Now this is podracing The Clone Wars! Season 5, just a few episodes in, delivers on just about all the promises that friends told me about the show, and sets up some really interesting characters and scenarios for the future. Lets dig in!
1. A banger of a start
The season begins with what, essentially, people hoped that Episode II would be if you stopped them halfway through The Phantom Menace and asked what they would like to see in the sequel. Darth Maul is full badass here, and Obi-Wan continues his reputation as the Jedi. The action sequences are terse and exciting, full of things we haven’t seen before, refining the Jedi power set and giving Maul something to do other than just look cool. It was such an exciting way to begin the season.
Maul and Opress are either dead or missing at the end of the episode, but that really doesn’t matter, as Maul has seemed dead before. He represents to Obi-Wan the spectre of the past, and nothing he does, even cut a dude in half, can really protect him from the past coming back to haunt him.
This episode stands alone from the first couple of arcs (I haven’t watched much further yet), but it sets the tone for the season with a flourish. Hot damn this was a fun 22 minutes.
2. I saw Saw
I remember being genuinely surprised when I learned that Saw Gerrera was not a character native to Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, but rather a character from The Clone Wars moving to the big screen. This is a bigger deal than it seems, as there hasn’t been a lot of crossover in that direction for many, many years. Sure, Boba Fett debuted in a cartoon segment of the Star Wars Holiday Special, but since then, characters fro other media have rarely crossed over into the films.
So here, after five seasons of wondering, we finally get Saw in the flesh. We meet him, his sister Steela, and some other rebels on the planet of Onderon. They, along with Lux Bonteri, are attempting to free their exiled king Dendup, and get the Separatists off their planet. The Jedi can’t appear to be directly involved in the war, but attempt to train the rebels to defend themselves, allowing the rebels a chance to win without leading to an all-out war on Onderon.
This is the closest The Clone Wars has come to condoning unprovoked violence, or resisting in any non-peaceful way. They even go so far as to arm the dissidents with missiles, and by the end of this arc are essentially funding terrorism. Granted, they don’t see it as terrorism, but let’s call a spade a spade. This is surprisingly grey moral territory for the Jedi to engage in, and it creates a really interesting dynamic.
3. Bizarre Love Triangle
We’ve seen Lux and Ahsoka’s awkward flirting happen a few times now, and here we see Ahsoka’s jealousy when he’s shacked up with Steela. The whole idea of Jedi love is a sticky subject in the prequels, and Ahsoka never really falls for Lux, per se, but rather just expresses affection and attraction. Hers seems to be a pretty standard teenage reaction, versus Anakin’s all engrossing stalker vibe.
There’s another facet of this, though. As we will discuss in a bit, Ahsoka, due to when she’s being trained, is not getting the standard Jedi training for a bunch of reasons. Because of that, it seems like her training allows for more grey area, morally, practically and, here, romantically. Not that I think she’s going to run off with Lux in the end, but that idea isn’t as bewildering to her as it would be for someone trained 100 years earlier.
4. Flawed rebels
One of the nice bits about this arc was showing the flaws of the rebels, both in terms of their combat skills and also just in how they approach stuff. Too often, there’s a romantic aspect to a homespun rebellion that somehow makes all the players simultaneously ‘aw, shucks’ farmboys and also crack shots. Saw, Steela, and co. are not that at all; each of them has a serious ineptitude at one part of combat. They are also a bit unclear as to what exactly they are rebelling for; they know what they are rebelling against, but their goals are somewhat messy. That’s a good thing for the story, and it also sets Saw on the path that we find him on in Rogue One.
Continued below5. Politicizing everyone
While Saw was presented as a somewhat loose cannon at the start of this arc, you can see how Steela’s death will lead him down an even more extreme path. His partisans, as seen in Rogue One and some other canon-materials (like Leia: Princess of Alderaan), are the most aggressive of the rebels that we’ve seen thus far. They believe that blood must be shed to get things done; this is very different than the Jedi, or even some members of the Rebel Alliance. Saw’s methods are extreme, and that fits him.
But in the second half of this arc, Ahsoka begins to see that the Jedi’s way may not be the best in this case as well. She gets mixed up in the battles more than she agreed to, and you get the impression that she’s barely holding back enough to not just go apeshit all over the droids. She wants change, and she’s tired of doing nothing. Both she and Anakin see the Jedi flaws more than, say, Yoda and Obi-Wan; again, this may be to both of their reasonably unusual training. The indoctrination didn’t quite take for these two, which is part of what makes them potentially so powerful and important Jedi.
It is also what leads to the destruction of the Jedi Order.
