right back to The Fugitive (couldn’t they have thought up a more imaginative location than those very planet-earth-looking sewage tunnels?), and you will not have to guess more than once who the real culprit is. But it’s so well paced and so visually stunning (what an intimidating prison!), that this was the show’s best arc until the long-overdue final season was released.
Fives’s Investigation
| Season | 6 |
|---|---|
| Episodes |
The Unknown Conspiracy Fugitive Orders |
This arc does for the Order 66 plot hole what Rogue One did for the “why is the Death Star so easy to destroy” plot hole. Rogue One was unnecessary. If this arc here was necessary, it’s due to bad writing in the first place, because — I’m gonna say it — Order 66 was really dumb writing.
Never mind. This is as much the Clones’ show as the Jedi’s, and the Clones are much more sympathetic, anyway.
Series Finale
| Season | 7 |
|---|---|
| Episodes |
Old Friends Not Forgotten The Phantom Apprentice Shattered Victory and Death |
This is Revenge of the Sith as told from the points of view of Ahsoka, Rex, and Maul. It adds little to the overall story, and it has some major plot holes. Just why does Ahsoka want to depose Maul and replace him with the equally evil and even less competent Bo Katan, and why is she so set on it that she is willing to violate treaties and start a war? This is insanely out of character for her.
But in all other respects, it’s the most Star Wars–y arc of the entire series. I do not consider it hyperbole to declare this finale to be as good as any Star Wars movie ever made.
This is the show’s masterpiece.
Other Good Ones
Trespass
| Season | 1 |
|---|---|
| Episodes | Trespass |
Non-topical space politics is boring and nerdy. Star Trek usually does this sort of thing way better than Star Wars. But I’ll make an exception here.
The peacemaker in this episode, Senator Riyo Chuchi, is the sort of character Padmé should have been. Like Padmé, she is young, idealistic, sort of naïve, and she won’t give up on finding the diplomatic solution, no matter how hopeless it seems. But unlike Padmé, Chuchi really sells the illusion of being a real-life person, as if her disposition, tone of voice, and other idiosyncrasies are informed by her own internal dialogue, not by whatever is in the script for that scene.
The Deserter
| Season | 2 |
|---|---|
| Episodes | The Deserter |
The Clones’ lack of voice or enfranchisement quietly hangs over the entire series, but it’s most explicitly explored in a conversation between Captain Rex and a deserter. Many of the clones on the show, including Rex, seem very proud of who they are and what they fight for, but how much of that is just a coping mechanism for something they know to be true but do not want to acknowledge?
Nightsisters Arc (partial)
| Season | 3 |
|---|---|
| Episodes |
Nightsisters Monster |
Occasionally The Clone Wars spends too much time on its villains without a break. Bad guys are more entertaining than good guys, but that wears off quickly when there aren’t any good guys to contrast them against.
Two episodes aren’t too much, especially when they waste no time. These two accomplish a lot, making them, in my opinion, the show’s greatest arc that isn’t an essential part of the greater story.
To fans of the lore, they turn Asajj Ventress into a sympathetic character, introduce Mother Talzen and Savage Oppress, put the magic back into the Force, and have one of Star Wars’s strangest and most unique lightsaber fights.
But what interests me the most is the striking environment design. They cram so many unforgettable settings into just these two episodes. The Nightsisters’ hellish (in a cold way) lair… The Dathomir arena, whose heavenly bodies turn blood-red in the sky at night… Count Dooku’s home, which on the inside looks kind of like some Brutalist modern-art transit terminal, blanketed in sickly green light… Even the settings in Ventress’s flashback are evocative in a way. The depth and richness of these two episodes’ environment design make them stand out in a TV show that already visually stands out.
Padawan Lost/Wookiee Hunt
| Season | 3 |
|---|---|
| Episodes |
Padawan Lost Wookiee Hunt |
This arc is like a cross between Predator and Richard Conell’s short story “The Most Dangerous Game.” It’s a turning point in a couple of ways.
One, from here on out, the show starts to depict Ahsoka less as Anakin’s lackey and more as her own person. Her California accent is toned down a bit, and her use of stupid nicknames like “Skyguy” quietly disappears. This is the point where you realize that for a while now, she has had things like motivation, personality, and conflicts of her own, and that she has been growing and developing as a human(ish) being. She hasn’t just been the immutable merch character that you initially thought she was — the Bart Simpson wannabe with stupid catch-phrases and that particular flavor of precociousness that you find everywhere in fiction but nowhere in real life. Why didn’t you notice this during an earlier episode? She sort of sneaks up on you like that.
Two, the animation got really good on the “big” episodes from here on out. They didn’t have to show a moving trail of ants in the corner of the screen, but they showed it anyway.
A Friend In Need
| Season | 4 |
|---|---|
| Episodes | A Friend In Need |
Wanna hear a joke? The Clone Wars is rated TVPG. That’s the TV equivalent of Coco’s MPAA rating. Think of that when you watch this episode.
Tbh I didn’t care for this episode. But it does show that for all the friction between Ahsoka and the Jedi, she isn’t perfect and they have their points. Some earlier episode — I forget which — had the line “Do not lose a thousand lives just to save one.” But here she ruins peace talks that could have saved millions, all so she could rescue her teeny-bopper crush from a bind of his own making. Nor does he do anything to return the favor.
Mandalorian Civil War
| Season | 5 |
|---|---|
| Episodes |
Eminence Shades of Reason The Lawless |
This is actually just the best part of a bigger multi-season arc that previously really dragged. Unfortunately, you will have to watch those other episodes to get the big picture.
Satine is not the most interesting heroine, Pre Viszla is not the most interesting villain, and — I’m just going to say it — except in the original 1977 Star Wars, Obi-Wan Kenobi is not that interesting of a Jedi. Maul, interesting though he is, is alive only for fanservice. It spoils the illusion to see him when I know beyond the shadow of a doubt that Obi-Wan killed him in The Phantom Menace. (In an earlier episode there was some phony-baloney talk about surviving because of his hatred and will to live.) How unfortunate that the show spent so much time building up Savage Oppress only to give his spotlight to Maul.
But these three episodes have a different kind of power, in their unflinching depiction of an entire civilization, the Mandalorians, being torn to pieces — right at the moment they were finally beginning to see a glimmer of stability — all because of a perfect storm of bad circumstances, viz. an economy weakened and isolated by the Clone War, a lack of military allies due to their neutrality, a weak pacifist ruler, her weak or corrupt ministers, and evil opportunists who know how to put it all together and press an advantage.
This arc shows what would have really happened to Naboo in The Phantom Menace if it were more true to life.
Most “Clone-centric” Episodes
| Season | Episode | Comments |
|---|---|---|
| 3 | Clone Cadets | |
| 1 | Ambush | |
| 1 | Rookies | |
| 1 | Cloak of Darkness | |
| 1 | Innocents of Ryloth | Middle part of a 3-episode arc that began with Storm Over Ryloth and ended with Liberty on Ryloth. |
| 2 | The Deserter | Already discussed above |
| 3 | ARC Troopers | |
| 4 | The “Umbara” arc | Already discussed above |
| 6 |
The Unknown Conspiracy Fugitive Orders |
Already discussed above |
| 7 |
The Bad Batch A Distant Echo On the Wings of Keeradaks Unfinished Business |
Tbh I didn’t care for this arc. It turned the clones into side-show grotesques. But maybe that was the point. |
A Great Arc that Everyone Seems to Hate
Ahsoka’s Walk-about
| Season | 7 |
|---|---|
| Episodes |
Gone with a Trace Deal No Deal Dangerous Debt Together Again |
This arc is a three-act movie, split four ways. I can see why someone watching it at release time would get frustrated when they saw the end credits roll and they realized it would be at least the week after next before the show would return to something more “epic.” The final season was fully released by the time I got around to watching it, so I had the luxury of watching it the way it should have been seen: like a movie.
It also helps if your tastes are broad enough that you don’t get bored when a Star Wars show tones it down for a few episodes. Must everything be all bombast all the time? Instead of presenting us with, like, the five-hundredth space battle or lightsaber duel, this arc gives us a lightweight crime misadventure. It’s basically the Jon Favreau movie Made, only funnier and less vulgar. Not a second of it was boring.
Guilty Pleasures
Either I like these ones despite knowing they are bad, or I think they are good despite everyone else saying they are bad.
R2D2 vs. R3S6
| Season | 1 |
|---|---|
| Episodes |
Downfall of a Droid Duel of the Droids |
If you like Star Wars but do not like R2D2, what’s wrong with you? He is the most successful “flour-sack” exercise ever, and that’s just his live-action version!
Destroy Malevolence
| Season | 1 |
|---|---|
| Episodes | Destroy Malevolence |
This is a forgettable episode, but I have a soft spot for the battle droids. Like Homer Simpson, they’re stupid in the cleverest ways. This episode has some of their funniest moments.
Cargo of Doom
| Season | 2 |
|---|---|
| Episodes | Cargo of Doom |
Another forgettable episode, except it has the two best lines in the entire series, both of them spoken by droids: “Guess I’m the commander now,” and “It won’t matter.”
Geonosis Arc (second half)
| Season | 2 |
|---|---|
| Episodes |
Legacy of Terror Brain Invaders |
This is to horror what the Gold Rusher at Magic Mountain is to roller coasters: It’s scary enough to be fun, but not scary enough to call “scary.”
Lightsaber Lost
| Season | 2 |
|---|---|
| Episodes | Lightsaber Lost |
“Lightsaber Lost” looks like a 1940s film noir with a cyber-punk color palette — way too good looking for its cutesy story about a Jedi youngling whose lightsaber is stolen by a pick-pocket.
This episode made me acutely aware how popular Venetian blinds are in the Star Wars universe. They are as ubiquitous as railings are not.
The Mace Windu Episodes
| Season | 2 |
|---|---|
| Episodes |
The Zillo Beast The Zillo Beast Strikes Back Death Trap R2 Come Home |
One nitpick I have about The Clone Wars is its treatment of Mace Windu. His character flaws are more interesting than his virtues, so naturally his flaws get explored in the highlight episodes, while his virtues — such as his merciful, chivalrous nature — get relegated to these forgettable episodes. Even worse, the episodes containing by far the best Mace Windu moments (“The Disappeared” in Season 6) are unwatchable, because … Jar Jar.
It’s too bad, because if you skip the Mace Windu episodes you will get the wrong impression and think that he is an arrogant jerk. In fact, he is the very picture of nobility.