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aberration) wrote2020-05-14 12:04 pm
aberration) wrote2020-05-14 12:04 pm
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on her head was a halo, she spoke brimstone and fire
Sorry for yet another absurdly long Star Wars review post, but -
So there's always a lot to unpack about the clones in general, but I want to go back to this – in the prequel movies alone, Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith, it is never stated that the clones had chips in their heads that made them do Order 66. In AOTC there's a line where one of the Kaminoans says they've been "genetically modified" to be completely obedient, but that's it. I went on Wookieepedia to try to find where the chip thing originated, I honestly thought it was going to be something like a visual dictionary or other Extended Universe source, but to my surprise the earliest appearance of it I could find was the Clone Wars "Conspiracy" sixth season arc that aired in 2014. I honestly had a hard time believing this, as I can't remember a time when I didn't know the about the chip and I only watched Clone Wars in its entirety in 2016ish (though I had watched some individual episodes and arcs before that). But I can't find anything that contradicts this timing – a really key part of the canon regarding RotS only became canon nearly a decade after that movie came out.
My only explanation for why I didn't remember things this way is that when RotS originally came out, I hated it and I thought Order 66 was a stupid we-need-to-wrap-this-shit-up Hail Mary from Lucas. Which, if we're being honest about RotS as a movie in itself, I do still think that. So for a long time I didn't really pay much attention to any Extended Universe outcroppings from that movie because a) I am still mad forever and b) it really didn't interest me very much, and I guess at some point during that my brain just filed that information away into it. But I really couldn't believe this and looked through a lot of EU stuff to try to find if they had established it earlier than this – but what I could find of pre-Clone Wars tv show clone material was along the lines of 'this clone didn't do it because he liked his Jedi' or 'uh they were in the Republic Army and then the Imperial Army and something might have happened in between then but we're not discussing it.'
I bring this up because… this is an enormous distinction. 'Naturally obedient' is really, really different from 'brain chip that forces someone to do something against their will.' And now it looks like while previous SW writers of clone-related material just kind of elided the issue, the makers of Clone Wars realized that this just wasn't going to work with the characters they'd made. The clones of the show, at least, simply weren't mindlessly obedient.
(meanwhile there's an old Legends book called Order 66 and somehow every ecopy is checked out of the nypl and bpl how is that possible)
I think there's a tendency particularly in the Internet's favorite gotcha-style media criticism to willingly ignore the meta, real-world context of a work's creative decisions. Why in Star Trek do most aliens look like humans with some limited make up or prosthetics, well because yes we don't have access to real aliens and this show's special effects budget is limited. Same reason why humans are always the main characters in Star Wars movies but in the cartoons you can more freely include aliens. Or how every time we have a solo superhero movie we have to be all 'oh why didn't other superhero show up????' we know why if you want to make an in-universe reason fine but can we not all pretend we don't know basic things in the process?
And in this case, I don’t have the impression that Lucas' ideas behind the clone armies really went beyond 'I need to put something here that will fit with Leia's reference to "the clone wars" in the first movie.' I don't think he considered what exactly it meant to engineer sentient beings to be slave-soldiers, or that by having the Jedi participate in it he was making the Jedi complicit in a massive, violent operation of slavery. And I think that means there's a limitation in the extent to which we can directly address that. Speaking to it most directly, the Jedi were slavers who subjugated and abused thousands of sentient beings, without much in the way of ethical or moral concerns about it beyond a vague recognition that "war is bad." But I don't think this was the story George Lucas meant to tell, I don't think he meant to make the Jedi complicit in something so obviously heinous and I don't think this was the takeaway he wanted his audience to have about the Jedi. So I do think this is one of those instances where to honestly engage with the material, you have to do so from a perspective that recognizes that limitation in the material, and that we can't really look at the clones and the Clone Wars through a real-world lens, but one that presupposes some of the limitations that went into its creation.
This in turn runs up against the issue that while I don't think Lucas meant the Jedi to be complicit in slavery and the broader implications of that, the prequels do have a weird tension in that they seem to want to both revere and criticize the Jedi and don't really do either well. And that raises questions as to what was the original narrative or thematic purpose of Order 66, if it had any at all or as I imagine was just a quick way to get everything where it needed to be plot-wise. Because narratively, I actually think what seems to be the "original" version, that the clones were mindlessly obedient, works better if the purpose of it is to be critical of the Jedi. The Jedi were willing to use and direct obedient slave-soldiers, and then that obedience was turned against them. It's very live by the sword, die by the sword. But a) that presumes an intent to criticize the Jedi that I don't know was there because these movies are a thematic mess and b) 'mindlessly obedient' is just not going to work if the clones are ever going to be given any kind of in-depth characterization. So whatever the original intent, the chip implant storyline changed all that very dramatically. Now a narrative about the Jedi reaping what they sowed doesn't work as precisely, as it's not exactly a feature of the clones that the Jedi themselves abused being turned against them. But also giving the clones more personality now makes more sense, and creates a lot of opportunity for some nice drama.
So I think that's a valid story choice, considering the wider context of the meta limitations on the clone narrative, even if I guess I'm also arguing that it essentially narratively lets the Jedi of the hook for their abuse of the clones. But the other issue for me is that my biggest problems with the Clone Wars tv show have always been that they haven't done enough to address those issues in the prequels. There are a few Jedi characters who are cruel to the clones, or who act in violent opposition to the war, but then it turns out they fell to the Dark side so that doesn't matter. Really I think almost every time I felt like the Clone Wars show might actually address the shortcomings of the prequels in a meaningful way beyond like, making Anakin as a character make any sense (which is not small but also not the point here), it always pulled back on that. And while I've just said I think there's a limitation on how much some of this can be addressed, I think that line was at a point farther than Clone Wars was willing to go, and moreover it was frustrating that it seemed to flirt with that line but refuse to commit. The show either seems to float ideas but then never adequately address them, or have what looks like a big thing happen only to then resolve and revert everything back to the way it was. The big, big, series-defining exception to this was Ahsoka leaving the Jedi.
And. well.
Okay, let's talk about what actually happened in season 7 of Clone Wars.
When it comes to this season – first it's almost kind of hilarious how obvious it is that they had the final four episodes and then were like 'well we need to fill in this other episodes so…' There are three arcs in this season, the Bad Batch arc which really doesn't have much to do with the final arc, and Ahsoka with the Martez sisters which does, for better or worse, lead into the final four episodes. I don't really have much to say about the Bad Batch arc – honestly I have a really hard time tracking everything that happened in the Clone Wars tv show and didn't really remember what had happened to Echo and looking back I'm pretty sure they just changed their minds about him being dead which you know, fine, but if you just stop writing something and then bring it back and don't really address that beyond 'there are comic books' I'm going to find that really confusing, Maul.
Regardless, I didn’t really like the Bad Batch very much because they're just clones with superpowers and one of them looks like Rambo. I'd thought initially that having some superpower would come with some clear weakness, but it doesn’t, so why not just make all the clones have superpowers since apparently it comes with no drawbacks. Moreover, for being characters who are introduced only now and only for this arc, they take up way more space in the story than say, Martez sisters do in Ahsoka's arc. The Echo storyline itself is – it's something I feel like I would find interesting, but the way this story engages with it just doesn't really do anything I found particularly thoughtful. And there were a few lines of dialogue that seemed like they could hint toward things like nature of the clones vs droid battle and how it essentially involved two forces of subjugated sentient beings, not to mention that the whole cybernetic Echo plot in and of itself totally plays into that, and the Bad Batch could have gone into something like 'wow our makers sure experimented on us with uncomfortable consequence' and not 'clones but superpowered.' Or I don't know, something interesting about the clones' culture but instead it's just sometimes the Superpowered Clones sneer at the normies? Anyway, to the extent that any of this is explored, it's all just floated and never addressed to the point that I'm not sure it was ever intentional at all.
Also I'm just going to stick this in here because I just thought of it but if we were going to do this whole 'final season of Clone Wars to sure do a lot of 'hey-remember-this-from-Revenge of the Sith' you could have at least given me a Padmé arc that's basically her deleted scenes of conspiring with Organa and Mothma but you know, not unbelievably boring like those scenes were. Or give me a book about that. But sure she was here for like a second to say something to Anakin and I don't actually remember what the point of that scene was beyond the show being like 'oh Obi-Wan totally knew about that the entire time' well okay.
So, the Ahsoka-Martez sisters arc. I liked the Martez sisters fine, but I didn’t really feel like they were given very much to do, and what could have really been a major narrative purpose for them seemed to be swept away by the end of it. It at least seems like they were designed to contrast with Ahsoka's relatively sheltered existence in the Jedi Temple, which.
Ahsoka comes across the Martez sisters apparently pretty shortly after leaving the Jedi Order (I kind of assumed it was almost immediate, but I don't know). Both Trace and Rafa are introduced by their interest in money – while Trace is a lot more otherwise friendly than Rafa, she also immediately offers to fix Ahsoka's speeder bike in exchange for payment, and continues to bring up how everything has a price, to Ahsoka's clear increasing consternation. And of course, Rafa subsequently ensnares all three of them in a spice running plot in hopes of a big payoff.
The sisters' focus on money, and the idea that everything has its price, and Ahsoka's discomfort with this way of thinking, seems to come to a head when the they reveal why they dislike the Jedi: their home was destroyed and their parents killed in a high speed chase that the Jedi were involved in, and all they were offered as recompense was an empty platitude about the Force. Moreover, in the same episode, after Ahsoka and the sisters escape the imprisonment by the Pyke cartel, Rafa and Ahsoka encounter a beggar who asks for money for food. Rafa snaps at him while Ahsoka stays silent, and literally seconds later, after they've passed him, Ahsoka says "when you find people who need your help, you help them, no matter what. I guess it's just who I am." The beggar subsequently sells out the women to the Pykes, who use his information to recapture them.
So initially, it looks like there's a pretty strong indictment of the Jedi, and Ahsoka in particular, in their disconnect from the Galaxy and the people they're supposed to serve. That the sisters are focused on finding any way they can earn more credits, and Rafa especially takes an 'out for herself (and her sister) and no one else' attitude, may obviously sound gauche to a Jedi who has been taught to focus on selflessness and detachment from material desires. But the Jedi are also sheltered in their temple that consistently serves their immediate needs – the Martez sisters didn't have that luxury. A particularly telling moment is when Ahsoka and Rafa are arguing over delivering the spice they pick up to the Pykes, with Ahsoka vehemently arguing against the delivery. But when Trace takes that decision into her own hands and jettisons the spice, Ahsoka admits that her argument was more about the theorical ethics of what they should do rather than the practical realities of their position. Ahsoka knows it's ethically wrong to be a spice runner, but hasn't had the lived experience of having to make hard choices to support herself and a loved one.
The problem with this is that the arc's resolution doesn't actually address any of this. Ahsoka essentially sacrifices herself to help the sisters escape, and in return they come back to rescue her. Rafa recognizes Ahsoka's sacrifice and it appears to change her outlook on people in general to see that there is someone who would do this for them. The sisters tell Ahsoka she has to go help Bo-Katan and the Mandalorians because helping others is what she does.
And I'm not denying that Ahsoka took an enormous risk to her own life to save the Martez sisters. The problem is that the nature of her actions, and what happens during the remainder of this arc, has nothing to do with the underlying problem of the Jedi Order's disconnect from the practical realities of the Galaxy they're supposed to serve. Yes, Ahsoka saved the sisters' lives – just like those Jedi who crashed a transport in the Martez sisters' home saved the lives of those who would have been killed had the transport hit a landing platform instead. But long term Rafa and Trace still need to survive. I don't know that it's the Jedi Order's responsibility to stamp out poverty, but if the Jedi are so disconnected from reality that they would offer no compensation to the children whose lives they inadvertently destroyed, then there's something very wrong with them. And an arc that has Ahsoka really recognize the way the Jedi Order sheltered her from what Rafa and Trace had to face at a very young age, and the problems that has led to with the Jedi as a whole, seems like an obvious way to go – but that's just not what happens. Instead it just becomes 'and then Ahsoka helped them, and both they and Ahsoka had to recognize that Jedi do help people' even though again Ahsoka's help does not resolve the underlying issue. It doesn't even really resolve the Martez sisters' issues – they're still desperate for credits, and the Pykes are still around even if damaged and presumably still know who they are. I don't actually think every aspect of that had to be resolved, it's just a problem when there's no clear narrative line of what Ahsoka's experiences with the Martez sisters was supposed to teach her. Like, what does Ahsoka learn here? What does she do by the end of this arc that she wouldn't have done before? And what do the Martez sisters learn? Well before it was Not Some Random Stranger who saved them and they ended up poor, but now a Random Stranger did save them and also they're still poor.
The thing is, the scene of Ahsoka ignoring a beggar and then going on to talk about how she always helps people in need was so striking to me, that it would be so sharp in pointing out Ahsoka's own hypocrisy. Which is great! Highlight your characters' flaws and then let them learn from them! But I was also concerned that it wasn't intentional, and looking back on this arc as a whole, I'm afraid that concern turned out to be correct. Reviewing that scene again, I noticed that the beggar is holding a paper-bag-covered-bottle, and I can't help but wonder if I guess him being a drunk is supposed to make him unsympathetic. I'd thought him selling out the women to the Pykes was supposed to be a point about the consequences of the Jedi's disconnect – that for all their high-minded ideals, if they don't actually protect people in the ways they needed to be protected, those people will find other ways to meet those needs. (There's also, I think, a nice potential note in this about the way capitalist dystopias set people in poverty against each other.) But now I'm afraid we're supposed to think it's just as well Rafa and Ahsoka ignored him because he was going to rat them out anyway.
(And as a note, I'm not saying you're a terrible person if you don't give money to every person who ever asks you, I know I'm not great on that score. But immediately following it with a speech about how you always help people in need because that's just who you are as a person really suggests a lack of self-awareness.)
In any case, Ahsoka goes with Bo-Katan to Mandalore, and we get to the final four episodes.
Which, here is what happens – over Mandalore, Ahsoka makes contact with the Jedi Order and asks them to help Bo-Katan and her faction overthrow Mandalore's current puppet ruler and capture Maul. The Jedi are initially reluctant to do so, because Mandalore is technically neutral, but ultimately send Obi-Wan and Anakin to meet with her. Again, they're reluctant, blah blah blah, neutrality, and then they're called back to Coruscant because Revenge of the Sith is starting and Ahsoka criticizes them for "playing politics" over honestly the completely reasonable inclination to prioritize an attack on the Republic capital over what if not for Maul would be an internal conflict on a planet that isn't even part of the Republic, but regardless they assign her a contingent of clone troopers and with the Bo-Katan's fighters Ahsoka and these clones succeed in removing the puppet government and capturing Maul. While Ahsoka and the clones are en route to deliver Maul to Coruscant, Order 66 happens and the clones turn against both Ahsoka and Maul. Ahsoka releases Maul and manages to separate Rex from the others and get his chip out of his head, while Maul fights the other clones and destroys the ships core-hyperdrive-whatever which sets the ship up to crash. Ahsoka and Rex and Maul then have to fight their way through the ship to find a way off it before crashes, which they do and it does. Ahsoka leaves her previously returned-to-her-lightsabers with the downed ship and killed clones, and then there's a Vader scene because I guess of course there is.
So this is all basically information I already knew, but now it's animated. Which there isn't necessarily anything wrong with, but – was there anything new or particularly inventive or imaginative in it? No, I didn't really think there was. And unfortunately I feel like a lot of what did happen undermined Ahsoka's arc in this franchise overall, and especially a lot of her later characterization in Rebels.
So first thing is that I kind of hate that they made 'Fulcrum' a codename Anakin used during the Clone Wars. It works in the context of the story, okay, fine. But before, it was something Ahsoka herself created – I loved how it figured in the early Rebellion, as something Ahsoka started and then others were assigned or adopted, and how this showed her influence among the early rebels. The Fulcrum identity was something she had built for herself and that originated with her, the Fulcrum symbol echoed her presence even when she wasn't immediately there. Now it's just another thing she got from Anakin, just another way literally everything about her has to tie back to Anakin rather than be her own. Can'twomen in this franchise Ahsoka have something she made for herself?
In any case, Ahsoka's meetings with the Jedi concerning Mandalore ultimately, and I feel unfortunately, leave a sense that her absence from the Jedi has been relatively brief, and that she would have already been on a path toward rejoining them if not for Order 66. She has a line about how she's been reminded that The Jedi Are Good Actually, and even though she clearly stops short of rejoining them immediately, referring to herself as a "citizen," she attaches a very notable "yet" to that. This is frustrating to me for a lot of reasons, among which are that nothing in this season really addresses why Ahsoka left in the first place. And yes, I'm very personally inclined to not see this show attempt to quickly undo what had been one of the most daring and defining moments of the series. Ahsoka left when the Jedi abandoned her. She had served them loyally her entire life, subjecting herself to all sorts of harm because she believed in what she had viewed as their cause – and then when she needed them, they weren't just ineffectual, they actively cast her out. When she hadn't even had a trial! Part of what made Ahsoka's decision to leave so effective for me was that I simultaneously felt terrible because watching her leave Anakin was painful, but also gratified because honestly, fuck the Jedi on that one. But setting my feelings aside, that was also a momentous decision on Ahsoka's part, and making it something that seems like it could be undone because of one 'wait I like helping people' experience really trivializes Ahsoka's choice and takes the teeth out of that moment. (which as I think I've mentioned before is something this show does a lot and it's really annoying)
The reasons why Ahsoka left, and the problems with the Jedi in general, are also vaguely mentioned in this season but either kept vague or, as with the Martez arc, just sort of dropped. Ahsoka accuses the Jedi of "playing politics" by running off to help Palpatine, which, okay? But that is a direct assault on the capital of the Republic? Moreover Mandalore is not only neutral, but actually had a war with the Jedi in the past, which also goes to the 'maybe we shouldn't be getting involved in that shit' point, to which the only answer is basically "no you should." That just seems like a completely reasonable thing for the Jedi to focus on, unless we're going to argue that the Jedi shouldn't be so tied directly to the Republic, which is an argument to have and one that the Clone Wars concept in general sort of questions but isn't really one explored here. And if we're going to get into that, we could also address how the Jedi know the Clone Wars was an invented conflict being controlled from both sides, since Obi-Wan says it, and I had to look up when/how the Jedi figured that out and it did happen but also they then deliberately chose to hide it from the Senate which would also be a thing to mention here, but it's not. Like, the problem with the Jedi in these conversations is never discussed in specific terms like lying to the Senate or not understanding the needs of the people they're supposed to serve or turning against one of their own when it was expedient or using slaves if we want to get back to that. It's just vague things like "hypocrisy" and "playing politics" – that’s floating the concept but never committing enough to anything for it to really matter.
(Also side note – the only reason any of them are entertaining any of this is Maul. And again, Maul has no connection to what underlying problems with the Jedi have been vaguely floated in all this. Maul's only history with the Jedi is that they've tried to kill him a lot and failed. He has nothing to do with ignoring the problems of the general public or keeping information from that democratically elected governing body or anything else. Arguably his being a Dark side Force user ex-Sith makes him their responsibility because they're the ones with the power to deal with that but that… would be new. And I guess Maul is a crime lord now and that sort of ties back in with the Martez sisters arc… if what you took away from that arc was that the Jedi should be targeting those who would exploit the poverty that they're already not doing anything about, which. I don't think that's going to go the way you think. So again these things just don't thread together.)
Which, let's get to Ahsoka's reunion with Anakin. Initially she's a little cold to Anakin, but by the end of their interaction the tension was resolved, they are on firmly friendly terms, and –
Look, I get it. I get why it would be so tempting to have an interaction like this to give the Anakin-Ahsoka relationship a sense of closure. I get that I will be wildly in the minority of fans in saying that it shouldn't have happened. But – I don't think it should have happened. Ahsoka leaving Anakin was the perfect ending to their relationship given the overall trajectory of the story. It put Ahsoka on a path of having to come into her own, without the Jedi and without her mentor. It leads very directly into her Rebels characterization as someone who very specifically rejects the Jedi title. And for Anakin, nothing this franchise has produced has better set the stage for his disillusionment with the Jedi Order than Ahsoka's departure. The Anakin of the films is basically just perpetually on the edge of the tantrum, but Anakin in Clone Wars passionately believes in the work of the Jedi, which is why Ahsoka leaving is such a great step to shattering that worldview.
And this interaction, I'm sorry, just completely undoes all of that. Ahsoka returns to Anakin, returns to her position in command of the clones, and accepts her old lightsabers from him. There is this general sense to it that she'll probably come back to the Order as well – she makes this point in front of him about having come back around to seeing the importance the Jedi have in this Galaxy. And while that is uplifting (though I'd maintain that it'd be nice if it had more substance behind it…), it's the absolute opposite of what the overall narrative needs in that moment. That moment that had so perfectly set the stage for Anakin's disillusionment with the Jedi is gone, and now despite this reunion with Ahsoka he's going to turn evil because he didn’t get a promotion and I guess no one knowing about that whole magic healing thing that apparently exists. There even seems to be this idea floated that by happenstance Ahsoka missed the opportunity to speak to him again while RotS was going on, and maybe Things Would Have Been Different if she had, but that just doesn't really mean anything. Their relationship is still resolved, and the discussion around what Anakin's doing in the background doesn't really extend beyond, well, Anakin maybe being uncomfortable with it, not like, hey the Jedi have kept important information from the Senate and are now actively spying on it sort of. So… what. And, well, we'll get to Ahsoka, but the point is that, for me, resolving tension when it doesn't make to do so sense in the narrative is bad, even if it's supposed to make me feel good.
But Anakin and Obi-Wan leave, and Ahsoka and Bo-Katan and the clones and Mandalorians go have their uprising. There are some other nice moments like that the clone contingent with Ahsoka have painted their armor to look like her, or when we get a peek of Ursa Wren with Bo-Katan. But it pretty quickly gets to the point of it all, which is having Ahsoka and Maul talk and then duel. But of course the person Maul was really trying to lure in was Obi-Wan, which I feel like I'd be more invested in if a) we really hadn't beaten the Maul vs. Obi-Wan thing into the ground at this point, which includes one of my least favorite plots in the Clone Wars show and b) this didn't relegate Ahsoka to perpetually walking into narratives between men. But you know whatever fine.
Really the saddest part of Maul-Ahsoka for me was 'wow it would be pretty cool to see this Not-Exactly-a-Sith and Not-Exactly-a-Jedi work together to try to take out Palp- oh wait never mind it's already over.' Way to tease an interesting plot to me and then I guess try to appease me with a lightsaber fight instead. But what's additionally frustrating about this is we have Ahsoka turning away a chance to take down the Sith Lord she knows at this point has concocted the entire Clone Wars (Obi-Wan literally just told her this) because she has to, I guess, fight for Anakin's ~*~honor~*~? They seem to try to rationalize this by having Maul more or less point this out and her answer is that he would've just taken Sidious' place which, really. I really think you could have handled that issue, Ahsoka. I get that no matter what they could only have failed, I just wish there had been a better reason for Ahsoka's choice than Maul Said Something Mean About Anakin, Really Don't You Have Higher Priorities Right Now.
(I want to clarify here that criticizing these decisions isn't criticism of Ahsoka as a character so much as criticism of the writers writing these choices/plots and then making the characters do them.)
I don't have that much to say about the Maul-Ahsoka duel itself because – it's fine, visually, choreographically, etc. it's fine. The ending was good. But these characters don't really know each other and this isn't exactly the culmination of some long-running plot between these two, other than that we all vaguely knew the end of the Clone Wars involved something Ahsoka and Maul on Mandalore. So this is more about our meta knowledge as the audience than it is about what this actually means for these characters, which ohhh I don't like that. And that isn't something I'm very emotionally vested in. Just by comparison even the brief time when Rex is later trying to kill Ahsoka is a lot more emotional and engaging for me.
But moving on, Ahsoka manages to outmaneuver Maul and he's captured. I may have not been that invested and not… liked how it came about, but I'm glad she was able to do that. Anyway they have an update call with the Jedi Council which is another 'look it's from RotS' moment. After it there is this point made about how Ahsoka doesn't share Maul's claims that Anakin will fall to the Dark side. I don't really know if this is meant to be highlighting that maybe Ahsoka let her feelings for Anakin affect her judgment (which I'm not opposed to but -) or just in general that Ahsoka cares about Anakin (which I already know…). The thing is though, in this moment, Ahsoka doesn't really have any reason to doubt Anakin or believe Maul. Because, and I cannot stress this enough –
Clone Wars Anakin is c o m p l e t e l y different from Prequel Trilogy Anakin
Which is a good thing, because Prequel Trilogy Anakin is just not a viable character. (And I put that squarely on Lucas – Anakin was always going to be a tricky character to pull off, someone who was genuinely heroic but also believably capable of his slide into villainy, but on top of that Lucas is not good at characters.) This show just wasn't going to work without a major reimagining of that character, and that's what happened. You can argue that this vision of Anakin is what Lucas intended, but it's what Dave Filoni and Matt Lanter and this crew actually created. And that character, even at his worst like around that guy-Padme-used-to-date-but-no-she-didn't-I'm-not-looking-his-name-up ugh okay I remember it's Clovis, doesn't square with the guy who went on a whiny rant about how he committed mass murder, or about how it's not fair the Jedi Council didn't make him a Master too. Here is what Anakin does in these final four episodes:
- Calmly helps Obi-Wan out when he's cornered by Separatists, in coordination with Rex
- Makes gentle and by all means patient overtures toward Ahsoka toward restarting their friendship (seriously, movies Anakin would never have forgiven Ahsoka for leaving in the first place)
- Actually acts as the level-headed peacemaker between Ahsoka and Obi-Wan when they're sort of arguing
- Looks vaguely uncomfortable when Obi-Wan says he has to prioritize his duty to the Jedi over his feelings for Satine
- Oh and offscreen is unhappy the Jedi Council asks him to spy on Palpatine and then turns evil bye
I'm not complaining that the Anakin we see here isn't tying in with his characterization in RotS because really, we are so beyond that point, all I could reasonably expect here was again a character who was both heroic and also showed that capacity to be tempted toward the Dark, and they did that with Anakin, even if how I could imagine that eventual fall going was not going to match its depiction in the movies. But if we're going to make this point about Ahsoka not sharing what Maul said about Anakin, I just don’t think it lands very effectively when Ahsoka just has been given no reason to think Anakin's on the edge of turning to the Dark side. It may also be why I find it unpersuasive as reason for Ahsoka to fight Maul – sure, it might be in character for Ahsoka to do it just out of some brash sense of honor and loyalty, but it's not something that has any reason to hit some preexisting fear or sensitivity Ahsoka had that her Master might betray the Jedi. Besides, idk, ~the Force~.
(Also, even if she'd told them, I don't know what difference it would have made. From here Anakin reports to Mace Windu that Palpatine is the Sith Lord, which is a HUGE SHOCK to Mace Windu even though if we go by what this show says he knew it really shouldn’t be, and then Anakin isn't even with the group that initially tries to arrest Palpatine. What would they have done differently based on the information 'this guy we have no reason to trust says maybe Anakin will turn bad'? Locked him up based on that? Mace Windu might have been slightly more prepared for that possibility when Anakin walked in on him fighting Palpatine? ehn.)
So they say goodbye to the Mandalorians and pack Maul up in a Hannibal box to take to Coruscant. (I did like the brief mention that Mandalore had this specifically anti-Force-user tech developed during the war with the Jedi.) After the ship has sets out, Ahsoka and Rex talk briefly, with Rex making perfectly interesting comments about the mixed feelings the clones have on the war, as obviously most would have wanted the war to have never happened, but the clones wouldn't exist if it hadn't. These were also so brief they were included in their entirety in the preview for this season. And then they receive the Order 66 signal. Rex resists it long enough to tell Ahsoka to follow up on what happened with Fives, so that she's able to find out what's going on and force Rex into a medical bay so she can get his chip out.
(Not really important but as Rex in Rebels said "I didn't betray my Jedi" I guess I'd assumed he and Gregor and Wolfe had somehow removed theirs on their own before Order 66. Obviously this is more dramatic. And also Ahsoka and Maul aren't Jedi but given that this seems to now be more of an activation code rather than an actual order, I can go with 'magic chip can make this include two people Palpatine would definitely want dead.' But that's… going to be relevant… later.)
This, however, does lead to probably my biggest objection to this season, at least as to its internal narrative – the finale ultimately rests on the idea that Ahsoka refuses to kill the other clones. Even when it's clear that they're all going to die anyway, she isn't going to be the one to kill them.
So, side note that this felt a little jarring after having just actually watched RotS, which includes a scene where Yoda straight up decapitates some clones without hesitation or qualm. Fair enough, the story has changed in the last fifteen years. But -
Ahsoka released Maul. She did it because, as she says herself, she wants him to be a distraction. She knows perfectly well that Maul will kill clones once she has released him, and that he would do something to fuck up the ship and cause it to crash is completely foreseeable. This isn't a comparatively speculative argument like, could Ahsoka have prevented the Empire had she just gone with Maul to kill Palpatine. There is a direct line of consequence between Ahsoka releasing Maul and the deaths of those clones, and one that Ahsoka not only anticipated but to some extent counted on. She may not have thought he'd take down the entire ship, but again, some clones were definitely going to die in her plan here, and him crashing the ship was totally foreseeable.
So for all that the show makes this big, moral-high-ground point that Ahsoka isn't going to kill the clones directly, I'm sorry, she is still responsible for their deaths. The ship crashed because she set Maul loose. And yes, you can argue that she didn't really have a choice, that giving the clones someone else to fight was the only way she could maybe at least rescue Rex and survive herself, but that's also true even if she had just directly killed them herself. And I get why they didn't want to do 'and then Ahsoka and Rex just kill all the other clones' because yes that would have been super dark no thank you, but you don't get to make this moral high ground (HIGH GROUND) point about it. There is no difference between Ahsoka killing clones to save herself, and her using Maul to do it.
(And again, this isn't meant to be criticism of Ahsoka, I'm not even saying what she did was wrong, I'm just saying you can't make it A Thing That She Won't Kill Clones. She did.)
So Maul, freed from the box, kills clones and destroys the ship's core drive thing, and in doing so sets off a race between him and Rex and Ahsoka to find a way off the ship before it crashes. (They can't just use escape pods because while still mind-controlled Rex has those all jettisoned.) They all manage to find some shuttle they can use, the ship crashes, Maul escapes off to keeping being a crime boss while Ahsoka and Rex apparently go to the crash site and set up a memorial for the clones before… leaving together? I'm assuming since they only have the one shuttle?
There's a lingering, silent sequence where Ahsoka stands among the ashes of the crash and the memorial they've set up for the clones, seems to ponder her lightsaber, and then drops it among the wreckage. And I don't… feel very confident… about what this is meant to signify. Have her feelings on the Jedi reversed again in the aftermath of Order 66 and the end of the Clone Wars? Or is she simply recognizing that she'll have to leave whatever part of that life she still had behind now? Because if it's the latter, then she's not really different from Kanan or any other Jedi survivor who went into hiding after Order 66.
And this isn't a small point, at least when it comes to her portrayal in Rebels. That show makes a pretty big deal of Ahsoka actively choosing to not be a Jedi. She refuses to help Kanan and Ezra open the Jedi Temple on Lothal, and there's a very big climactic moment where she declares "I am no Jedi." And all of that feels really undermined by this season's indications that Ahsoka would have returned to the Jedi if not for Order 66 – and that ending didn't really do anything to suggest otherwise. You could, well, make up that the final experience of Order 66 more settled her against the Jedi identity, but there's just nothing concrete to suggest that, not even her leaving the lightsaber behind. And the bottom line is that the two clearest elements of Ahsoka's character that were not tied to anyone else (by which I mean Anakin), that were parts of her identity that she'd forged for herself, were the Fulcrum codename and "I am no Jedi" (compared to people like Kanan or Ezra or Luke, who embraced the Jedi identity despite having either left it behind before, or never actually having been part of the old Jedi Order in the first place). And this season undermined or straight up removed both of those.
Also – and ohhhhhhhhh remember I said this when I spent so much of this damn post talking about Ahsoka not getting to build things for herself or like, have a plot that isn't wandering into Movie Male Character plots or something, but - mmm. I. Just. Maybe this Clone Memorial image should have involved Rex more than him just. Looking sadly at Ahsoka. Considering it's. He's the clone. mmm.
So, some general comments:
- It was interesting to see how the animation retained the heavy stylization of Clone Wars (as opposed to Rebels) while also clearly having a bigger budget. Also Disney prudishness is bad except when it forces these animators to come up with interesting female character designs that don't rely on revealing clothing, I'm just saying.
- I could put in here that in Rebels it's also kind of important that Ahsoka hadn't known what happened to Anakin, whereas here she clearly does unless we're supposed to think she couldn't put all that information/feeling him fall to the Dark side together, but. Whatever.
- A lot of this has been complaining when my actual feelings fall somewhere in the vicinity of… fine. It's fine. I didn't have a lot of specific expectations for this going in and… well okay I could have done without the 'let's undo some really compelling aspects of Ahsoka.' But the parts of this I liked most tended to be when we had some bit of world building like I guess here is the King of Kessel that's a thing, or the Mandalorian box thing. But the reason I liked it was because it was the only time I really felt like I was getting something new. Otherwise this was mostly just telling me stuff I already knew and I don’t want that. But that's. My opinion.
- Also I'm hard on this show for not interrogating the prequels and the problems with the Jedi and etc. enough but that's because it half-asses it. If it didn't do it at all I don't even know that I'd care that much, but it just floats these ideas and then drops or otherwise doesn't follow up on them so we can go back to comfortable familiarity and that bugs the crap out of me.
- This apparently contradicts a bunch of stuff from the Ahsoka novel that I'd forgotten anyway and unlike the Rebels stuff I wouldn’t consider most of it that important, the only thing I regret from what I've read is that apparently in that novel Ahsoka and Rex put another clone's body in Rex's armor to make it look like he and Ahsoka had killed each other and that's kind of badass???
- While writing this I started making a lot of mental comparisons to Rise of Skywalker. Which, to be clear, that is an incoherent disaster of a movie, and this is not that. This season is coherent and everything internally makes sense and like I said above, you know, fine. But I did feel that sense of, 'things that will make fans feel good' need to be prioritized over all else. Even if it doesn't really add anything or make sense in the context of the overall story. This kind of approach is also extremely risk-averse – again, I essentially knew everything that happened here before watching it, and nothing about this season gave me some new perspective or insight into what I already knew. And yes, as a fan I can enjoy the occasional little reference or cool imagery. But god am I sick of these attempts at what are really fan placation, especially because if nothing else, it's certainly not me they're placating to. Is this what I'm supposed to want? For a story to never challenge me, to never expand or change from what I already knew about it?
Given that I opened this with a really long thing about the clones and Order 66, I didn't actually talk about the clones very much when describing this season because uh, the arc that was nominally about them was more about Superpowered Clones and then. They did things. Over there.
But fun news, I put a hold on that Order 66 book that was somehow checked out of both of my libraries???? and it came through while I was writing this. Sorry to whomever I'm guessing was just checking it out over and over. I haven't and am not going to read the whole thing, but I did flip through to find what I was looking for. This is an old Legends novel from 2008 written by Karen Traviss, who wrote numerous novels and other material about the clones and Mandalorians in the old continuity and then I think had a kind of falling out over things shifting to the Clone Wars show.
But, it did answer my question as to how pre-Clone Wars handled Order 66. And that is that it was an order and the clones mostly just obeyed it. That's it. There were no brain chips, they weren't compelled to do it. The book actually includes this whole paragraph about how they're not mindlessly obeying orders, that soldiers make a conscious voluntary decision to suppress individual choice because they have an obligation to act on the commands of democratically-elected leaders, which – there's a lot to unpack there, among which the issues of 'just following orders' and also that clones are not citizens of a democratic government who have volunteered or been conscripted – but I'm just going to set that aside for a moment. Order 66 is one of 150 contingency orders the clones memorized as children, that was set up in case the Jedi went rogue and turned against the Republic, with the justification for it being that it has to be a kill order because Jedi are too powerful to simply detain. And there are several clones who just don't do it. In one squad there's a clone who's married to a Jedi (which can I say – eugh – there's a lot – I don't – issues with that -), and the squad's reaction is basically "uh yeah no, we're just going to go get her to safety and let the other clones… deal with this…" But yeah, that's it. It's not really either 'genetically modified to be obedient' or brain chip, they just do it.
I'm not bringing this up because I have any strong preference about it really, I just find it interesting to look at how these creators developed the clones and how they reconciled that with what happens in the prequels, which do not at all develop the clones and didn't really care about them. I did think Traviss' version was interesting because I liked seeing the clones portrayed as really considering this order and their rationalizations for following it. On the other hand, come on, if nothing else these rationalizations just don't cover the murder of children.
The brain chip thing, by contrast, is maybe a little less interesting on that one specific point, but is also a cleaner, neater, creates plenty of super dramatic possibilities and works better with what's shown in RotS. And the conspiracy was cool and honestly I wish this season had been like, those few minutes where Ahsoka had to uncover what happened to Fives but you know, that for the whole season and she's tragically too late to do anything about it. And we could have also had the Maul-Mandalore thing yeah I know just, more Ahsoka uncovering things instead of Obi-Wan telling her things over the phone, I don't know. I like conspiracies, it's dramatic, and it's pretty plot tidy aside from making mind control chips a Thing in this universe which is extremely plot-breaking but I sure was willing to just brush that aside as 'it's only developed for clone DNA' or something until Chuck Wendig used it in Aftermath and uuuuuuuuuuuuuuugh I did not like that. But. Okay.
I'm focusing on this because it shows how Traviss and Filoni correctly concluded that they weren't going to be able to tell engaging stories about the clones if they were just the personality-free cannon fodder the way Lucas largely left them, presumably because again, he needed to make a nearly three-decade-old line of dialogue make sense. And that means even redefining what those movies were depicting sometimes years after the fact, because the story those movies were telling has now also changed dramatically. Being… not good, the prequel movies present an interesting opportunity to do that kind of revisionist storytelling – which is what Clone Wars did, even if I also think it backed down way more often on that than it should have.
Anyway, that is my very long Clone Wars comments. I also finished the Black Spire novel and am combining that with my comments on the Galaxy's Edge park, so my next post will be mostly positive! And hopefully include pictures, we'll see if Someone lets me share my photo of her being interrogated by Stormtroopers for the second time in one day.
(Also it is incidentally George Lucas's birthday today, ah. Happy Birthday! I'd maybe feel more bad about being so casually critical but you have $5 billion and wouldn't let Princess Leia wear a bra so I think you'll be okay.)
So there's always a lot to unpack about the clones in general, but I want to go back to this – in the prequel movies alone, Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith, it is never stated that the clones had chips in their heads that made them do Order 66. In AOTC there's a line where one of the Kaminoans says they've been "genetically modified" to be completely obedient, but that's it. I went on Wookieepedia to try to find where the chip thing originated, I honestly thought it was going to be something like a visual dictionary or other Extended Universe source, but to my surprise the earliest appearance of it I could find was the Clone Wars "Conspiracy" sixth season arc that aired in 2014. I honestly had a hard time believing this, as I can't remember a time when I didn't know the about the chip and I only watched Clone Wars in its entirety in 2016ish (though I had watched some individual episodes and arcs before that). But I can't find anything that contradicts this timing – a really key part of the canon regarding RotS only became canon nearly a decade after that movie came out.
My only explanation for why I didn't remember things this way is that when RotS originally came out, I hated it and I thought Order 66 was a stupid we-need-to-wrap-this-shit-up Hail Mary from Lucas. Which, if we're being honest about RotS as a movie in itself, I do still think that. So for a long time I didn't really pay much attention to any Extended Universe outcroppings from that movie because a) I am still mad forever and b) it really didn't interest me very much, and I guess at some point during that my brain just filed that information away into it. But I really couldn't believe this and looked through a lot of EU stuff to try to find if they had established it earlier than this – but what I could find of pre-Clone Wars tv show clone material was along the lines of 'this clone didn't do it because he liked his Jedi' or 'uh they were in the Republic Army and then the Imperial Army and something might have happened in between then but we're not discussing it.'
I bring this up because… this is an enormous distinction. 'Naturally obedient' is really, really different from 'brain chip that forces someone to do something against their will.' And now it looks like while previous SW writers of clone-related material just kind of elided the issue, the makers of Clone Wars realized that this just wasn't going to work with the characters they'd made. The clones of the show, at least, simply weren't mindlessly obedient.
(meanwhile there's an old Legends book called Order 66 and somehow every ecopy is checked out of the nypl and bpl how is that possible)
I think there's a tendency particularly in the Internet's favorite gotcha-style media criticism to willingly ignore the meta, real-world context of a work's creative decisions. Why in Star Trek do most aliens look like humans with some limited make up or prosthetics, well because yes we don't have access to real aliens and this show's special effects budget is limited. Same reason why humans are always the main characters in Star Wars movies but in the cartoons you can more freely include aliens. Or how every time we have a solo superhero movie we have to be all 'oh why didn't other superhero show up????' we know why if you want to make an in-universe reason fine but can we not all pretend we don't know basic things in the process?
And in this case, I don’t have the impression that Lucas' ideas behind the clone armies really went beyond 'I need to put something here that will fit with Leia's reference to "the clone wars" in the first movie.' I don't think he considered what exactly it meant to engineer sentient beings to be slave-soldiers, or that by having the Jedi participate in it he was making the Jedi complicit in a massive, violent operation of slavery. And I think that means there's a limitation in the extent to which we can directly address that. Speaking to it most directly, the Jedi were slavers who subjugated and abused thousands of sentient beings, without much in the way of ethical or moral concerns about it beyond a vague recognition that "war is bad." But I don't think this was the story George Lucas meant to tell, I don't think he meant to make the Jedi complicit in something so obviously heinous and I don't think this was the takeaway he wanted his audience to have about the Jedi. So I do think this is one of those instances where to honestly engage with the material, you have to do so from a perspective that recognizes that limitation in the material, and that we can't really look at the clones and the Clone Wars through a real-world lens, but one that presupposes some of the limitations that went into its creation.
This in turn runs up against the issue that while I don't think Lucas meant the Jedi to be complicit in slavery and the broader implications of that, the prequels do have a weird tension in that they seem to want to both revere and criticize the Jedi and don't really do either well. And that raises questions as to what was the original narrative or thematic purpose of Order 66, if it had any at all or as I imagine was just a quick way to get everything where it needed to be plot-wise. Because narratively, I actually think what seems to be the "original" version, that the clones were mindlessly obedient, works better if the purpose of it is to be critical of the Jedi. The Jedi were willing to use and direct obedient slave-soldiers, and then that obedience was turned against them. It's very live by the sword, die by the sword. But a) that presumes an intent to criticize the Jedi that I don't know was there because these movies are a thematic mess and b) 'mindlessly obedient' is just not going to work if the clones are ever going to be given any kind of in-depth characterization. So whatever the original intent, the chip implant storyline changed all that very dramatically. Now a narrative about the Jedi reaping what they sowed doesn't work as precisely, as it's not exactly a feature of the clones that the Jedi themselves abused being turned against them. But also giving the clones more personality now makes more sense, and creates a lot of opportunity for some nice drama.
So I think that's a valid story choice, considering the wider context of the meta limitations on the clone narrative, even if I guess I'm also arguing that it essentially narratively lets the Jedi of the hook for their abuse of the clones. But the other issue for me is that my biggest problems with the Clone Wars tv show have always been that they haven't done enough to address those issues in the prequels. There are a few Jedi characters who are cruel to the clones, or who act in violent opposition to the war, but then it turns out they fell to the Dark side so that doesn't matter. Really I think almost every time I felt like the Clone Wars show might actually address the shortcomings of the prequels in a meaningful way beyond like, making Anakin as a character make any sense (which is not small but also not the point here), it always pulled back on that. And while I've just said I think there's a limitation on how much some of this can be addressed, I think that line was at a point farther than Clone Wars was willing to go, and moreover it was frustrating that it seemed to flirt with that line but refuse to commit. The show either seems to float ideas but then never adequately address them, or have what looks like a big thing happen only to then resolve and revert everything back to the way it was. The big, big, series-defining exception to this was Ahsoka leaving the Jedi.
And. well.
Okay, let's talk about what actually happened in season 7 of Clone Wars.
When it comes to this season – first it's almost kind of hilarious how obvious it is that they had the final four episodes and then were like 'well we need to fill in this other episodes so…' There are three arcs in this season, the Bad Batch arc which really doesn't have much to do with the final arc, and Ahsoka with the Martez sisters which does, for better or worse, lead into the final four episodes. I don't really have much to say about the Bad Batch arc – honestly I have a really hard time tracking everything that happened in the Clone Wars tv show and didn't really remember what had happened to Echo and looking back I'm pretty sure they just changed their minds about him being dead which you know, fine, but if you just stop writing something and then bring it back and don't really address that beyond 'there are comic books' I'm going to find that really confusing, Maul.
Regardless, I didn’t really like the Bad Batch very much because they're just clones with superpowers and one of them looks like Rambo. I'd thought initially that having some superpower would come with some clear weakness, but it doesn’t, so why not just make all the clones have superpowers since apparently it comes with no drawbacks. Moreover, for being characters who are introduced only now and only for this arc, they take up way more space in the story than say, Martez sisters do in Ahsoka's arc. The Echo storyline itself is – it's something I feel like I would find interesting, but the way this story engages with it just doesn't really do anything I found particularly thoughtful. And there were a few lines of dialogue that seemed like they could hint toward things like nature of the clones vs droid battle and how it essentially involved two forces of subjugated sentient beings, not to mention that the whole cybernetic Echo plot in and of itself totally plays into that, and the Bad Batch could have gone into something like 'wow our makers sure experimented on us with uncomfortable consequence' and not 'clones but superpowered.' Or I don't know, something interesting about the clones' culture but instead it's just sometimes the Superpowered Clones sneer at the normies? Anyway, to the extent that any of this is explored, it's all just floated and never addressed to the point that I'm not sure it was ever intentional at all.
Also I'm just going to stick this in here because I just thought of it but if we were going to do this whole 'final season of Clone Wars to sure do a lot of 'hey-remember-this-from-Revenge of the Sith' you could have at least given me a Padmé arc that's basically her deleted scenes of conspiring with Organa and Mothma but you know, not unbelievably boring like those scenes were. Or give me a book about that. But sure she was here for like a second to say something to Anakin and I don't actually remember what the point of that scene was beyond the show being like 'oh Obi-Wan totally knew about that the entire time' well okay.
So, the Ahsoka-Martez sisters arc. I liked the Martez sisters fine, but I didn’t really feel like they were given very much to do, and what could have really been a major narrative purpose for them seemed to be swept away by the end of it. It at least seems like they were designed to contrast with Ahsoka's relatively sheltered existence in the Jedi Temple, which.
Ahsoka comes across the Martez sisters apparently pretty shortly after leaving the Jedi Order (I kind of assumed it was almost immediate, but I don't know). Both Trace and Rafa are introduced by their interest in money – while Trace is a lot more otherwise friendly than Rafa, she also immediately offers to fix Ahsoka's speeder bike in exchange for payment, and continues to bring up how everything has a price, to Ahsoka's clear increasing consternation. And of course, Rafa subsequently ensnares all three of them in a spice running plot in hopes of a big payoff.
The sisters' focus on money, and the idea that everything has its price, and Ahsoka's discomfort with this way of thinking, seems to come to a head when the they reveal why they dislike the Jedi: their home was destroyed and their parents killed in a high speed chase that the Jedi were involved in, and all they were offered as recompense was an empty platitude about the Force. Moreover, in the same episode, after Ahsoka and the sisters escape the imprisonment by the Pyke cartel, Rafa and Ahsoka encounter a beggar who asks for money for food. Rafa snaps at him while Ahsoka stays silent, and literally seconds later, after they've passed him, Ahsoka says "when you find people who need your help, you help them, no matter what. I guess it's just who I am." The beggar subsequently sells out the women to the Pykes, who use his information to recapture them.
So initially, it looks like there's a pretty strong indictment of the Jedi, and Ahsoka in particular, in their disconnect from the Galaxy and the people they're supposed to serve. That the sisters are focused on finding any way they can earn more credits, and Rafa especially takes an 'out for herself (and her sister) and no one else' attitude, may obviously sound gauche to a Jedi who has been taught to focus on selflessness and detachment from material desires. But the Jedi are also sheltered in their temple that consistently serves their immediate needs – the Martez sisters didn't have that luxury. A particularly telling moment is when Ahsoka and Rafa are arguing over delivering the spice they pick up to the Pykes, with Ahsoka vehemently arguing against the delivery. But when Trace takes that decision into her own hands and jettisons the spice, Ahsoka admits that her argument was more about the theorical ethics of what they should do rather than the practical realities of their position. Ahsoka knows it's ethically wrong to be a spice runner, but hasn't had the lived experience of having to make hard choices to support herself and a loved one.
The problem with this is that the arc's resolution doesn't actually address any of this. Ahsoka essentially sacrifices herself to help the sisters escape, and in return they come back to rescue her. Rafa recognizes Ahsoka's sacrifice and it appears to change her outlook on people in general to see that there is someone who would do this for them. The sisters tell Ahsoka she has to go help Bo-Katan and the Mandalorians because helping others is what she does.
And I'm not denying that Ahsoka took an enormous risk to her own life to save the Martez sisters. The problem is that the nature of her actions, and what happens during the remainder of this arc, has nothing to do with the underlying problem of the Jedi Order's disconnect from the practical realities of the Galaxy they're supposed to serve. Yes, Ahsoka saved the sisters' lives – just like those Jedi who crashed a transport in the Martez sisters' home saved the lives of those who would have been killed had the transport hit a landing platform instead. But long term Rafa and Trace still need to survive. I don't know that it's the Jedi Order's responsibility to stamp out poverty, but if the Jedi are so disconnected from reality that they would offer no compensation to the children whose lives they inadvertently destroyed, then there's something very wrong with them. And an arc that has Ahsoka really recognize the way the Jedi Order sheltered her from what Rafa and Trace had to face at a very young age, and the problems that has led to with the Jedi as a whole, seems like an obvious way to go – but that's just not what happens. Instead it just becomes 'and then Ahsoka helped them, and both they and Ahsoka had to recognize that Jedi do help people' even though again Ahsoka's help does not resolve the underlying issue. It doesn't even really resolve the Martez sisters' issues – they're still desperate for credits, and the Pykes are still around even if damaged and presumably still know who they are. I don't actually think every aspect of that had to be resolved, it's just a problem when there's no clear narrative line of what Ahsoka's experiences with the Martez sisters was supposed to teach her. Like, what does Ahsoka learn here? What does she do by the end of this arc that she wouldn't have done before? And what do the Martez sisters learn? Well before it was Not Some Random Stranger who saved them and they ended up poor, but now a Random Stranger did save them and also they're still poor.
The thing is, the scene of Ahsoka ignoring a beggar and then going on to talk about how she always helps people in need was so striking to me, that it would be so sharp in pointing out Ahsoka's own hypocrisy. Which is great! Highlight your characters' flaws and then let them learn from them! But I was also concerned that it wasn't intentional, and looking back on this arc as a whole, I'm afraid that concern turned out to be correct. Reviewing that scene again, I noticed that the beggar is holding a paper-bag-covered-bottle, and I can't help but wonder if I guess him being a drunk is supposed to make him unsympathetic. I'd thought him selling out the women to the Pykes was supposed to be a point about the consequences of the Jedi's disconnect – that for all their high-minded ideals, if they don't actually protect people in the ways they needed to be protected, those people will find other ways to meet those needs. (There's also, I think, a nice potential note in this about the way capitalist dystopias set people in poverty against each other.) But now I'm afraid we're supposed to think it's just as well Rafa and Ahsoka ignored him because he was going to rat them out anyway.
(And as a note, I'm not saying you're a terrible person if you don't give money to every person who ever asks you, I know I'm not great on that score. But immediately following it with a speech about how you always help people in need because that's just who you are as a person really suggests a lack of self-awareness.)
In any case, Ahsoka goes with Bo-Katan to Mandalore, and we get to the final four episodes.
Which, here is what happens – over Mandalore, Ahsoka makes contact with the Jedi Order and asks them to help Bo-Katan and her faction overthrow Mandalore's current puppet ruler and capture Maul. The Jedi are initially reluctant to do so, because Mandalore is technically neutral, but ultimately send Obi-Wan and Anakin to meet with her. Again, they're reluctant, blah blah blah, neutrality, and then they're called back to Coruscant because Revenge of the Sith is starting and Ahsoka criticizes them for "playing politics" over honestly the completely reasonable inclination to prioritize an attack on the Republic capital over what if not for Maul would be an internal conflict on a planet that isn't even part of the Republic, but regardless they assign her a contingent of clone troopers and with the Bo-Katan's fighters Ahsoka and these clones succeed in removing the puppet government and capturing Maul. While Ahsoka and the clones are en route to deliver Maul to Coruscant, Order 66 happens and the clones turn against both Ahsoka and Maul. Ahsoka releases Maul and manages to separate Rex from the others and get his chip out of his head, while Maul fights the other clones and destroys the ships core-hyperdrive-whatever which sets the ship up to crash. Ahsoka and Rex and Maul then have to fight their way through the ship to find a way off it before crashes, which they do and it does. Ahsoka leaves her previously returned-to-her-lightsabers with the downed ship and killed clones, and then there's a Vader scene because I guess of course there is.
So this is all basically information I already knew, but now it's animated. Which there isn't necessarily anything wrong with, but – was there anything new or particularly inventive or imaginative in it? No, I didn't really think there was. And unfortunately I feel like a lot of what did happen undermined Ahsoka's arc in this franchise overall, and especially a lot of her later characterization in Rebels.
So first thing is that I kind of hate that they made 'Fulcrum' a codename Anakin used during the Clone Wars. It works in the context of the story, okay, fine. But before, it was something Ahsoka herself created – I loved how it figured in the early Rebellion, as something Ahsoka started and then others were assigned or adopted, and how this showed her influence among the early rebels. The Fulcrum identity was something she had built for herself and that originated with her, the Fulcrum symbol echoed her presence even when she wasn't immediately there. Now it's just another thing she got from Anakin, just another way literally everything about her has to tie back to Anakin rather than be her own. Can't
In any case, Ahsoka's meetings with the Jedi concerning Mandalore ultimately, and I feel unfortunately, leave a sense that her absence from the Jedi has been relatively brief, and that she would have already been on a path toward rejoining them if not for Order 66. She has a line about how she's been reminded that The Jedi Are Good Actually, and even though she clearly stops short of rejoining them immediately, referring to herself as a "citizen," she attaches a very notable "yet" to that. This is frustrating to me for a lot of reasons, among which are that nothing in this season really addresses why Ahsoka left in the first place. And yes, I'm very personally inclined to not see this show attempt to quickly undo what had been one of the most daring and defining moments of the series. Ahsoka left when the Jedi abandoned her. She had served them loyally her entire life, subjecting herself to all sorts of harm because she believed in what she had viewed as their cause – and then when she needed them, they weren't just ineffectual, they actively cast her out. When she hadn't even had a trial! Part of what made Ahsoka's decision to leave so effective for me was that I simultaneously felt terrible because watching her leave Anakin was painful, but also gratified because honestly, fuck the Jedi on that one. But setting my feelings aside, that was also a momentous decision on Ahsoka's part, and making it something that seems like it could be undone because of one 'wait I like helping people' experience really trivializes Ahsoka's choice and takes the teeth out of that moment. (which as I think I've mentioned before is something this show does a lot and it's really annoying)
The reasons why Ahsoka left, and the problems with the Jedi in general, are also vaguely mentioned in this season but either kept vague or, as with the Martez arc, just sort of dropped. Ahsoka accuses the Jedi of "playing politics" by running off to help Palpatine, which, okay? But that is a direct assault on the capital of the Republic? Moreover Mandalore is not only neutral, but actually had a war with the Jedi in the past, which also goes to the 'maybe we shouldn't be getting involved in that shit' point, to which the only answer is basically "no you should." That just seems like a completely reasonable thing for the Jedi to focus on, unless we're going to argue that the Jedi shouldn't be so tied directly to the Republic, which is an argument to have and one that the Clone Wars concept in general sort of questions but isn't really one explored here. And if we're going to get into that, we could also address how the Jedi know the Clone Wars was an invented conflict being controlled from both sides, since Obi-Wan says it, and I had to look up when/how the Jedi figured that out and it did happen but also they then deliberately chose to hide it from the Senate which would also be a thing to mention here, but it's not. Like, the problem with the Jedi in these conversations is never discussed in specific terms like lying to the Senate or not understanding the needs of the people they're supposed to serve or turning against one of their own when it was expedient or using slaves if we want to get back to that. It's just vague things like "hypocrisy" and "playing politics" – that’s floating the concept but never committing enough to anything for it to really matter.
(Also side note – the only reason any of them are entertaining any of this is Maul. And again, Maul has no connection to what underlying problems with the Jedi have been vaguely floated in all this. Maul's only history with the Jedi is that they've tried to kill him a lot and failed. He has nothing to do with ignoring the problems of the general public or keeping information from that democratically elected governing body or anything else. Arguably his being a Dark side Force user ex-Sith makes him their responsibility because they're the ones with the power to deal with that but that… would be new. And I guess Maul is a crime lord now and that sort of ties back in with the Martez sisters arc… if what you took away from that arc was that the Jedi should be targeting those who would exploit the poverty that they're already not doing anything about, which. I don't think that's going to go the way you think. So again these things just don't thread together.)
Which, let's get to Ahsoka's reunion with Anakin. Initially she's a little cold to Anakin, but by the end of their interaction the tension was resolved, they are on firmly friendly terms, and –
Look, I get it. I get why it would be so tempting to have an interaction like this to give the Anakin-Ahsoka relationship a sense of closure. I get that I will be wildly in the minority of fans in saying that it shouldn't have happened. But – I don't think it should have happened. Ahsoka leaving Anakin was the perfect ending to their relationship given the overall trajectory of the story. It put Ahsoka on a path of having to come into her own, without the Jedi and without her mentor. It leads very directly into her Rebels characterization as someone who very specifically rejects the Jedi title. And for Anakin, nothing this franchise has produced has better set the stage for his disillusionment with the Jedi Order than Ahsoka's departure. The Anakin of the films is basically just perpetually on the edge of the tantrum, but Anakin in Clone Wars passionately believes in the work of the Jedi, which is why Ahsoka leaving is such a great step to shattering that worldview.
And this interaction, I'm sorry, just completely undoes all of that. Ahsoka returns to Anakin, returns to her position in command of the clones, and accepts her old lightsabers from him. There is this general sense to it that she'll probably come back to the Order as well – she makes this point in front of him about having come back around to seeing the importance the Jedi have in this Galaxy. And while that is uplifting (though I'd maintain that it'd be nice if it had more substance behind it…), it's the absolute opposite of what the overall narrative needs in that moment. That moment that had so perfectly set the stage for Anakin's disillusionment with the Jedi is gone, and now despite this reunion with Ahsoka he's going to turn evil because he didn’t get a promotion and I guess no one knowing about that whole magic healing thing that apparently exists. There even seems to be this idea floated that by happenstance Ahsoka missed the opportunity to speak to him again while RotS was going on, and maybe Things Would Have Been Different if she had, but that just doesn't really mean anything. Their relationship is still resolved, and the discussion around what Anakin's doing in the background doesn't really extend beyond, well, Anakin maybe being uncomfortable with it, not like, hey the Jedi have kept important information from the Senate and are now actively spying on it sort of. So… what. And, well, we'll get to Ahsoka, but the point is that, for me, resolving tension when it doesn't make to do so sense in the narrative is bad, even if it's supposed to make me feel good.
But Anakin and Obi-Wan leave, and Ahsoka and Bo-Katan and the clones and Mandalorians go have their uprising. There are some other nice moments like that the clone contingent with Ahsoka have painted their armor to look like her, or when we get a peek of Ursa Wren with Bo-Katan. But it pretty quickly gets to the point of it all, which is having Ahsoka and Maul talk and then duel. But of course the person Maul was really trying to lure in was Obi-Wan, which I feel like I'd be more invested in if a) we really hadn't beaten the Maul vs. Obi-Wan thing into the ground at this point, which includes one of my least favorite plots in the Clone Wars show and b) this didn't relegate Ahsoka to perpetually walking into narratives between men. But you know whatever fine.
Really the saddest part of Maul-Ahsoka for me was 'wow it would be pretty cool to see this Not-Exactly-a-Sith and Not-Exactly-a-Jedi work together to try to take out Palp- oh wait never mind it's already over.' Way to tease an interesting plot to me and then I guess try to appease me with a lightsaber fight instead. But what's additionally frustrating about this is we have Ahsoka turning away a chance to take down the Sith Lord she knows at this point has concocted the entire Clone Wars (Obi-Wan literally just told her this) because she has to, I guess, fight for Anakin's ~*~honor~*~? They seem to try to rationalize this by having Maul more or less point this out and her answer is that he would've just taken Sidious' place which, really. I really think you could have handled that issue, Ahsoka. I get that no matter what they could only have failed, I just wish there had been a better reason for Ahsoka's choice than Maul Said Something Mean About Anakin, Really Don't You Have Higher Priorities Right Now.
(I want to clarify here that criticizing these decisions isn't criticism of Ahsoka as a character so much as criticism of the writers writing these choices/plots and then making the characters do them.)
I don't have that much to say about the Maul-Ahsoka duel itself because – it's fine, visually, choreographically, etc. it's fine. The ending was good. But these characters don't really know each other and this isn't exactly the culmination of some long-running plot between these two, other than that we all vaguely knew the end of the Clone Wars involved something Ahsoka and Maul on Mandalore. So this is more about our meta knowledge as the audience than it is about what this actually means for these characters, which ohhh I don't like that. And that isn't something I'm very emotionally vested in. Just by comparison even the brief time when Rex is later trying to kill Ahsoka is a lot more emotional and engaging for me.
But moving on, Ahsoka manages to outmaneuver Maul and he's captured. I may have not been that invested and not… liked how it came about, but I'm glad she was able to do that. Anyway they have an update call with the Jedi Council which is another 'look it's from RotS' moment. After it there is this point made about how Ahsoka doesn't share Maul's claims that Anakin will fall to the Dark side. I don't really know if this is meant to be highlighting that maybe Ahsoka let her feelings for Anakin affect her judgment (which I'm not opposed to but -) or just in general that Ahsoka cares about Anakin (which I already know…). The thing is though, in this moment, Ahsoka doesn't really have any reason to doubt Anakin or believe Maul. Because, and I cannot stress this enough –
Clone Wars Anakin is c o m p l e t e l y different from Prequel Trilogy Anakin
Which is a good thing, because Prequel Trilogy Anakin is just not a viable character. (And I put that squarely on Lucas – Anakin was always going to be a tricky character to pull off, someone who was genuinely heroic but also believably capable of his slide into villainy, but on top of that Lucas is not good at characters.) This show just wasn't going to work without a major reimagining of that character, and that's what happened. You can argue that this vision of Anakin is what Lucas intended, but it's what Dave Filoni and Matt Lanter and this crew actually created. And that character, even at his worst like around that guy-Padme-used-to-date-but-no-she-didn't-I'm-not-looking-his-name-up ugh okay I remember it's Clovis, doesn't square with the guy who went on a whiny rant about how he committed mass murder, or about how it's not fair the Jedi Council didn't make him a Master too. Here is what Anakin does in these final four episodes:
- Calmly helps Obi-Wan out when he's cornered by Separatists, in coordination with Rex
- Makes gentle and by all means patient overtures toward Ahsoka toward restarting their friendship (seriously, movies Anakin would never have forgiven Ahsoka for leaving in the first place)
- Actually acts as the level-headed peacemaker between Ahsoka and Obi-Wan when they're sort of arguing
- Looks vaguely uncomfortable when Obi-Wan says he has to prioritize his duty to the Jedi over his feelings for Satine
- Oh and offscreen is unhappy the Jedi Council asks him to spy on Palpatine and then turns evil bye
I'm not complaining that the Anakin we see here isn't tying in with his characterization in RotS because really, we are so beyond that point, all I could reasonably expect here was again a character who was both heroic and also showed that capacity to be tempted toward the Dark, and they did that with Anakin, even if how I could imagine that eventual fall going was not going to match its depiction in the movies. But if we're going to make this point about Ahsoka not sharing what Maul said about Anakin, I just don’t think it lands very effectively when Ahsoka just has been given no reason to think Anakin's on the edge of turning to the Dark side. It may also be why I find it unpersuasive as reason for Ahsoka to fight Maul – sure, it might be in character for Ahsoka to do it just out of some brash sense of honor and loyalty, but it's not something that has any reason to hit some preexisting fear or sensitivity Ahsoka had that her Master might betray the Jedi. Besides, idk, ~the Force~.
(Also, even if she'd told them, I don't know what difference it would have made. From here Anakin reports to Mace Windu that Palpatine is the Sith Lord, which is a HUGE SHOCK to Mace Windu even though if we go by what this show says he knew it really shouldn’t be, and then Anakin isn't even with the group that initially tries to arrest Palpatine. What would they have done differently based on the information 'this guy we have no reason to trust says maybe Anakin will turn bad'? Locked him up based on that? Mace Windu might have been slightly more prepared for that possibility when Anakin walked in on him fighting Palpatine? ehn.)
So they say goodbye to the Mandalorians and pack Maul up in a Hannibal box to take to Coruscant. (I did like the brief mention that Mandalore had this specifically anti-Force-user tech developed during the war with the Jedi.) After the ship has sets out, Ahsoka and Rex talk briefly, with Rex making perfectly interesting comments about the mixed feelings the clones have on the war, as obviously most would have wanted the war to have never happened, but the clones wouldn't exist if it hadn't. These were also so brief they were included in their entirety in the preview for this season. And then they receive the Order 66 signal. Rex resists it long enough to tell Ahsoka to follow up on what happened with Fives, so that she's able to find out what's going on and force Rex into a medical bay so she can get his chip out.
(Not really important but as Rex in Rebels said "I didn't betray my Jedi" I guess I'd assumed he and Gregor and Wolfe had somehow removed theirs on their own before Order 66. Obviously this is more dramatic. And also Ahsoka and Maul aren't Jedi but given that this seems to now be more of an activation code rather than an actual order, I can go with 'magic chip can make this include two people Palpatine would definitely want dead.' But that's… going to be relevant… later.)
This, however, does lead to probably my biggest objection to this season, at least as to its internal narrative – the finale ultimately rests on the idea that Ahsoka refuses to kill the other clones. Even when it's clear that they're all going to die anyway, she isn't going to be the one to kill them.
So, side note that this felt a little jarring after having just actually watched RotS, which includes a scene where Yoda straight up decapitates some clones without hesitation or qualm. Fair enough, the story has changed in the last fifteen years. But -
Ahsoka released Maul. She did it because, as she says herself, she wants him to be a distraction. She knows perfectly well that Maul will kill clones once she has released him, and that he would do something to fuck up the ship and cause it to crash is completely foreseeable. This isn't a comparatively speculative argument like, could Ahsoka have prevented the Empire had she just gone with Maul to kill Palpatine. There is a direct line of consequence between Ahsoka releasing Maul and the deaths of those clones, and one that Ahsoka not only anticipated but to some extent counted on. She may not have thought he'd take down the entire ship, but again, some clones were definitely going to die in her plan here, and him crashing the ship was totally foreseeable.
So for all that the show makes this big, moral-high-ground point that Ahsoka isn't going to kill the clones directly, I'm sorry, she is still responsible for their deaths. The ship crashed because she set Maul loose. And yes, you can argue that she didn't really have a choice, that giving the clones someone else to fight was the only way she could maybe at least rescue Rex and survive herself, but that's also true even if she had just directly killed them herself. And I get why they didn't want to do 'and then Ahsoka and Rex just kill all the other clones' because yes that would have been super dark no thank you, but you don't get to make this moral high ground (HIGH GROUND) point about it. There is no difference between Ahsoka killing clones to save herself, and her using Maul to do it.
(And again, this isn't meant to be criticism of Ahsoka, I'm not even saying what she did was wrong, I'm just saying you can't make it A Thing That She Won't Kill Clones. She did.)
So Maul, freed from the box, kills clones and destroys the ship's core drive thing, and in doing so sets off a race between him and Rex and Ahsoka to find a way off the ship before it crashes. (They can't just use escape pods because while still mind-controlled Rex has those all jettisoned.) They all manage to find some shuttle they can use, the ship crashes, Maul escapes off to keeping being a crime boss while Ahsoka and Rex apparently go to the crash site and set up a memorial for the clones before… leaving together? I'm assuming since they only have the one shuttle?
There's a lingering, silent sequence where Ahsoka stands among the ashes of the crash and the memorial they've set up for the clones, seems to ponder her lightsaber, and then drops it among the wreckage. And I don't… feel very confident… about what this is meant to signify. Have her feelings on the Jedi reversed again in the aftermath of Order 66 and the end of the Clone Wars? Or is she simply recognizing that she'll have to leave whatever part of that life she still had behind now? Because if it's the latter, then she's not really different from Kanan or any other Jedi survivor who went into hiding after Order 66.
And this isn't a small point, at least when it comes to her portrayal in Rebels. That show makes a pretty big deal of Ahsoka actively choosing to not be a Jedi. She refuses to help Kanan and Ezra open the Jedi Temple on Lothal, and there's a very big climactic moment where she declares "I am no Jedi." And all of that feels really undermined by this season's indications that Ahsoka would have returned to the Jedi if not for Order 66 – and that ending didn't really do anything to suggest otherwise. You could, well, make up that the final experience of Order 66 more settled her against the Jedi identity, but there's just nothing concrete to suggest that, not even her leaving the lightsaber behind. And the bottom line is that the two clearest elements of Ahsoka's character that were not tied to anyone else (by which I mean Anakin), that were parts of her identity that she'd forged for herself, were the Fulcrum codename and "I am no Jedi" (compared to people like Kanan or Ezra or Luke, who embraced the Jedi identity despite having either left it behind before, or never actually having been part of the old Jedi Order in the first place). And this season undermined or straight up removed both of those.
Also – and ohhhhhhhhh remember I said this when I spent so much of this damn post talking about Ahsoka not getting to build things for herself or like, have a plot that isn't wandering into Movie Male Character plots or something, but - mmm. I. Just. Maybe this Clone Memorial image should have involved Rex more than him just. Looking sadly at Ahsoka. Considering it's. He's the clone. mmm.
So, some general comments:
- It was interesting to see how the animation retained the heavy stylization of Clone Wars (as opposed to Rebels) while also clearly having a bigger budget. Also Disney prudishness is bad except when it forces these animators to come up with interesting female character designs that don't rely on revealing clothing, I'm just saying.
- I could put in here that in Rebels it's also kind of important that Ahsoka hadn't known what happened to Anakin, whereas here she clearly does unless we're supposed to think she couldn't put all that information/feeling him fall to the Dark side together, but. Whatever.
- A lot of this has been complaining when my actual feelings fall somewhere in the vicinity of… fine. It's fine. I didn't have a lot of specific expectations for this going in and… well okay I could have done without the 'let's undo some really compelling aspects of Ahsoka.' But the parts of this I liked most tended to be when we had some bit of world building like I guess here is the King of Kessel that's a thing, or the Mandalorian box thing. But the reason I liked it was because it was the only time I really felt like I was getting something new. Otherwise this was mostly just telling me stuff I already knew and I don’t want that. But that's. My opinion.
- Also I'm hard on this show for not interrogating the prequels and the problems with the Jedi and etc. enough but that's because it half-asses it. If it didn't do it at all I don't even know that I'd care that much, but it just floats these ideas and then drops or otherwise doesn't follow up on them so we can go back to comfortable familiarity and that bugs the crap out of me.
- This apparently contradicts a bunch of stuff from the Ahsoka novel that I'd forgotten anyway and unlike the Rebels stuff I wouldn’t consider most of it that important, the only thing I regret from what I've read is that apparently in that novel Ahsoka and Rex put another clone's body in Rex's armor to make it look like he and Ahsoka had killed each other and that's kind of badass???
- While writing this I started making a lot of mental comparisons to Rise of Skywalker. Which, to be clear, that is an incoherent disaster of a movie, and this is not that. This season is coherent and everything internally makes sense and like I said above, you know, fine. But I did feel that sense of, 'things that will make fans feel good' need to be prioritized over all else. Even if it doesn't really add anything or make sense in the context of the overall story. This kind of approach is also extremely risk-averse – again, I essentially knew everything that happened here before watching it, and nothing about this season gave me some new perspective or insight into what I already knew. And yes, as a fan I can enjoy the occasional little reference or cool imagery. But god am I sick of these attempts at what are really fan placation, especially because if nothing else, it's certainly not me they're placating to. Is this what I'm supposed to want? For a story to never challenge me, to never expand or change from what I already knew about it?
Given that I opened this with a really long thing about the clones and Order 66, I didn't actually talk about the clones very much when describing this season because uh, the arc that was nominally about them was more about Superpowered Clones and then. They did things. Over there.
But fun news, I put a hold on that Order 66 book that was somehow checked out of both of my libraries???? and it came through while I was writing this. Sorry to whomever I'm guessing was just checking it out over and over. I haven't and am not going to read the whole thing, but I did flip through to find what I was looking for. This is an old Legends novel from 2008 written by Karen Traviss, who wrote numerous novels and other material about the clones and Mandalorians in the old continuity and then I think had a kind of falling out over things shifting to the Clone Wars show.
But, it did answer my question as to how pre-Clone Wars handled Order 66. And that is that it was an order and the clones mostly just obeyed it. That's it. There were no brain chips, they weren't compelled to do it. The book actually includes this whole paragraph about how they're not mindlessly obeying orders, that soldiers make a conscious voluntary decision to suppress individual choice because they have an obligation to act on the commands of democratically-elected leaders, which – there's a lot to unpack there, among which the issues of 'just following orders' and also that clones are not citizens of a democratic government who have volunteered or been conscripted – but I'm just going to set that aside for a moment. Order 66 is one of 150 contingency orders the clones memorized as children, that was set up in case the Jedi went rogue and turned against the Republic, with the justification for it being that it has to be a kill order because Jedi are too powerful to simply detain. And there are several clones who just don't do it. In one squad there's a clone who's married to a Jedi (which can I say – eugh – there's a lot – I don't – issues with that -), and the squad's reaction is basically "uh yeah no, we're just going to go get her to safety and let the other clones… deal with this…" But yeah, that's it. It's not really either 'genetically modified to be obedient' or brain chip, they just do it.
I'm not bringing this up because I have any strong preference about it really, I just find it interesting to look at how these creators developed the clones and how they reconciled that with what happens in the prequels, which do not at all develop the clones and didn't really care about them. I did think Traviss' version was interesting because I liked seeing the clones portrayed as really considering this order and their rationalizations for following it. On the other hand, come on, if nothing else these rationalizations just don't cover the murder of children.
The brain chip thing, by contrast, is maybe a little less interesting on that one specific point, but is also a cleaner, neater, creates plenty of super dramatic possibilities and works better with what's shown in RotS. And the conspiracy was cool and honestly I wish this season had been like, those few minutes where Ahsoka had to uncover what happened to Fives but you know, that for the whole season and she's tragically too late to do anything about it. And we could have also had the Maul-Mandalore thing yeah I know just, more Ahsoka uncovering things instead of Obi-Wan telling her things over the phone, I don't know. I like conspiracies, it's dramatic, and it's pretty plot tidy aside from making mind control chips a Thing in this universe which is extremely plot-breaking but I sure was willing to just brush that aside as 'it's only developed for clone DNA' or something until Chuck Wendig used it in Aftermath and uuuuuuuuuuuuuuugh I did not like that. But. Okay.
I'm focusing on this because it shows how Traviss and Filoni correctly concluded that they weren't going to be able to tell engaging stories about the clones if they were just the personality-free cannon fodder the way Lucas largely left them, presumably because again, he needed to make a nearly three-decade-old line of dialogue make sense. And that means even redefining what those movies were depicting sometimes years after the fact, because the story those movies were telling has now also changed dramatically. Being… not good, the prequel movies present an interesting opportunity to do that kind of revisionist storytelling – which is what Clone Wars did, even if I also think it backed down way more often on that than it should have.
Anyway, that is my very long Clone Wars comments. I also finished the Black Spire novel and am combining that with my comments on the Galaxy's Edge park, so my next post will be mostly positive! And hopefully include pictures, we'll see if Someone lets me share my photo of her being interrogated by Stormtroopers for the second time in one day.
(Also it is incidentally George Lucas's birthday today, ah. Happy Birthday! I'd maybe feel more bad about being so casually critical but you have $5 billion and wouldn't let Princess Leia wear a bra so I think you'll be okay.)