Lit A/V Clone Wars Continuity Discussion (Spoilers Allowed)

Vos was clearly neck-deep in drugs at that point in his life.

 

No, the Marvel Comics rule is if you did see them die they probably didn't.

 

Like Lumiya getting her chest hollowed out.

 

Or even the old 'it wasn't him' ploy. Witness the endless parade of not-Thanos/Magneto/Doom duplicates/clones/robots used to nullify previous storylines.

Put Hickman on the case, and you'll have the real Jacen back in no time.

 

Hickman is more likely to point out how stupid we are for not having noticed he was an alternate dimension time-travelling HRD all the time. And somehow make it work if you manage to follow his train of thought.

 

I'd rather not use clone retcons anymore, as those are cliche to the point of comedy. And although I love the idea of Vos being hopped up on drugs and darkside, why couldn't Valorum have employed a body double? We know other major Republic politicians did that. And Valorum knew something was rotten on Coruscant, so he would have known to be cautious. He could have even used a Shi'ido or other changeling to perfect the illusion.

The other question is, what is Valorum's role in the story? Is it something in the public eye? Or could he conceivably be in hiding?

 

Actually, that makes a lot of sense. I always thought it a little strange that Valorum, for all of his talk of dark conspiracies, was only taking a minimum of precautions.

 

And as I said, if he didn't die after all, why was there a Finis Valorum Memorial?

 

Yes, because now, Finis Valorum is Batman.

 

Superman can go "hibernate" after suffered severed blow, I don't see how Valorum can do that.

Also DC/Marvel's many resurrections really brought down the consistency and seriousness of their story. SW's known resurrection also received mostly bad reaction, especially Palpatine's.

 

Actually, I think that Palpatine's resurrection is the only one the concept of which actually makes sense.

 

It makes sense sure, not a plot hole, but I think it reduced the epicness of RotJ's finale.

 

Maybe Valorum had some kind of body double from his days in politics?

 

All of it only makes me wonder how long TCW really had been supposed to continue. At this point the Jedi should step up their game and try to finish the war even faster than before, which would tie nicely into the separatists being desperate enough to go for the chancellor. But from an OOU perspective, they surely answer a lot of questions and decide a lot of fates already.

The Jedi, Yoda included, definitely act as if life after death is unheard of, so there's that. Basically, all of these episodes are great fun to watch if you don't think about the ramifications too hard. Next to some dialogue that's somehow not definitive enough but still puts a lot of concepts into the room (like Qui-Gon explaining the life force/cosmic force duality), it feels as if these episodes prepare for an alternate Episode 3, which is more of a feeling, though.

Like with all the Dooku/Anakin/Obi-Wan duelling, there's stuff that feels as if should change the game but somehow doesn't. The Jedi knowing that there's something fishy about their army is both a big change since the point of ROTS is that they trust their troops (although that gets a pass by Yoda saying the clones have proven themselves to be good men, and on the Jedi's side) and no change at all since the Tyranus revelation was self-evident since Jango Fett was working closely with Dooku and still living with the clones. Him playing both sides of this particular conflict would have been a possible but improbable irony. In addition, for all it's worth, Sifo-Dyas is still in a strange situation; he actually argued for the creation of a Republic army on the council before his death, and he was seen as "extreme" by his peers. But the witness makes it sound as if Dooku only wanted Sifo-Dyas' name, not the guy himself, to use in his scheme. Dooku's identified as "a second Jedi" who had been present, so it's still a question if that's because he was actually with Sifo-Dyas, posing as a Jedi, or if he was misidentified as a Jedi because he had a lightsaber. And the timeline still only makes sense if Palpatine trained both Dooku and Maul while being still apprenticed to Plagueis - dring Episode 1. But I guess Dooku betraying Sifo-Dyas has always been like that since Sifo-Dyas obviously always dies before Episode 1. Unfixable, Sido-Dyas is, if you ask me.

As for Valorum, I'm not sure if Palpatine actually says anything that makes it sound as if he knows Valorum's still alive. Valorum lives in a Coruscant penthouse with a few senate guards, so it looks like he's living on his official pension with his official post-office bodyguards. If he were hiding, the guards would give him away. I think he was chosen for this role in the story because he's one of the very few faces people would identify from Episode 1 as someone who could give information about that era. They could have invented all kinds of people for the role, but tying it back into the film gives just a tiny bit of stability to the entire "untold story of what happened around Episode 1".

Oh, and I love the "Windu & Binks" buddy movie.

It's not so outrageous to suddenly have a general for the droid army in ROTS that we didn't see in AOTC - Dooku is too busy ordering the army around in AOTC, and the council doesn't seem... talented enough, and even if they were, we don't see them doing something along the lines. It's a bit outrageous that Grievous is a suitable opponent for the Jedi, but I have enough faith in the movie's flashiness to not make people think about that. And basically, he is simply introduced to create semi-finals for the Anakin/Obi-Wan fight, to set up that these two are truly comparable in a duel.

The main problem with the PT versus the OT is that they are not the same kind of movies. Surprise. Not only has mainstream cinema evolved, Lucas has also grown older (and creative people seldom get permission to change over their course of their career), and most importantly, Lucas didn't want to tell the same story. He chose a different cast of characters with a different base and a different situation. This is not "Star Wars has always to be on the fringe or I cry my eyes out" (and I anticipate this will kill the ST for me - Lucas probably wrote an outline that concentrated on something else entirely to make a new point, and Abrams probably goes for Holy OT continuation for all wrong kinds of nostalgia). This is Lucas using the SW frame to tell a story of how a government comes down. It's not about making another Luke monomyth with two different choices. Would it have been nice to have a pre-planned trilogy? Yes. The OT wasn't pre-planned, either, though. Why make Lando the leader of the fighter squadrons in Ep6? Because we have nothing else to do, and we need a familiar face in the spacefight. Wow, great establishingy action. Battle of Taanab? What?

The politics of Episode 1 don't need an introduction because they're just there. Trade guys don't want to pay huge taxes. Easy. They blockade a planet to show what happens when trade does not take place. Easy. Good guys should solve this. Easy. Bad guy tells Trade guys that he'll back them so they can go about killing. This only establishes that blue hood man must be powerful. Easy. Regarding your knowledge/smartness about Palpatine and Sidious, you either see a movie that has the good guys win or one that has the good guys get fooled. Easy. The one big ball that's dropped in the PT is the complicated clone army issue. There's too much information making the army seem fishy, but the Jedi use it anyway without giving us a reason like "now we use their own army against them, full win!". That's the one big handwave that Lucas set up without having a solution for, and no EU and no Plagueis book and apparently no TCW can make that work entirely, so I wonder if they would have been better off just ignoring the issue.

 

Well, the Jedi don't have a choice about the clone army. The Senate votes Palpatine emergency powers and he adopts it. What are the Jedi going to do?

Grey1
Can you better explain Qui-Gon's explanation of the Cosmic and Living Force aspects than what has been posted?

 

So apparently Agen Kolar appears and Shaak Ti appears in a vision being stabbed in the back, presumably by Vader.

 

I hope it doesn't mean the terrible scene in which Anakin and Obi-Wan finish each other's sentences poorly is canon. That would be if it was Grievous that stabbed Shaak Ti in the back.

 

Of course there's all kinds of possible reasons for using the army, but they never even acknowledge the mess it came out of. AOTC gives a vibe of very naive "lucky we found them just in time" when the movie would have benefitted of a more balanced approach to the army's creation and adoption.

About the Cosmic and Living Force thing...When asked how he can be "here", Qui-Gon says he's a manifestation of the Force, a Force that consists of two parts: living creatures create the Living Force which gives energy to the original (primal) Cosmic Force. The energy of the Living Force, of everything that has ever lived, flows into the Cosmic Force, unites with it and makes itself available again to "us" (says Qui-Gon to Yoda) through the Midi-Chlorians. That's why Qui-Gon can talk, he says. More details include the fact that Qui-Gon's position is outside of time (the 'future' is not the future to him), and he doesn't explain why he can't give definitive answers about 'the future' but can only point to the place where answers will be found - the cave.

During the cave vision, the clone troopers are extremely shady - I didn't make them out on the big screen, to be honest - so it might be a 'hint' for the audience, but nothing Yoda would necessarily pick up on in this situation. Also, that scene - all named Jedi rushing into the clones like they did with the droids on Geonosis - doesn't result in Jedi deaths, it's more the other way around. The vision continues to show the council masters killed by Sidious in his office just like in the movie (except for a hood Sidious is wearing), and finally there's Shaak Ti, who, canon death or not, is probably a vision hint at Anakin devastating the temple since it's the exact move from that cut scene. So the vision generally shows Jedi fighting a war (vs the clones), Jedi losing vs. Sidious, Jedi purged by Vader. Actually, TCW's need to create hints at the story it prequels in visions and other elements is an interesting parallel to the prequels creating hints at the OT in visions, acknowledging that the audience knows all this stuff already. I'd agree that it's not done perfectly, but seeing how the show is made for little kids and fanboys who take everything literal, if they had shown a generic Sith spectre with a devil voice instead of Sidious as we recognize him, people would have argued it's not actually about Sidious and that the vision is dealing with something else (like the Bardotta arc makes you expect they have a prophecy about the Dark Times, too, but then it's probably just a generic darkness that gets fought off with Talzin).

Oh, a nice bit that hasn't been mentioned as far as I can see is that when Yoda smalltalks that the Force is strong on Dagobah, Qui-Gon says it's one of the purest places in the galaxy.

 

So basically we're getting an in-universe "screen" explanation of what Lucas basically decided back when he made Episode I in 1998 and which was the underlying premise to the NJO as a consequence. I like that it is more or less corroborating the NJO.

 

Please remind me, when exactly was the living/unifying (or cosmic) Force model seen any other way, except by people who ignored the explanation that made sense?

 

I don't think that really explains why Qui-Gon either doesn't know that Palpatine is a Sith or doesn't tell the Jedi; it shouldn't be a question of "the future", per se, since Palpatine is a Sith throughout the film saga. Can't the Force tell that Palpatine is a Sith?

Is she killed by a blue lightsaber? Because that would seem like a pretty big hint.

 

I'm not sure what you're asking. I'm just saying it's nice to see it in a format that is less likely to be retconned to oblivion. The NJO dealt with it, but then we had to deal with the Vergere Sith retcon and Jacen becoming Caedus and that cast a pall over the NJO, especially since Luke backtracked on everything he learned in that series.

Edit: Granted, TCW also did Mortis and that was likewise immediately picked up on by FOTJ, so...