Books "Sword of the Jedi" trilogy would be over by now...

There was an episode with Helena Bonham Carter and Johnny Depp?

 

Yeah I'm trying to figure out what episode he's referring to there...

Although it did suddenly give me this mental image of Dark Disciple starring Depp and Carter. If Lee were still around that would have one heck of a musical number.

 

It was the one where C3PO and Artoo fell into down a sewer and met a bunch of Nightmare Before Christmas . . . flower people? Bugs? I forget.

It was really stupid.

 

Oh, that episode? Bah, don't let that discourage you from watching the rest of the series. They're not all like that.

 

I liked that pair of episodes. Some good fun.

That clone though. So annoyed with C-3PO.

 

Yeah, IMO one of the only enjoyable part of those episodes was Wolffe's constant frustration with Threepio. Other than that those weren't really my favorite episodes.

 

And when Wolfe and one of the Jedi found them on the ship or whatever it was? Can't remember.

 

In retrospect... I now see why he finally broke in that one Rebels episode. First 3PO. Then stuck in a desert with Gregor for eternity. Poor fellow.

 

"Another one of those planets."

Well, for me, the best episodes of TCW were these two droid episodes, the droid squad (especially the trippy desert trip) and almost everything with Jar Jar. There, I said it. For me, those episodes work really well as children's entertainment, while grown-up grisly battles don't - but those mostly get a kiddie fortune cookie lesson attached anyway. Or use flamethrowers on sentient beings. The thing with the "fun episodes" is that they still always work (ok, droid squad fall apart in the end since it can't top the trippy desert trip).

Yes, I know people hate droid squad. For me, those were the best of the fifth season since everything else in that season was just boring and a mix of "unrealistic realism", like a teenager revolution, weird Maul Brothers mob-based planet takeovers, or everyone playing idiot ball to put Ahsoka into a situation the setting doesn't really support. Yeah, that season 5.

 

What are you talking about, the Mauldalore episodes were amazing. They basically defined TCW for me (along with the Umbara arc). To each his own, of course.

 

People hate the droid squad episodes? So strange. I liked the more violent and more comical episodes. I think kids deserve mode credit in terms of what they can handle.

I agree that the Jar Jar episodes were...good. The only good, funny, interesting use of Jar Jar. I was hoping they'd do more to somehow make him... relevant.

I get why people might not dig the 3PO tree people episode. But it was probably more due to the more metaphysical take on SW, which, obviously has a large metaphysical component, but also mixed in with a certain visual realism.

When SW goes full metaphysical, like the Yoda Arc, it feels off... tonally.

But I liked that arc too. I'm a good stories loyalist above all else.

 

I don't know, I liked the Yoda arc. Mortis was kind of meh, but they got the tone right with Yoda, IMO.

 

Mortis and Yoda were definitely both interesting. I like those for actually breaking the mold and coming up with something new.

Funny thing is, the real war arcs like Geonosis or Mon Calamari, and to a lesser extent Ryloth and Umbara, were the least successful for me since they always want to be even grander than the movies but still can't overome the conceit that the war setup is basically rubbish for a sci-fi setting. With most of the ground battles, they don't even find a conceit like Hoth's "planetary shield" that you can walk, but not fly your bombers into. In Star Wars, war is just a mood.

The only thing that's even worse in my opinion is the planetary rebellion thing that always falls apart in their animation TV since such a rebellion always consists of a small bunch of relatable teens that Ahsoka may or may not have a tender moment with. And every larger progression has to be cut into 20 minute segments that almost all have a happy ending of their own.

Good war episodes, in my opinion, are the ones that find a take on the SW elements of the conflict; Grievous trap and Malevolence still come to mind easily after all these years.

To each their own, but the montage of a diverse-as-hell assortment of intergalactic criminals, including our hyped-up nightmare Sith monsters, playing Hamburglar and being pretend-caught by Viszla... yeah... can't remember Jar Jar ever being used in a worse context.

 

Okay, to be fair, the "pretend to be criminals so Death Watch can look like heroes" bit was a bit lame. The rest of it, though, was pretty good.

 

Best episodes of the last two seasons.

I've found I'm pretty much alone in feeling that for the most part, The Clone Wars got worse, not better, as it progressed. Season 1 seemed so daring and full of energy, producing great story arcs like the Malevolence trilogy. Seasons 2 and 3 had some fun stuff too, and then season 4 had some high-concept ideas like Mortis and the Umbara arc that suffered from awful execution and ended up being a bunch of long, dragging, crappy episodes. I did like Slaves of the Republic, but then there was that Mon Calamari trilogy that fizzled from a visually attractive underwater war to an evil shark-man screaming "Bahaha! Now I will control this planet! Grrr, I am a bad guy!"

And I'm with Grey in thinking that season 5 was just awful. A series of four-episode arcs that had no business being four-episode arcs --- a lot of time-killing, like that Moebius episode in the middle of the Droid Squad thing. There were some stories that might have worked as one- or two-episode arcs, but drawn out to four episodes they became slow-paced turds.

The truncated Season 6 had that cool story where Yoda meets the Whills, but otherwise it a was a lot of meh that proved pretty definitively that there was no gas left in the creative team's tank. It was a mercy to end it at that point despite all those unproduced and half-completed episodes.

The two-episode Droid adventure arc from Season 4, though... pure class. And starwars.com even described it as Artoo and Threepio being in "trouble again." Lovely.

 

We're very much on the same page; For me, 1 was a lot of fun, 2 didn't quite match that based on a few missteps but was still good, 3 brought in more fun elements like Opress and Mortis, and larger arcs helped give the show that vector towards epicness; but then 4 and especially 5 lost it with the four-episode-arcs since suddenly you didn't have as much diversity in episodes, and having a happy end after every 20 minutes and then reconfiguring the setup for the next episode actually stops these larger stories from being epic. 6 was better, though; the epicness in the Fives and Yoda arcs works, and the Jar Jar/Mace buddy movie was stellar. Senators in love... well, the other episodes were good.

Yes! And... no? The Moebius episode is marvellously bonkers and shows what a cineastic Artoo movie could and should pull off. For me, the bad thing was grounding the arc in sentient beings and yet another clone again, because in that context, they became "only droids" with limited speech patterns again. WALL-E survived the introduction of humans into the story better.

As said above, I think the senator thing was run of the mill and the others were all interesting; and surprisingly, except for the stellar Binks stuff, it all had finality written all over it. Fives and Yoda take a peek at the end of the war, as does the Sifo-Dyas revelation. I mean, even the senator episodes killed off their anchor character. Somehow, this worked better than in season 5 when Mandalore was leveled; maybe only because the end was truly in sight, I don't know.

I always hoped for an end to the show that would have the CW characters exist in a parallel story to ROTS, especially one with Rex dying/Oppo taking over for Order 66 (whose ruthlessness was foreshadowed on Umbara), and with Ahsoka always being there offscreen, interacting with Anakin and Obi-Wan in intelligent ways to act around the movie script, with her saving Jedi children at the temple and maybe encountering Vader there already. Way to traumatize children who grew up on TCW! But the stuff I heard about the final episodes including rogue Ahsoka and Maul somewhere... well, not really where I would have taken the show.

Now that you mention it, Artoo and Threepio in trouble is the first thing we see in SW, so basically, this is the core of SW.

 

I think that having the final episode of TCW be showing Ahsoka running around in "deleted scenes" from ROTS, saving padawans and helping Obi-Wan and encountering Vader but living, would both be absolutely terrible and would be the perfect encapsulation of Ahsoka's character, and so fitting in a way.

I was going to say that the only thing worse than that being the end would be having Maul running around interacting with the movie characters "offscreen" during ROTS, but actually the last episode of TCW being a direct adaptation of Old Wounds would have been good.

My view of TCW has improved a bit over the years, partly since the reboot since I can now completely divorce it from the real EU in my head so it's easier to accept all the nonsense bits of it. I do however really wish they had actually made the Yuuzhan Vong story. That's one TCW I'm keeping my fingers crossed they'll bring back for Rebels.

 

That Yuuzhan Vong story would've been insane. I once wrote a fanfic that covered what would've happened if Anakin hadn't turned to the dark side and Palpatine had been executed by Mace. I'm a little sketchy on the details because I wrote it several years ago, but the Yuuzhan Vong had invaded around the time of ANH. I had Luke and Leia as Jedi Knights, Luke apprenticed to Obi-Wan and Leia to Anakin, IIRC. Bail Organa was Chancellor, Han Solo was a Republic Navy pilot, and Rex, Cody, and other clones fought the Vong with the Jedi. I had Karen Traviss' Republic Commando characters involved, too. It was a little cheesy (I would've been about sixteen when I wrote it), but I had fun writing it.

 

Since we are talking about old stuff: I still don't understand why people call Quinlan Vos in his TCW appearance a surfer or why they say that he was nothing like his comics version.

As a person who don't like the Yuuzhan Vong overall (they had some interesting parts but the whole: mhe) and dislike the story line in which they appeared I hope that we don't see them.

 

Somewhere between seasons 2 and 3, TCW stopped being a kids show. Yes, there were younger characters in it like Ahsoka, but the stories work very differently if you disregard that and just attack it like an adult-level animation. Take the Onderon arc. Yes, it's too long and the script is rather weak. But it's also a rather frank and (now that we know what happened to Saw) realistic view of war and the compromises that have to be made to wage it. It just gets lost under the weak dialogue and bad pacing.

I'll definitely agree that the show's best time was in the first two seasons when things were fresh. Once they moved to making four-parters they stretched stories too far. The Onderon arc would have been a snappy and well-paced two-parter in the second season, for instance. And a lot of the long-term plots they chose to build on were of questionable integrity (like Maul).

I'll agree with Revanfan that The Lawless is about the high-point of the series for me, because that's where I finally broke and just accepted the show for what it was instead of trying to make it something else. It's insane quite a lot of the time, but it's still entertaining in that insanity. And if Dark Disciple is any indication, it would only have spiraled further outward from there if it had gone on.

 

I always thought TCW was stupid, but got worse as it went on. Ahsoka is probably the perfect representative of everything good and bad about the series. 1 and 2 weren't that bad, especially compared to later seasons, but then they introduced Darth Maul's brother, Savage Oppress, then they brought Maul back from the dead, the two played gangsters (they took over Hondo Ohnaka's pirate gang at one point for some reason), and of course, there could never be enough of wonderful, pure badass Ahsoka.

I remember that youngling arc in the last/fifth season, Yoda was there to help them find their lightsaber crystals, but after that, gone, as otherwise Yoda would slaughter Grievous and there'd be no suspense (though Ahsoka could still hold off Grievous, even though Grievous' escapes were kind of a running joke). Not to mention the last arc, which made everyone else look bad for accusing Ahsoka. Well, Anakin and Obi-wan weren't too bad, but everybody else was an idiot.

Even stranger, around the third season they started rearranging the timeline- you'd think the order the episodes were broadcast in would be the normal order, but now we started getting prequel episodes and interquel episodes and... yeah, it got really silly. Ancillary media also got stepped on by the show (Anakin was never in carbon freeze before, etc.).

At least the animation was always good, especially that Lawless lightsaber battle- well, more like a one-sided beating, which is part of what made it so fun.

Mortis was interesting, as a vision, or warning, or something metaphysical, but then FotJ had to reference it as literally happening, with the Dagger of Mortis as their only real chance of finally defeating Abeloth. A dagger from a planet that might have just been a vision from an old Clone Wars report was their best chance. Talk about longshots (well, not that FotJ was well-constructed anyway). I do wonder if SotJ would have referenced it or not (Crucible did mention that quest).

 

You have that uploaded somewhere? I'd love to read it.

 

Same here. It sounds fantastic

 

MY favorite episode of TCW is the one where Southern the Hutt is in love with Sly Snootles, and then they meet Mama the Hutt, and then Sly Snootles shoots him in the end. I don't think I've ever enjoyed any work of Star Wars-related fiction so much.

I loathed TCW in the beginning, mostly because I felt bad for the droids (seriously, they're so cute, squeaky-voiced, and obviously sentient that TCW became like watching Ewoks get gunned down in front of me for comical effect) and Grievous (who becomes a pathetically incompetent cartoon villain with an accent to match), and because I didn't really like any of our heroes. Also I found Yularen to be unintentionally hilarious, and couldn't take any scene he was part of seriously; I am a bad person. I did like Lair of Grievous and found it oddly moving, because its premise was that Grievous was a pathetic loser, and because he actually got to kill a Jedi. Small victories. I also came to like what's-his-name the Hutt and the various Bounty Hunter characters, including Cad Bane.

I feel like TCW might have gotten better--or at least different-- later, but I also started watching it less as well. Mortis was ambitious, but it was also an obvious remake of Lost that sort of ruined the Force. Umbara was good. Every political episode TCW ever did was a horrific trainwreck of smug, inane, incoherent awful. Savage Opress didn't really live up to his billing, though I also never watched most of his arc. The Mandalore episodes I watched (not including the later, apparently decent Maul arc?) were black holes of lethargy, crushing out all life in the universe. I actually really dug Slaves of the Republic and the Yoda arc in the last season; one of the few times I know of where TCW really just did solid, almost film-level Star Wars stories.

I don't know; TCW just never made much sense to me. A kid's show with fortune-cookie morals and frequent torture scenes, it always seemed to be in some basic way to be in conflict with itself. It seemed to suffer from GL's later insistence that he made Star Wars for twelve-year-olds, when obviously he made it for thirty-five-year-old Flash Gordon fans. Part kid's show, part "serious" GL-approved Star Wars entertainment, I think it rarely succeeded completely at either. It was at its best, for me, when it had a chance to go crazy with sheer Filoni creativity and madness, like Star Wars melded with Spongebob; it worked less well when it tried to be Star Wars melded with PBS Educational Programming. It obviously succeeded on some level as a show, but I don't pretend to understand it.

 

Force Smuggler ShanOffirin I could upload it in the fan fiction section, but I'm telling you: it's bad. I looked back at the dates, and I was fifteen when I wrote it, and it's pretty rough. Cheesy, dorky. And I was super pro-Traviss stuff at the time (I still love her stuff but I can properly divorce the characters' opinions from actual facts now; I wasn't so good at that at the time), so a lot of KT's characters showed up in really shoe-horned situations. But if you guys want, I'll upload it and tag you in it so you can read it. Just be prepared to cringe a lot. It had a ton of action but none of the depth of NJO.