I am reluctant to start new shows. I’ve been burned by too many series in the past — and because I prefer my long-term commitments to involve people. So I was initially cold on diving into The Clone Wars animated series. Six seasons and a movie? Forget it.
My bluff was called when I learned that the show would be leaving Netflix this April, and so over the past four months, I slowly chipped away at what had been my biggest Star Wars blind spot. I didn’t watch all of it, mind you. I followed a popular abbreviated guide to the show, one that siphons out the cringiest stories, leaving a more streamlined husk still relevant to the franchise’s official canon.
Well, mostly relevant. The first few episodes Netflix packages together actually make up the Clone Wars movie, which came and went in the summer of 2008. LucasFilm pulled in upwards of $50 million in profits during that theatrical run, and when you actually look at the animation quality, it’s not hard to marvel at the ROI. By and large, The Clone Wars looks bad. Textures are muddled, details are minimal, and the earliest seasons of the show really fail at interpreting facial features.
That goes double for the first story arc. Again, what is in the slapdash “movie” consists of a Separatist plot to frame the Republic for kidnapping Jabba the Hutt’s newborn son and gain leverage on vital hyperspace routes. Even for Prequel material, it’s a weak story that’s been eviscerated numerous times already, so I’ll just say that this movie-sode is not a good look for any established characters. The humor falls flat, the drama is limp, and characters act in incongruous or even downright silly ways. It’s also a rough introduction to Ahsoka Tano, Anakin Skywalker’s new, kid-friendly Jedi apprentice. The series (eventually) takes her character to interesting, even bold places, but she’s out of the gate with quips and bad nicknames — the “Poochie” of the series.
Ahsoka is both goofy and vanilla and yet, miraculously, much of the show fits that contradiction. General Grievous continues his incompetence, so much so that at this point, the strategic ineptitude is a full-fledged character flaw. R2-D2 and C-3PO continue to be far too present. Obi-Wan Kenobi gets a lip-serviced romance. There’s a late-season arc about interest rates. In a touch of irony, it would seem that the lows of the Prequel Trilogy “rhyme” with their animated counterparts. At the end of the day, Star Wars is fantasy in space, and The Clone Wars is fantasy in space for children. I had to take the droid-focused B-shows in stride, because this asterisked watch through was always going to be a catch-22.
One of the show’s greatest strengths is its treatment of the Clone Troopers themselves; it’s consistently good at fleshing out what Attack of the Clones had once brushed aside as a vague convenience. The Season 1 episode “Rookies” is a high watermark for the entire show, giving us Clones with unique personalities and emotions. That the likes of Troopers “Fives” and “Rex” and “Dogma” can stand out in spite of their CGI laboratory origins is a tremendous achievement. Luke’s amazement at Obi-Wan’s service in the Clone Wars will forever hold more intrigue in one line than anything we’re retroactively bound to see. But if the Prequels ended up as a six-hour whiff on a bad pitch, Clone Wars deserves credit for eking out a single.
Six seasons is a lot of real estate. Clone Wars doesn’t always make the best use of that but when it does, it really shines. Take Count Dooku’s apprentice, Asajj Ventress. A fan favorite from Samurai Jack creator Genndy Tartakovsky’s excellent, nearly-wordless 2003 miniseries of the same name, Ventress was a striking presence, a Jedi version of Jack Skellington. When Dooku tries to turn on Ventress at the behest of his master Darth Sidious, she flees to her swampy home world and the cabal of the Nightsisters. There, Ventress starts a Manchurian-candidate-inspired plot with a tattooed brute named Savage Oppress, sending Oppress to replace her as Dooku’s new pupil. When Oppress eventually tires of all the manipulation, he goes AWOL to find his brother, Darth Maul, a character that was sliced in half back in 1999.
As the show would have us believe, Maul did not die at the end of Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace. His torso found itself a pair of mechanical spider legs and decided to hide out on a backwater planet. (Did I say this was a kid’s show?) It’s weird and convoluted and doesn’t always work; Maul’s second life finds him obsessed with revenge (cool) and overeager for power (less cool). But, and this is a low bar, Maul, Ventress, and Oppress all have the chance to evolve in a storyworld founded on wooden dialogue and flat bureaucrats. I’ll never fully equate this animated resurrection with Maul’s original version, but re-introducing a character who only had a whopping two speaking lines under George Lucas’s watch takes guts.
(On a side note, I don’t know that I ever will associate any of The Clone Wars’ animated characters here with what happens in the live-action films. Despite watching dozens of episodes, the show never stopped feeling like a parallel universes.)
I cherry-picked up until Season 6 and, considering its reputation as the best of the series, watched all 13 episodes. Back in 2014, Disney would cancel the show from broadcast television, dumping these remaining stories onto Netflix as part of the Mouse House’s then-current deal. These so-called “Lost Missions” are all over the place. There’s a team-up with Mace Windu and Jar Jar Binks that plays like a solid-if-sloppy riff on Lethal Weapon. We also get closure on what happened after Jedi Master Sifo Dias ordered the creation of a Clone Army (a mystery that Obi-Wan Kenobi picked up and then conveniently forgot back in Episode II).
The show really shines in its final few episodes. Encouraged by none other than fallen Jedi Master Qui-Gon Jinn (and voiced by none other than Liam Neeson), Yoda goes on a soul-searching quest to learn the secrets of the Force — specifically how to pass on what he has learned from beyond the grave. Yoda learns that those microscopic organisms we heard about and then tried to forget are only a part of the Force, one that’s complimented by the more spiritual, vaguely-defined “cosmic Force.” Yoda also runs into OG Sith Lord Bane, an obscure reference to a series of novels that the show really goes out of its way to make. (Hipster fan service is the best fan service). Most importantly, the series wraps with the implication that Yoda knew the events of Episode III before they happened, glimpse both Chancellor Palpatine’s treachery as a secret Sith Lord as well as Anakin’s role in the Republic’s downfall. In a surprisingly poetic moment, the show ends with a disturbed Yoda returning to the Jedi Temple and the image of dying foliage in the foreground. (This is a kid’s show?)
If you think too hard about it — he added, 1,000 words later — Yoda’s foreknowledge makes the events that follow The Clone Wars in Revenge of the Sith feel pretty trivial. After all, the Jedi were always going to die at the hands of Darth Vader. Then again, if you really think too hard about it, the dramatic irony reflects what everyone already assumed before George Lucas started his second trilogy: the Jedi were always going to die at the hands of Darth Vader. Is it destiny? Is it yesterday’s news? From a certain point of view, the answer will always be “yes.”
As was announced at Star Wars Celebration last week, Clone Wars is coming back, and it looks like Ahsoka Tano will be a centerpiece of this forthcoming season. I am surprised to find that I am cautiously optimistic. While her character gets off to just about the worst start possible, series show runner Dave Filoni comes to see Ahsoka as a counterpoint to that’s wrong with the shortsightedness of the Jedi. After she is framed for an assassination in Season 5, Ahsoka leaves both Anakin Skywalker’s tutelage and the Jedi Order.
Among its many, many strengths, The Last Jedi went to town on the light side and dark side dichotomy we’d been raised on for seven movies+. But The Clone Wars did it first. The revelation that these space monks are not all-knowing seems like a self-own for Star Wars. That both Ahsoka and, we learn, Anakin give this idea some serious thought turns that criticism into complexity.
The Clone Wars often feels like a waste of time, even in my abbreviated experience, and upon further reflection, a lot of that is because of the thankless material it has to work with. Because it’s pigeonholed by the crummy drama of two tentpole films, there’s only so much this children’s TV show can do with plot holes and half-baked love affairs. This in and of itself is a fitting irony though, that an animated cash grab could be hamstrung by one man’s flaccid vision — and subsequently find room to grow out of those restrictions. If only its inspiration were so lucky.
David Klein 