What I Rewatched to Watch The Clone Wars Season 7

[starlady]

Perhaps naively, I was not fully prepared for the level of feelings raised by my anticipation for the start of The Clone Wars' final season last week. It's been…a really long time since I was fully anticipating new Star Wars content when it came out. I was hopeful for The Last Jedi, but not all-in; I totally missed The Clone Wars when it first came out and didn't get onboard with Rebels until early in S4. Maybe it was 2002, for Attack of the Clones? In any case, a really long time.

(My top three Star Wars regrets: not seeing The Clone Wars movie in the theaters, not going to Celebration in Japan, missing the costume exhibit. But I really only blame myself for that last one.)

But! The resurrection of TCW was a very good excuse for a rewatch. I didn't have time to rewatch the whole show, which is a shame, because picking and choosing the arcs I did really brought home to me how as the show went on all of its disparate threads were playing into some powerful statements about the saga overall. If you like Star Wars and you haven't seen The Clone Wars, you absolutely must. Do it in the chronological order. 

I prioritized Ahsoka, Maul, and Mandalore in my selection, which meant that some backstory to some of the elements in these episodes got cut. In particular, there's almost no Asajj in these episodes, which is really unfortunate because she has one of the most interesting arcs in the saga. There's also very little Padmé, which is a shame as TCW really fleshes out her and Anakin's relationship believably and gives her a lot of the political scenes that were cut from the movies. The advantage of this selection, however, is that most of these episodes are also backstory to stuff in Rebels.

The Movies

• The Phantom Menace - Screw machete order, this is a movie that holds up and introduces quite a lot of backstory which informs everything else that happens in the original six movies. Also Padmé was never better than she was here, and the lightsaber duel at the end is one of the best in the saga.
• Attack of the Clones - This movie has problems, but it's not as bad as popular culture remembers and parts of it are quite good. And in terms of the saga, it's probably the original tragedy of everything that happens later. Be sure to watch Padmé's speech to the Senate, which was unfortunately deleted. 

The Clone Wars

• The Clone Wars - Once Ahsoka stepped off the shuttle onto Chrystophsis, the saga would never be the same.
• Second Geonosis arc (205-08) - Some of the biggest war scenes in the show and a standout set of episodes, including the introduction of Barriss Offee. 
• Duchess of Mandalore arc (212-14) - Hey, did you know that Obi-Wan did the exact same thing that Anakin did as a teenage padawan, namely falling in love with a young female planetary ruler? Gee, it's almost like they were and are very similar!
• Corruption on Mandalore arc (305-06) - If we ever find out what happened to Korkie Kryze, I don't think it will be good.
• Mortis (315-17) - A strange, momentous set of episodes full of weird Force shit and a crux for Ahsoka in particular, whose path is unquestionably altered by her experiences.
• The Citadel (318-20) - The episodes that made me sit up and realize just how far the Jedi were willing to go in the war, and just how much it had cost them even before the end. Also, Tarkin was clearly born The Worst™.
• A Friend in Need (414) - Did you forget about Death Watch and the Darksaber? Dave Filoni didn't!
• Rako Hardeen/Crisis on Naboo (415-18) - Maybe faking your death and lying to your closest friends is bad? Just maybe!
• Brothers/The Fall of Mandalore (421-22, 501, 514-16) - You don't know the power of the dark side.
• The Wrong Jedi (517-20) - Never become so desperate as to trust the untrustworthy.
• Sifo Dyas and Qui-Gon Jinn (610-13) - It's difficult to overstate how much the revelations of "The Lost One" mean for the saga as a whole, particularly for Dooku. Unfortunately even some of the tie-in writers haven't seen this episode or don't understand what it means. But everything here is essential for understanding what came before and what happens after. Also, Yoda forgives himself too readily and goes too far in what he learns from the Force priestesses. A lot of things are actually his fault.

The End

• Revenge of the Sith - This story happened a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. It is already over. Nothing can be done to change it.

Comments

[sovay]

(I have a long disquisition about what went wrong with AotC in particular, but I'll spare you.)

I don't mind. I didn't enjoy it as a movie, but I always enjoy hearing how things do or don't work.

[starlady]

Overarching statement about the prequel movies: the story, the casting, and the production are all extremely good. The writing, the directing, and the editing (not coincidentally, the parts Lucas handled himself, whereas in the original trilogy he either had help or had other people take over completely) are all much weaker.

Overarching problem with AOTC: there was a lot of blowback about there being too much politics in TPM, with the result that there is not enough politics in AOTC. Obi-Wan's space Nancy Drew plotline is actually extremely relevant, but not in a way that's clear, and Padmé being sidelined on Naboo and Tatooine takes screentime from what's happening on Coruscant.

Additionally, AOTC has the same problem as TLJ, which is that a key vertex of the trio (Obi-Wan/Padme and Finn/Poe, respectively) is split up because the writer couldn't figure out how to have them on screen together without their chemistry being too obvious. The result is that Obi-Wan and Padmé have two scenes together without Anakin in the entire saga (three if you count another one that was cut from ROTS), all of them about Anakin in some way. And that's it. I've never seen any of the Lucasfilm types talk about this, but the fact that it extends into TCW is strong evidence that this came from George himself, especially since at one point during the writing of AOTC he was reportedly considering doing a full-blown love triangle. Which I don't endorse per se, but would have solved that problem of them being two key figures who never interact. (In ESB, by contrast, the trio is split up for reasons that make sense within the plot and support the overarching conflict of the story.)

Two more specific comments: AOTC was Hayden Christensen's first major role, he got absolutely no direction from Lucas, and he didn't have the experience to bring more to the part like Portman and McGregor did. Also, the droid foundry sequence is completely pointless and should have been adapted into some kind of action sequence that actually served the plot.

[sovay]

The writing, the directing, and the editing (not coincidentally, the parts Lucas handled himself, whereas in the original trilogy he either had help or had other people take over completely) are all much weaker.

That I had picked up on.

Much of what I remember about the film is the sense of unmotivated action sequences being flung at the screen while nobody explained why they were doing anything except when they explained ad nauseam. I've seen people discuss the plot in streamlined terms, however, which means that it must exist buried under Lucas' disorganized presentation.

Additionally, AOTC has the same problem as TLJ, which is that a key vertex of the trio (Obi-Wan/Padme and Finn/Poe, respectively) is split up because the writer couldn't figure out how to have them on screen together without their chemistry being too obvious.

That's a terrible solution! (I'm also not sure that's . . . a problem? If your actors have chemistry, surely you want to mine that, not minimize it?)

a full-blown love triangle. Which I don't endorse per se, but would have solved that problem of them being two key figures who never interact.

Do you not endorse it because it wouldn't have worked with these characters or because you don't endorse spackling plot holes with love triangles on general principle?

AOTC was Hayden Christensen's first major role, he got absolutely no direction from Lucas, and he didn't have the experience to bring more to the part like Portman and McGregor did.

I do not hold Christensen responsible for Attack of the Clones. It was the first thing I saw him in, which was unfortunate, but even at a point in my life where I did not think very much about movies I knew you would have to be superhuman to salvage that dialogue about sand. Catching him the next year in Shattered Glass (2003) confirmed that he really could act, which just made the writing and direction of Clones look worse in hindsight.

Also, the droid foundry sequence is completely pointless and should have been adapted into some kind of action sequence that actually served the plot.

. . . I don't even remember the droid foundry sequence.

[starlady]

(I'm also not sure that's . . . a problem? If your actors have chemistry, surely you want to mine that, not minimize it?)

I didn't pick up on this aspect of AOTC until I rewatched it this time with The Discourse about TLJ and TROS fresh in my mind. I think both movies were trying to reflect this aspect of ESB (which on the face of it is a really weird movie, and especially weird for a blockbuster sequel) but didn't fully manage to imitate the way that splitting the trio in ESB fuels the conflict of the story for all three of them. And in the specific case of AOTC keeping the stronger actors in a room together would have done a lot to make the wooden dialogue less noticeable.

As for TLJ, Rian Johnson has specifically said the Finn/Poe chemistry was too powerful (read: too gay) to keep them together. He's very clearly taking the fall for Lucasfilm and Disney there, because it's very clear that there was no way they would have allowed Finn and Poe to be boyfriends. When they were reunited in TROS, JJ Abrams shoehorned in Keri Russell as an old flame of Poe's to prove his heterosexuality (note, this fails, the chemistry is just That Strong and Finn and Poe basically are married), while Finn spends a good chunk of his time either with Jannah or…semi-mooning over Rey? It's literally not clear from the script, though I prefer the interpretation that he's trying to tell her that he's a Force-user too.

In terms of the prospective love triangle in AOTC, I am glad they didn't do it because I don't think the writing would have been up to snuff to make it believable, based on the evidence of AOTC. I also think that there would have been (justifiable) criticism of its similarity to the semi-love triangle in the back half of A New Hope and the front half of ESB. I also think that part of it has to be that Ewan McGregor was just way too popular and too good-looking at the time (when he'd just come off Moulin Rouge and was on the walls of college and high school students across the country) for anyone to really believe that Padmé would choose Anakin over Obi-Wan, and that even George Lucas, who clearly does not have a romantic bone in his body, was able to figure that out. And part of the point of Anakin in AOTC is that he is a callow youth (not quite as callow as Luke, but still). Putting him into competition with Obi-Wan like that wouldn't have reflected favorably on either character and would potentially have undermined their connection with each other, especially since their deathless bond was already shown to have been the engine of Vader through the end of the OT.

Plus it would have made it a lot harder to write my OT3 fanfic all these years later, lol.