Not Bad...

 

Star Wars: The Clone Wars

2008-13, 2014, 2015, 2019-

**********

Pros: Humanizing the Clones, Some Good Character Moments,  Voice Cast Battles

Cons: Doesn’t Explore Motivations of Separatists Enough, Some Slow Arcs

         Considering how bad Dave Filoni’s The Clone Wars movie was, I was a bit close-minded toward his resultant show.  It also didn’t help that I greatly preferred Genndy Tartakovsky’s Clone Wars and still do.  When I finally checked it out, it took a few episodes to finally become worth watching, but it turned out to be decent.  It does some things well, but in some ways it falls short of its potential.  There was an entire galaxy of potential and complexity here, after all.

         The show focuses on many points of view.  Primarily we get those of Anakin Skywalker (Matt Lanter) and Obi-Wan Kenobi (James Arnold Taylor).  Their friendship is handled well throughout the show, and Anakin’s potential fall from grace is more credible with his disillusionment with the compromises made by the Jedi.  His apprentice Ahsoka Tano (Ashley Eckstein) also develops into a likable, strong character despite her initial scrappy status in the movie.  The political aspect of the war is shown through Padme Amidala’s (Catherine Taber) eyes, helping her becoming more than just a love interest.  Other characters include the clones (Dee Bradley Baker), Yoda (Tom Kane), Chancellor Palpatine (Ian Abercrombie, then Tim Curry), Count Dooku (Corey Burton), Jar Jar (Ahmed Best),  Mace Windu (Terrence C. Carson), C-3PO (Anthony Daniels), Nute Gunray (Tom Kenny), Asajj Ventress (Nika Futterman), Cad Bane (Corey Burton), Bail Organa (Phil LaMarr), Boba Fett (Daniel Logan), Captain Typho (James C. Mathis III), Mon Mothma (Kath Soucie), Tarkin (Stephen Stanton), Jabba (Kevin Michael Richardson), Qui-Gon Jinn (Liam Neeson), Schmi Skywalker (Pernilla August), Chewbacca (Peter Mayhew), and Matthew Wood as General Grievous and the battle droids.  Other voices include Olivia d’Abo, Robin Atkins Downes, Dave Filoni, Brian George, Anna Graves, Jennifer Hale, Angelique Perrin, Meredith Salenger, Jason Spisak, Tasia Valenza, Seth Green, David Tennant, Ron Perlman, James Hong, Michael York, George Takei, Simon Pegg, and Mark Hamill.  Voice acting is very good.  I like how the show utilizes voice actors, and Star Wars could make use of them for an animated movie (cc: Disney).  There’s plenty of good mimicry, and James Arnold Taylor, Matt Lanter, and Dee Bradley Baker are particularly versatile.  I commented on this before, but I do not like the WW2 newsreel-style recaps by narrator Tom Kane, as it seems out of place in the franchise.   

           The animation is as good as the movie, which is good for the show and bad for the movie.  The scenery is very creative and the production design is original.  This is often used depicted protracted battles.  They are pretty good (particularly the 2^nd Battle of Geonosis, which is a huge improvement over the first), but I wish they had focused more on the subtleties of the politics.  Worldbuilding is pretty good when we get it.  For example, Mandalore is reimagined cleverly as a developed, progressive planet while maintaining the old canon in the form of a rebellious group of reactionary patricians who have fallen out of favor.  Still, the civilization’s pacifism leaves it open to attack.  Dathomirian Nightsisters also return as an alternative group of force users led by the sinister Mother Talzin (Barbara Goodson) who have an alliance with the Sith.  Less enjoyable is the Mortis arc, which is tediously vague spiritualism that smacks of blatant Midichlorian overcompensation.

            The biggest problem with the show is how it fails to realize the “heroes on both sides” angle.  There is next to no development on the various potentially sympathetic motivations for the Separatists.  Instead, all its leaders are one-dimensional, greedy monsters.  Their blatant oppression of occupied systems may make sense as part of Palpatine’s plan to turn public opinion toward the stability of the Empire, but surely there would be some idealistic Separatists who would call this out.  The most we get is an episode about a friend of Padme’s who is a member of the Separatist Senate and is only vaguely opposed to the “corruption” of the Republic.  She blindly trusts Dooku despite evidence to the contrary.  There is a touch of Trumpism here: people so fed up with the corruption that they turn to even more blatantly corrupt people because it’s all the same to them now.  Dooku himself displays no humanity or complexity save for feeling slightly bad when Palpatine orders him to kill Asajj off.  I never found him an interesting character, and his backstory is frustrating because suggests some complex motivation that apparently isn’t there.  Star Wars sometimes has a problem with having delve even deeper into supplementary material for depth, as if six seasons of a show aren’t enough.   General Grievous is also disappointing, getting humiliated too many times throughout the series (he gets better, though).  The battle droids are walking jokes as well.

          And it’s not like there isn’t enough material to work with for this complexity.  The Republic is extremely flawed, as it allowed something like the events of Episode I to happen.  More importantly, the Jedi Order forcibly takes people’s children to train them as soldiers.  That alone seems like enough to rebel over but we hear little of that.  At least one system has separated itself peacefully from the Jedi over this, but the show seems to victim-blame them as this leaves them vulnerable for the antagonists of the episode.  

NARRATOR: You did and you are.

          One thing the show does beautifully is humanizing the Clone Troopers.  Each of them have formed a distinct personality, and Dee Bradley Baker does a great job conveying that.  They struggle with their experiences of war while being denied their personhood and feelings because they were “just” clones who were “designed” for this.  The show reconciles this with Order 66 by revealing that they had an organic chip installed in their brains that would override their will when the command was given.  A great breakout protagonist is CT-7567/”Rex,” who gets the most development out of the bunch.   

            The show has a few more interesting characters.  Cad Bane, despite his ridiculously out-of-place cowboy hat’s being a little too Western, is a badass antagonist with an awesome voice.  Hondo Ohnaka (Jim Cummings) is an ambiguously likable scoundrel with a complex relationship with the war.  He’s fun, but he sometimes does things too evil for his “gentleman pirate” characterization to work.

             

The important thing is that Jim Cummings is still getting work.

            In a rather ill-advised move, the show decides to revive Darth Maul (Sam Witwer), and, no, it does not trouble itself with explaining his apparent resurrection.  It’s a sacrifice of logic in favor of fanservice, especially since Maul is far more intelligent and calculating than he is in the Episode I.  There is some interesting motivation behind him, as he feels robbed him of his supposed destiny as a Sith master.  We also get some great voicework from Witwer and Clancy Brown, who plays his brother Savage Oppress.  This moment is amusing as well.

              The show is generally divided up into 4-episode arcs of varying quality, and it can be found on Netflix.  It’s easier to get through if you just skip the ones you find boring.  There is some cheating of chronological order, especially the events surrounding Bane’s breaking Ziro the Hutt (Corey Burton) out of prison.  The show was cancelled in 2013 with a final season’s (“The Lost Missions”) getting released on Netflix in 2014.  A few unfinished episodes were released on StarWars.com, and a revival series will debut on Disney streaming next year.