Full Series The Clone Wars: Episode 218: The Zillo Beast Discussion Thread (Spoilers Allowed)

By the looks of the battle at the beginning, they're primarily used as an anti-air weapon; one tank's stun beam was able to knock two or three fighters out of the sky in one go.

 

Awesome episode

The Good
- The opening battle from scale to resolution was awesome.
- The explosion
- Anakin?s hand getting electrically charged following the explosion (foreshadowing his final fate).
- The near invincible Zillo Beast
- Mace needing Anakin to bail him out.
- Anakin?s brilliant escape
- The Dugs and their weaponry
- Mace?s frustrating but typically Jedi outlook
- Mace & Anakin?s different outlooks (perhaps the first of many judging by Mace?s ?I don?t trust him? comment in ROTS).
- Palpatine?s condescending remark about Master Windu?s conscience, his change of heart when he discovers the beast is useful & his blaming of others for the beast been dragged to Courascant for testing.
- The capture of the beast looked good.
The bad
- The galaxies greatest pilot crashed, AGAIN.
- The capture of the beast was too easy for my liking.
Random thoughts
- Anakin greatest strength is the fact that he?s a tactical genius.
- Mace?s has an unspoken Authority over Anakin, despite disagreeing with Master Windu Anakin quickly comes up with a comprise.

 

Yeah... weird. It does seem to work like an Ion beam on the droid starfighters. Anakin says they should use a "stun cannon or a pulse" to disable the beast. It looks like they went with the stun cannon, but how a stun ray can act like an Ion or EMP beam doesn't really make a lot of sense....

 

If I recall, a similar laser effect was used in AOTC on another piece of Republic heavy artillery. The difference would be that those lasers seemed to visually damage the target, shooting down a Trade Federation ship. Weird that these lasers seem to leave droids intact.

Ion lasers seem to be the best bet, with the possibility of outfitting them for stun blasts, switching weapons when they subdue the beast. Though I wonder how quickly their engineers could equip that many tanks with stun beams?

 

Allways ......blame it....... on the ship.

 

Thoughts as I go:

- Destroyers look awesome coming in from hyperspace

- cool that they are mentioning the desperation in the opening reel

- looks like the animation has taken another jump - Rex looks awesome

- is that a Rakata????

- battle scenes now look almost as good as the PT films and are more exciting/broader in scope

- ARCs??!?! Awesome.

- oh my god they even got Anakin's robo-hand, that was incredible. One of the coolest moments of the series to date.

- why wouldn't the Dugs use pod racers instead of mounts?

- wilhelm?

- Trapper and Hawkeye? Awesome.

- boy, that's got to be the first time in a long time we've even heard Artoo mentioned! Probably since Voyage of Temptation, and before that, I can't even remember the last episode he was in.

- heh, pretty cool sequence with Anakin running up the Zillo Beast. I don't really like the weird tentacles, seems kinda disproportionate.

- "and rest Master Windu's conscience" ha ha, that's awesome by Palpatine. Rather than agreeing it's an important principle or even a Jedi principle, he makes it sounds like some weird idiosyncracy of Mace alone.

- "E chu ta!"

- "Yes I'm sure - you go first."

- wait, so now they don't care if the Dugs know the beast isn't dead?



- All in all, a quite enjoyable episode. Rather predictable with respect to the Zillo Beast, especially because we already know about Zillo Beast Strikes Back.

However, the first 5 minutes I thought were incredible, some of the best the series has to offer. I'm pretty tired of the homage episodes.

 

I enjoyed this episode for what it was, a giant monster causing mayhem and destruction and the internal strife between those who want to destroy it and those who want to preserve it. But quite a few things did irk me.

Firstly I didn't like the voice of the Dug leader Doge Urus, he sounded bombastic and over-acted and I think I would have preferred if they'd had him speaking Huttese a la Sebulba or a new native Dug language rather than English.

Secondly I'm not a huge fan of the Zillo Beast design, I felt the extra set of arms which if I can remember involved one arm on its back just looked so far-out from any Star Wars design I've seen so far and was perhaps a little too stylised (much like Lieutenant Divo). Plus it sorta reminded me of one of those snaky toys only with limbs with its long, overly-flexible gangly arms and legs and despite the great sound design I was never convinced that this gargantuan creature possessed the mass and weight it would have simply because of the way it looked.

Lastly, Mace's sudden apparent assumption that this beast is the last one of its kind is a pretty big assumption to make. Nonetheless, despite these problems it isn't a bad episode, just a bit more average than most.

 

Anyone else notice the crab droids in the opening skirmish?

 

Well, I can bet you that if you tasered me I'd fall down and if you tasered my laptop you'd fry it completely.

 

Uh, yeah... same as if I burried an axe on you and on your laptop, the results would be equally destructive. However, if I activated an EMP pulse, you wouldn't even be aware of it, while your laptop would be more hopeless than Windows Vista.

Yeah. We'd already seen them in Bombad Jedi.

 

I bet if you got in the path of an ion cannon without a ship around you you'd be pretty frazzled as well. Generally my take on stun weapons in the SW galaxy is that they're pretty much like a taser, so they would be effective against living targets and droids. A sufficiently large EM field can mess with the human mind.

 

Why? It was living underground and none of the Dugs there had apparently seen one before....the head Dug, we'll call him Dig Dug, even mentions they thought the Zillos were extinct.


Anyway, I'm just glad we got to see a bit more Jedi philosophy in the show - probably good for the kids to get some kind of environmental message, but I just like seeing the Jedi as philosophers, environmentalists, whatever - more of what I originally hoped to see when I heard the PT was coming out.

Hate to bring up the Zahn trilogy, but there's that one scene in the first or second book where Luke is in some bar and there's a dispute and the crowd is like "well, you decide, Jedi".

 

Well, that's your take on it. As far as the established canon (I know, I know, but so far that's all we got) neither an Ion blast nor a Stun blast are simply an electrical current like a taser. A stun blast goes directly to your brain, shutting it down, so it would have no effect on droids. Of course, it can be thorized that if you make a weapon of absurd power, then the amount of energy will affect everything in some way, regardless of what type it is.

 

So "E chu ta!" translates into "Turn the knob and release the radioactive green goo."

The Empire Strikes Back:

Droid: Turn the knob and release the radioactive green goo.
Threepio: How rude!


Also, here's my take on the stun cannons: Anakin said that they might mess up the nervous system of the creature. This leads me to think that they are meant to disable droids, but can also disable a human.

My theory is they they scramble the circuitry of a droid, and do the same thing to an organic creature.

 

No, it simply means: "open the valve".

 

Well, you can see how that could be offensive to a droid.

 

I didn't really care for this episode. The Dug leader had one of the worst, overacted voices so far and the pacing of the episode just seemed too slow. When the episode finally ended it felt like it had concluded in 10 minutes rather than running a full 22 mins (or whatever a half hour block really works out to) of programming. Obviously it was a full length show, but it just seemed like too little happened, and when the credits finally began to role I got hit with a feeling of "it's over already? That was it?"

I really liked the way Season 2 opened with the Cad Bane episodes, and I think they're the best of the season so far. Cat and Mouse and Zillo Beast have been disappointing IMO.

 

I take back what I said earlier about this being a crappy Godzilla ripoff.

It is a freaking funny awesome Godzilla Ripoff!

The level of campiness in this episode was off the charts. It felt like watching a hilariously bad B-movie, with the crazy plot and ludicrous weapons.

Imperial Guard Baneblades with SPHAT guns and nuclear bombs dropping off!

I don't know what there really is to say about this episode. It was definitely funnier than anything mr Binks has done.

One thing caught my attention though. It was a great little maneuver by Palpy to get the creature reassigned to Coruscant.

"Yeah! The Jedi managed to keep this thing under control! Wait, oh crap its loose!"
Discredit the Jedi, and gain public support when the beast is contained.

Well played my good man.

Also, did anyone notice the clone say "Seppie?" Nice little EU reference there.

 

Maybe stun tanks have different settings that allow them to be used against machines and organic beings. Or they may work on a different principle than other technology. The Gungans have boomas that work against living and mechanical foes so maybe the Republic is using something like that in their tanks - a different type of energy beam or one that can be altered for different effects.

 

Decent episode. The beginning battle did seem a little slow, and the battle droids seemed completely useless. I really liked the bomb's aftermath effect, the EMP-type explosion. Anakin's mechno-arm malfunctioning was a nice touch. One of the things that seemed odd, though, was when the Dugs lifted their electrostaff-type weapons up. Shouldn't those be rendered useless after being destroyed by the EMP effect.

For some odd reason, I felt sorry for that trapped clone inside that AT-TE. But, it was a good sinkhole effect that the animators pulled off. Seeing Ponds and Trapper was nice, and then we have some new clone called "Hawkeye." I heard the Wilhelm scream, too, after a clone got killed by the Zillo (Godzilla) beast.

One thing that I hated the most was Anakin's crash. Complete garbage. After the beast hit his starfighter, you can see how his fighter continued to fly fast, and when Anakin was about to crash into that wall, his fighter magically landed and didn't blow up against the wall. At least, Anakin could have lifted his fighter out of the sinkhole and skid across the surface of Malastare. It would have been a lot better than what was seen.

Before Anakin jumped onto R2, he could have tried and stab the Zillo Beast's eye with his lightsaber. Unlike the beast's tough skin, I don't think his eye is lightsaber-proof.

The Zillo Beast was like Godzilla, and I knew it, too. "The last of its kind," the sound that the beast made, and overall movement of trying to bite everything that comes near its way. I have to admit, this was a "unique" rip off/homage. Certainly a whole lot better than the ones we've seen throughout season two.

Palpatine continues to support death and destruction, and the uncaring of lives. I like how he doesn't want the Beast to live, while the Jedi want it to survive. Also, I was waiting for Mace to ignite his lightsaber and kill that Dug. I knew he was going to do it sometime. But, I kind of like him. Reminded me of Chairmen Cho from Trespass.

And, where were the Gran? If it was Malastare, then according a Galaxy guide and New Essential Guide to species, Gran had control of the planet and made the Dug lesser known. They controlled the government, too.

Overall, 7/10

Also, according to Ben Burtt, "E chu ta" is Huttese, but it can't be translated, because it's very inappropriate. I also heard "Mutually beneficial." I guess TCW will always continue to add in OT dialgoue.

 

as for Skywalker being the best pilot in the galaxy more like the most ship crasher in the galaxy.

The leader of the Dugs didnt he have a tiger facein some odd way??
well at least the battle scene with the droids was ok short but ok I guess

 

Well, I guess they figured 'if he can walk away from so many crashes, he MUST be good'. Or maybe Obi-Wan was trying to spare Luke's feelings in A New Hope ("Why, SURE your dad was a good pilot!")

 

Of course Malastare is one of the very few planets actually named and associated with a species in the films - a squeaky-voiced Gran senator in TPM identifies his delegation as 'the congress of Malastare'. Qui-Gon refers to podracing on Malastare ('very fast, verrry dangerous'), and given that one of the Boonta Eve podracers is a Gran (ill-fated Mawhonic, the only OT species involved), the association of Gran and Malastare seemed sound. Then the EU ran with the idea of Dugs being from Malastare (the Sebulba association, I presume), mixed it up with native Dugs subjugated by Gran colonists, and there you go.

My take here is that it's the Gran population of Malastare that are represented in the Senate by 'the congress', while the Dugs on Malastare remain outside the Republic under their own rule, possibly living on their own rather inhospitable looking continent. Hence the need for a treaty to secure these peculiar fuel reserves.

Despite low expectations I loved the episode, it really was terrific fun and I actually shouted when the ARC-170s flew into view. The electro-proton bomb was a fantastic effect, and a given that its droid-effecting range is much larger than its lifeform-affecting range it's a sensible type of weapon for the Republic to be develop, sinkhole-creating side effects aside. I really prefer these episodes where the war is the backdrop rather than the focus - in both this and Bounty Hunters the Jedi were doing some palpable good, and not just strengthening the Empire to come. Makes it easier to care about teh outcome.

Can't wait to see Zillo climbing those starscrapers in the Senate district next week! Better yet, the towers of the Jedi Temple itself!

I was however slightly let down that there wasn't a clone called Hot Lips.

 

We've got an Archduke (Poggle), a Duchess (Satine), two Queens (Amidala used to be one and the Geonosian Queen), a Count (Dooku), and now a Doge (Urus).

For being a Republic there seems to be a strong usage of noble titles.

 

Not to mention Bail Organa is a Viceroy, Wat Tambor is an Emir, Passel Argente is a Baron, etc. I wonder if we'll ever see a pope