I find the the plot of the episode "Corruption" (S03E05)... disturbing (spoiler alert!)

(Warning, the is going to be a long read)

I originally posted this on TVTropes.com, but I just wanted to share what I thought about all the issues I have with that episode and what everyone else thinks about it.

As someone that enjoys The Clone Wars Cartoon series, everything about the episode "Corruption" bugs me a lot that I am not even sure where should I start. Here are just some of the main issues that I had with the story.

(1) The entire plot seems to be written by someone that lack any basic understanding of economics at all. One of the biggest theme in the story was the issue of Smuggling. However, smuggling and black markets usually will only exist under three conditions:
- Firstly, if the products that they trading is illegal;
- Secondly, if taxes imposed on the products are so high that it is deemed worth the risk to smuggle them in;
- Finally, if the products are not entering the market in large enough quantities to satisfied the demand due to government intervention such as a trade quota.
In this case, the first reason is clearly not the cause of the problem (Seriously? The government banning bottled tea?). Therefore, if the supply crisis was caused by the latter two reasons, then Satine has no one to blame other then her own government's policies. Even then, she can easily fix the problem by getting the government to just cancel the trade barriers for the time being. Sure, that might have a large impact on the government?s income, but in the story Mandalore is running out of basic supplies such as food and medicine! Government income shouldn?t be a priority over starving citizens. All they really need to do is to declare Mandalore a free trade world and supplies will come pouring in with the simple laws of demand and supply.

(2) Continuing from the pervious point, in the intro, the narrator said that the supply shortage was caused by the war which resulting in trade routes being too expensive for the trading companies to maintain (Ignoring for the moment that I have no idea why they are even still in the Republic in the first place. I though they were open members of the CIS). Lets just forget for a moment that this makes the crisis totally irrelevant to internal corruption. This isn?t the first time in the Star Wars EU in which smugglers run supplies for worlds that has been blockaded or cut off. In all other examples, they are portrayed positively. At worst, they are seen as True Natural and selfishly good individuals that although are in it for the money, managed to save a lot of lives (e.g. Hylo Visz in the upcoming Star Wars :The Old Republic video game), and at best as outright heroic (e.g. Han Solo). And if Mandalore is really running out of basic supplies, why are they wasting time and energy cracking down on smugglers instead of, you know, encouraging independent traders to bring in supplies if the big trading companies or the Republic government will not do so? When talking to the council with Padme, Satine said that Mandalore shouldn?t be relying on smugglers to feed their people, but there are three problems:
- Firstly, those people are only smugglers because Satine forced them to be that way (As seen by the scene when the smugglers bribed the customer officer instead of legally trading their good. Suggesting that there is an import tax that is so high in Mandalore that it is easier for traders to pay off the officer and taking the rise instead of doing it though the legal channels);
- Secondly, if they are having a supply crisis, what is wrong with smugglers bring critical supplies to the people? Is it better for them to put the smugglers out of business and let the people starve to death instead? Granted, the smugglers in this episode were putting poison in the tea in an attempt to increase the money that they make, but that is just one example of the smuggling operation. If Mandalore is really 'depending' on smugglers to feed their people, then the fact that they are still having a comfortable standard of living with clean building and open parks suggest that most smugglers are not

 

Here's our discussion thread for Corruption: http://boards.theforce.net/live_action_clone_wars_classics/b10467/31295194

 

My apologies. I am new to this site and therefore I am not really familiar with the rules when it comes to posting discussions on the individual episodes. So should I copy the content of the post to the main thread, or just post the link there?

 

You can just copy and paste, but with what you said you are just preaching to the choir. That episode, just the logic behind it, was what made people really mad and might be the reason for most of the season 3 hatred. However wrote it just did a terrible job.