I was extremely happy to hear that Star Wars: The Clone Wars is coming back. This means more Ahsoka, one of my favourite Star Wars characters, and more of a version of Anakin that is actually interesting — instead of the unrelatable and unstable psycho from the movies.
Please note, major spoilers ahead. Please go watch The Clone Wars if you haven’t already.
It seems we’ll get 12 episodes that sort of finish the unfinished last season of the original show. I liked all of Clone Wars, but that short last season was my favourite, with two story lines I found quite mind-blowing.
The first begins with a clone trooper named Tup inexplicably going rogue and attacking his Jedi commander. This leads his fellow clone trooper Fives to discover that all the clones have chips implanted in their brains by the Kaminoans. Fives removes his own chip and ends up in a private meeting with Chancellor Palpatine. Palpatine calmly explains his entire plot, including the chips which implement Order 66. Fives manages to escape, and he tries to tell Anakin and Rex what he’s learned. But with his chip removed and burdened by the horrifying knowledge that they’re all pawns in a vast and evil conspiracy, his behaviour becomes erratic. His friends think he’s suffering from the same delusion as Tup. Fives is eventually shot dead while trying to escape capture.
I just loved the fact that a humble clone trooper came incredibly close to blowing the lid off Palpatine’s entire, decades-long, plot. I regard Fives as one of the most heroic — and most tragic — characters in Star Wars. This story also reveals the deeply tragic nature of all the clones, including the disturbing implication that they’re all subconsciously aware that they’ve been programmed to betray everything they’ve been fighting for.
In episodes 2 and 3, the clones don’t have any more personality than the droids they’re fighting. By comparison, the depth and nuance brought to them by The Clone Wars is really impressive.
The other mind-blowing storyline of the season is the Jedi getting a lead on the fate of Sifo-Dyas. I always thought it very odd that in Episode 2 the Jedi seemed staggeringly incurious about the origin of the clone army when it was so obviously suspicious. Jango Fett (quite inexplicably) tells Obi-Wan that he’d never heard of Sifo-Dyas and was hired by “a man called Tyranus”. He then flies off to join the separatists.
Well, in this story the Jedi finally get a chance to investigate the matter. Palpatine immediately realises this is incredibly dangerous for him, and dispatches Dooku to clean up the loose ends. Dooku is only partially successful. The Jedi don’t figure out the whole plot, but they do find out that Dooku is Tyranus and that he basically created the clone army.
The episode ends with what is one of the most extraordinary scenes in the entire Star Wars canon. The Jedi Council realise that they are fighting with an army that their enemy provided for them. Yoda concludes that the whole war was deliberately engineered by the Sith from the start, for reasons not yet clear. However, the Jedi decide to cover up these discoveries, fearing panic and collapse if the Republic loses trust in the clone army. Yoda says the only available course of action is to keep fighting and hope they can win before the Sith’s plan can be completed. I mean, wow, just wow.
In the end, this last season really brought home just how evil and ingenious Palpatine was, and how dark the story of his rise to power was. It handled this in a more sophisticated way than the prequel movies, in my view. I can’t wait to see what they do next with it.
