Full Series The Clone Wars: Episode 419: Massacre Discussion Thread

The magic ruined the episode? No, making the nightsisters sound like Bela Lugosi in Glen or Glenda ruined the episode.

. . . oh, wait. I figured it out. It wasnt Bela Lugosi the nightsisters sounded like, it was Boris Badinov!

 

God forbid they kill anyone of importance on this show.

 

Yeah, that was pretty lame. Also lol at the trailer at the end - "You won't believe who's coming back!" yeah like anyone hasn't already heard, with how much they're milking it. I half expect Midnight Cowboy himself to be on street corners telling passers-by, "Hey sir, did you know, Darth Maul's coming back, watch my show please..!"

 

Oh. My. Freaking. God.

Had a few problems with it (Nightsisters losing, Nightsister zombies, Talzin's supposed death), but everything else was so awesome I'm willing to overlook it.

 

I quite liked how the Nightsisters were/are portrayed on this show, and any chance to see more of their culture is a plus to me (how they "bury" their dead was very interesting). I liked the episode, but not for the main storyline.

 

About Ventress teaming up with bounty hunters.. one thing I think would've been more interesting, if we HAVE to have bounty hunters, is to have her work with Aurra Sing. We haven't seen her in a while. Is she still in jail?

 

Well, that was quite good. Not stellar but just plain good.

Just going by what I knew before the episode aired - Grievous is sent to enact Dooku's revenge against Ventress and Talzin but walks away killing everyone but them - I was prepared to be slightly underwhelmed on the Grievous front, despite him killing every other Nightsister. However, the episode managed to make it all plausible and not damaging to Grievous' reputation. Instead of simply failing to kill Talzin and Ventress due to incompetence, it's interference from above that causes Grievous to abandon the hunt for Ventress. It's Talzin's mystical witchcraft that causes this and allows her to escape death.

Despite escaping with her life, Talzin is pretty much completely and utterly pwned by Dooku and Grievous. She's the "mother" to her clan so the death of practically everyone in it is a major loss to the same degree as the experience of Yoda and Obi-Wan at the end of ROTS. She does her witchcraft with the primary objective of blackmailing Dooku to recall the droids and the secondary objective of killing him; she fails miserably on both fronts, outfoxed by Grievous' brutality and (!) competence.

Grievous proves his competence in this episode. The Nightsisters are certainly not at Jedi levels of combat prowess but judging by their success against regular battle droids, they're on a level way above clone troopers. However, Grievous swats them aside like flies. He comes close to defeating Ventress in the duel, only to get forced back by Ventress' (implied) use of the Dark Side, which is known from the films to be a path to great power and which Grievous can't hope to match. In addition, Grievous shows himself to be a completely merciless killer (eg. to old whatshername in the cave) and he uses the droids to good effect.

The battle droids also manage to re-establish their threat. What they lack in intellect and creativity they make up for with numbers, firepower and unfeeling brutality. Their nonchalant dialogue as they fire off WMDs is a nice touch. Nicely rounding it off is the battle droids engaging the (living) Nightsisters in battle outside the cave as Grievous and his elites head inside, followed a few cuts later by these droids - implied to have killed all the Nightsisters outside - swarming in to attack Talzin.

Both Talzin and Ventress are worthy opponents, thus making it seem like they could win at some points, but the tide of battle swings in the droids' favour thanks to Grievous. This is some fairly decent writing of a battle: not a Sith/CIS curbstomp victory, but a victory that is actually earned. It is a genuine victory, since Talzin completely fails and Dooku gets his revenge against her and Ventress by killing all their clan. IIRC, this is the first proper villainous victory in the series - against other antagonists, but I'll take it.

Unfortunately, that's all mostly fanservice related to the established villains. It's much appreciated (possibly overdue) CIS fanservice for the benefit of the series as a whole, but there needs to be more to an episode than that. The Nightsister side of the story was very weak.

Why, for instance, would the Nightsisters be so sacrificial on behalf of a wayward kinswoman who showed up a few weeks/months back, led a few of them on a nonsensical assassination mission, mutated one of their Zabraks and then buzzed off with him for a reason that is probably uknown to most of them? Why is there no voice of dissent among them about inducting Ventress? I can understand that Karis, who went on the crazy mission to Serenno, would be "honoured" to be Ventress' doormat, but why does even the unknown Nightsister with the Mohawk risk her life for the person who made them a target in the eyes of the CIS? Wasn't their first appearance in TCW of them threatening Ventress and hissing that they "don't like strangers"?

For instance, why does no Nightsister suggest to Talzin that they hand Ventress over to Grievous? Obviously, Talzin would refuse, but is every Nightsister supposed to be her clone? Frankly, because every Nights

 

It was alright. The witch stuff was too weird , for me. I always think they've got Ventress too powerful in this series.

 

To the person that was asking about whether or not the Nightsisters' "Magicks" are Force related or something else - yes, the magick is derived from use of the light and dark sides of the Force. The Mother Talzin chapter of the recent Book of the Sith explains this very well. The Witches of Dathomir are just another of the galaxy's Force using groups, with the Nightsisters emphasizing the dark side (although not exclusively). The "green stuff" so prominent in the episode is spirit ichor, a light side manifestation that seems to be unique to Dathomir because of it's proximity to what the witches call the spirit world.

Some questions raised by this episode:

1.) Why didn't Mother Talzin foresee the massacre of her tribe? Or did she? In "Darth Maul: Restraint" she immediately recognized that she was outclassed by Darth Sidious. Is it possibly she is working for Sidious and was willing to sacrifice her followers for some favor from the Dark Lord? Perhaps her assassination attempts on Dooku are Sidious' way of continuing to test his apprentice.

2.) For a Sith Lord, Dooku came off as a bit of a chump in this episode. I kept expecting him to turn the tables on Talzin's voodoo spell, and was surprised when it didn't happen. The only way that I can see him saving face is if he was never trained to deal with this by his master, who may be taking advantage of that omission for his own ends (see above).

On first viewing, this may be my favorite episode of the series! I'll take zombies fighting robots over "The Mystery of The Poisoned Iced Tea" any day of the week.

 

Decent episode after the latest disappointment- I'm not the greatest fan of "magicks" though but I expected something like this so I'm not surprised nor disappointed.

+Grievous gets something done- not killing a jedi though(sighs) but well...
+Droid army and navy are starting to look epic
+Nice to see more episodes without any good guys
+Defoliator (?) I guess they made it to mass-production after all even when Durd was captured
+Nightsisters are so humoristic- especially Talzin and her magicks(Love the way she says it) but sad to see them massacred but good that it was Grievous and droids doing that..
+Dooku's suddenly appearing boils and Talzin ghost were kinda creepy and well animated.

-Talzin dead(?) far too soon- but she can ghost or something.... so we are going to see more of her I suppose.... what exactly she is- is she after all one of those force wielders.... anyway she's got cool skills so shame we didn't see her fighting sith or anything...
-Voodoo-doll is not too imaginary and another army of the undead in TCW.... did we really need to see this?

 

This!! I have to agree (with your sarcasm)?Perhaps this is just another rhyming ?stanza? in GL?s poetry? Ugh! This show makes me sick to my stomach at times. Watching it is like watching a train wreck, but instead of box cars and tanker cars spilled on the ground, we have plot holes, terrible dialogue, and flat-out lazy writing.

Perhaps since GL killed off Obi-Wan so quickly, the lazy writers can do the same with just about every other character in the Star Wars universe? Just look at the beginning of The Clone Wars (The Movie); were we supposed to care that Padme?s decoy was killed in the explosion? I was scratching my head wondering who the hell she was?.

It is time to end this series before it efs any more plot points?

 

As cool as that would be to see on the show Asajj and Aurra, I doubt that will happen. There too afraid kids won't be able to tell them apart. That's what Filoni's excuse was when asked if Sing would use a lightsaber like in her EU appearances- that her with a lightsaber would just confuse kids on who's who- Ventress or Sing.

 

You know, it's always slightly disturbing when media hotshots say authoritatively that people can't tell near-human (or even human) characters apart. Is Filoni really saying that "kids" can't tell the difference between two bald albino women just because they're bald and pale?

Aurra and Asajj have very different facial bone structures. Aurra actually has some red hair. Asajj often has strange makeup around the side of her lips while Aurra has similarly strange makeup around her eyes. Asajj sounds like Nika Futterman. Aurra sounds like Jaime King.

If "kids" can't tell these very different characters apart, the Force help us all.

 

I found this episode creepy. Those Zombie things were messed up and Grievous was kinda cool in this one. The end did remind me of Mufasa's ghost. I'll have to rewatch this one when I'm not feeling like the walking dead myself and give a better review.

 

I guess I need to clarify. I do fully respect and accept your opinion of the episode, as I do everyone else's. I don't care to discuss it much more, but, just for the record, none of my post was intended as sarcasm. I was serious.

 

Introduction:

Something about this episode just didn't click with me at first, and I was feeling 6ish or 7ish about it. I felt like it went by too fast and watched it a few more times, almost gave it a 9, but settled on an 8 for one reason.

The main problem I had with it at first was that it felt a lot like The General to me - a huge portion of the episode dedicated to pure action and most of the plot points were things we already knew about. The General is by far my least favorite of the Krell arc, so this episode feeling like The General was not a good thing.

Positive:

One thing that made me decide that this episode wasn't that bad is that the fighting actually means a lot more in this episode. The General had a couple new enemies visually (I'm thinking worm-robot and those really big things), but it was still the same fight between the same two sides we had just seen anyway. This episode doesn't just have a fight we've never seen before - CIS versus Force-witches - but the fight actually wipes out an entire commune the viewers are intimately familiar with from the preceding season. That is a huge improvement over what the action accomplished in The General.

As to the plot points, both episodes relied heavily on things established in past episodes, but Massacre did add more new stuff than The General for sure; showing how Mother Talzin fights with her Force-magicks both in battle with the CIS and the long-distance assassination of Count Dooku, and also the Force-revived undead which wouldn't have been my choice for what to see in a TCW episode was nonetheless done to perfection in the finest tradition of the original masters of pulp story-telling (it felt very much like how Conan the barbarian creator Robert E. Howard would have done it in the 1930's).

I would rather have seen other Force-related magicks, but given that they went the undead-route, there's still certainly a right and a wrong way to do it, and thankfully they did it in all the right ways. It could have been quick and cheap and easy but they seem to have put a lot of effort into getting all the classic pulp archetypes perfect. One such archetype is the elder Nightsister. The way she was hidden with the Force, the fact that she was the only one with this power, the way she looked, the way her voice sounded when she was chanting, everything about her seemed uniquely ancient, which is exactly the set-up you need for a power as drastic as reviving dead Force-witches with the Force. Another classic pulp aspect of this they absolutely nailed is how they defeated the Force-revived undead: not by fighting the undead themselves, but by destroying the power source that is using the Force to keep their revival going. The immediate shot from Grievous killing the elder Nightsister to the collapsing undead was the exact right way to go. TCW could easily have botched this idea, but they included all the important pulp elements they needed to do it right, which I'm appreciative of as a pulp fan and someone who recognizes that Star Wars was originally intended by George Lucas as a pulp throwback.

The Mother Talzin and Asajj Ventress stuff was really all I liked about this episode from the very beginning. The way she hovered in midair and that yellowish Force bubble appeared around her and then she just started zapping people with the Force (lots of cool sound effects from the sound dept. there) was probably my favorite thing about the episode. I love seeing new, weird, cool Force stuff on this show. This had me almost as psyched as the triple Jedi mind trick from S2, but in a different way. I also loved how towards the end when Talzin was on the verge of killing him we were literally seeing Dooku's body ripped apart by the Force - that was nuts.

If anyone has wanted to see the Force used by someone other than Jedi or Sith, this episode paid off in a massive way. I feel bad for people who just see it as Harry Potter or LOTR "magic" and that ruins it for them. Since the Courtship of Princess Leia 90's days Dathomir has been home to

 

Man, i got vibes from the Temple of Doom in the episode. Should have had a heart pulling scene.

 

Um, you have a "former sith/nightsister". She was NEVER a sith. She is a dark jedi. Look it up on the wookipedia. Yes dark jedi have been known to work with the Sith, even back in the days even before the Rule of 2. But that doesn't make them sith. Sith are a certain group of dark side users. A dark jedi is anyone who uses the darkside (could be a former jedi), but isn't a sith.

 

I don't think you have that last part rignt. The Nightsisters use the Dark Side and aren't Dark Jedi. I would think to be a Dark Jedi one would have to be a Jedi who had gone dark, not just any Dark Side user.

 

Don't let the term "dark jedi" fool you. It does not always literally mean former jedi who have fallen (it can be used though for jedi who have fallen). Originally that was the only meaning the term meant, but now someone can be a dark jedi, without ever actually being a jedi. As long as they practice the dark side, but however are not a sith.

This would help.

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Dark_Jedi

 

That was the main problem with this episode (and it had its fair share). We have this epic battle going on, and yet we really have no sympathy whatsoever for either side. There's no emotional connection to the witches, and much less with the droids. They're both faceless villains, so they can tear through each other to their hearts' content and it won't affect the viewer in any way. I see that they intended us to side with the witches, and feel bad about those two sisters that die in Ventress' arms, but at least for me that didn't work at all. It was all just empty spectacle. When the clones fight, I can feel for them and want them to win. Here we could only, maybe, care a bit about Ventress, but she never really feels like she's in danger (what does that say about Grievous?), so it's no big deal.

The use of the defoliator was a cool idea, but terribly executed. In Defenders of Peace it was a frightful weapon, incinerating everything in a HUGE radius. Here they are dropped in the middle of a skirmish, and yet we don't see a single Nightsisters burn in its wake. They all just jog a little and the blast dies away. Pitiful.

Too much magic. Just too much. Raising the zombies can be kind of forgiven due to how cool and vicious the zombies looked and acted. Truly scary. But on the other hand... zombies? Again? Haven't we had enough if them? But what truly bugged me was the voodoo. It wasn't a reference to voodoo, it was simply... voodoo. Wax doll, needles and all (of course, it's not the real voodoo, just the TV/film version of it). Really unimaginative, and not Star Warsy at all.

This wasn't a terrible episode, but for all the spectacle it didn't engage me at all. Considering the final two episode are the Maul ones, the only thing I feel I have left for this season is Bounty, which looks like just some cool bounty hunter filler.

 

I'm going to say you're missing the point entirely. The effect of these monsters going at each other creates its own emotional resonance. Where's it written that the viewers absolutely must sympathize with what they're watching? The effect of the episode was incredibly strong, it's not trying to be anything other than what it is. Sometimes it's great just to see something wild that isn't easily classifiable.

And those weren't (post-Romero / modern) zombies: they were dead, embalmed bodies controlled by an intelligence, very different. Once the old witch was killed, they were like puppets with their strings clipped.

It was great to finally see a full-on Sith conflict onscreen.

 

Very confused by that as well. How was that a Sith conflict? It was nightsisters against droids, the only Force-user on the other side was lying in bed.

I think it's script writing 101. When I say "sympathize" I don't mean that the nightsisters should have been the "good guys" against the bad droids. But we should feel some sort of empathy. We should care about who wins and who loses, who lives and who dies. If the viewer is not concerned about the outcome of a battle, then it just becomes... Transformers...

 

I loved this episode. It's hard for me to discuss this episode, however, because it all kind of interlinks to one underlying fact.

Star Wars is changing. Big time.

And I haven't yet decided on whether I like that or not. Things in this episode just felt that little bit... un-StarWarsy. Magic, voodoo dolls, magic, army of the undead, magic, magic, magic. Yes, I'm aware there was magic in the Nightsisters Trilogy and that it is, technically the Force, but call a flower a table, it still remains a flower. It's not the Force in what we have seen up until now. That's because, the Force is NOT the Force from 1977. The Force is choking 4 people at the same time. The Force is the Mortis trilogy.

I wonder if Katie Lucas is heading these changes or not. The thing is, when I step back, I can easily recognize good entertainment, so why shouldn't it be good Star Wars? I think, for better or for worse, we're all going to have to rethink: what is Star Wars? One thing I know is I was *surprised* by this episode. Star Wars is almost 35 years old, and we have seen countless lightsaber battles, countless space battles, countless Jedi and Sith. Maybe it does need to reinvent itself, just to survive.

I am genuinely interested in Ventress' story. I had no idea this direction was going to be taken, and I'm intrigued.

I then look to the Maul return. In Star Wars of 5 years ago, I would have said "No way. That's stupid. He got cut in HALF!". But now, in this coming new age of Star Wars... I don't know. As a Star Wars fan, I am rethinking what I want out of Star Wars, and if Star Wars is still my Star Wars.

(I don't think I can write Star Wars any more times in that paragraph. )

Thoughts? Is this still your Star Wars?