The Clone Wars’ Final Season Fiddles in Mediocrity — Until The Final Four Episodes
It’s no secret that I’m not that big of a Star Wars fan — I would be considered, by the hardcores, as a casual one. As a child, I wasn’t really drawn into the lore of Star Wars, I was more obsessed with Marvel & DC Comics. Heck, I’m not afraid to admit that Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017, Rian Johnson) is the best film of the franchise — and the best film of 2017. If the “fans” who like to whine about everything and nothing from the universe want to tell me that it “ruined” the franchise with its “SJW propaganda”, so be it. I wasn’t keen on the idea of a new Star Wars film each year (and I’m glad this is buried in the ground due to Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018, Ron Howard) bombing at the box-office), but Johnson’s film felt like a true breath of fresh air, that wasn’t afraid to challenge its audience and say “this doesn’t matter” and/or “who cares?”. It’s a shame that J.J. Abrams had to bend the knee and attempt to please everyone in the disaster that is 2019’s Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. With The Last Jedi, I haven’t felt this pleased, this satisfied, at a Star Wars property since Cartoon Network’s incredible The Clone Wars (2008–2013, Netflix, 2014). The series has some of the best Star Wars content ever, and if you never jumped on the bandwagon, I highly suggest you get a Disney+ subscription and do so — especially if you’re a fan of The Skywalker Saga. When a new (and final) season of The Clone Wars was announced for Disney+, fans everywhere united (for once) to get excited about Star Wars again. With the season finally released and completed, I’m afraid to admit that it was a rather disappointing end to an otherwise epic show.
*Mild spoilers ahead*
The first two story arcs of its final season, The Bad Batch and Ahsoka’s Journey, are some of the most pointless filler the series has to offer. I know that The Clone Wars’ structure is non-linear, 3–4 episode arcs, that chronicle the beginning and end of The Clone Wars, taking place between Attack of the Clones (2002, George Lucas) and Revenge of the Sith (2005, George Lucas), but there’s no sense of finality or a path to finality. While The Bad Batch arc is fun, reintroducing the familiar elements of the show (Kevin Kiner’s rousing theme, Tom Kane’s voiceover narration, and quickly powerful episodes), there is nothing new and/or interesting that moves the story of The Clone Wars forward, compared to the past six seasons of the show that moved every important character forward and properly fleshed them out. It’s enjoyable, I guess, to see malfunctioned Clones try and track down Echo with some beautiful looking animation and fantastically staged action sequences that do exalt and represent what Star Wars is all about, but everything feels so weightless and/or pointless.
The pointlessness that was brought upon The Bad Batch continues in the dull and terribly unnecessary Ahsoka’s Journey — in which the titular character (voiced again by Ashley Eckstein) leaves The Jedi Order to do what exactly?!? Hang out with two of the dumbest (if not THE DUMBEST) characters in Star Wars history — rivaling Toro Calican (Jake Cannavale) from The Mandalorian (2019, Disney+) and even Jar Jar Binks (Ahmed Best), who progressively gets better and more likeable in episodes of The Clone Wars. Allow me to introduce The Martez Sisters: Trace (Brigitte Kali) and Rafa (Elizabeth Rodrigiuez). Both of these characters follow the tropes and characteristics of a bad horror movie — they never think with their head before accepting (or doing) anything, they always think with their rear, which makes the four episodes with Ahsoka dealing with two brainless characters incredibly head-scratching and frustrating to watch. None of these episodes felt like Star Wars — aside from the incredibly sparse appearences of Bo Katan (Katee Sackhoff) and Darth Maul (Sam Witwer). You can accept the return of TCW with a paint-by-numbers, brainlessly enjoyable arc like The Bad Batch, to refamiliarize the audience members with its lore and tropes, but after waiting for SEVEN YEARS to see the return of the most popular character of the series and, instead of making her feel regret or some sort of anguish from leaving the Jedi Order, she hangs out with two characters nobody’s heard of before whom the fans seem to universally dislike. They all have their reasons — except for their non-SJW looks (not a valid reason to dislike them). The way they’re written and interact with Ahsoka makes it inherently painful to watch — and that goes on for four weeks.
Thankfully, once Dave Filoni tortures your mind for four weeks, thinking this predicament will never end, out he comes with a CGI flip and a minor autistic Palpatine screech to deliver what could possibly the greatest Clone Wars of all-time: The Siege of Mandalore. Right when I thought all hope was lost, out comes this:
Then, the John Williams Star Wars theme kicks in — and a huge smile came on my face and never went away for the next four weeks. Every episode of that particular arc was pure cinematic bliss — as it finally went beyond traditional television settings to leap into cinema kinetics. The duel between Ahsoka and Darth Maul is top tier Star Wars, and one of the best duels in the history of the franchise. What’s most interesting about this scene is that it was done for real, via motion capture (provided by the great Ray Park) — which allows a greater study (and use) of movement that go beyond the normal conventions of animation. Every frame in The Siege of Mandalore is as gorgeous and full of visual power as its last, a rare sight to see in many Star Wars animated TV shows. The way it perfectly ties into Revenge of the Sith is another plus, without needing to be explicit and offering the right amount of tie-ins to get the audience locked-in. When Order 66 kicks in, Captain Rex (Dee Bradley Baker) suffers a form of psychological angst, a brief moment of hesitation before the inhibitor chip takes over. That brief moment, alone, is one for the ages and allows us to deepen more with the clones, who are more than machines who respond and conform to a precise set of commands by their maker. They know something is wrong, but become helpless as their pre-programmed code takes over and they must bend the knee and conform, like machines in the world who are taught to follow methodology or they’ll never go far in life. It’s a poignant moment — and the series could’ve stopped there as far as I’m concerned.
The final scene of the show doesn’t neatly wrap-up The Clone Wars, because it doesn’t need to. The story doesn’t end here — as explicitly told by the images we see in the end: the Clones become Stormtroopers, Anakin (Matt Lanter) becomes Darth Vader and will bring fear to the Galaxy until Luke (Mark Hamill) shows him the light in Return of the Jedi (1983, Richard Marquand). It’s a shame that most of the final season is spent on underwhelming and unnecessary fluff that amount to nothing. However, if you want to see how The Clone Wars ends and ties into Revenge of the Sith, then I highly recommend watching The Siege of Mandalore. The rest you can skip.
✯✯✯
