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It's called "Massacre" but I'd forgotten how nuts this fourth season episode of Clone Wars was. Featuring absolutely no "good" characters, it's the story of a single battle and rout, of the droid army laying seige to a whole civilisation. And not just your average goofy Star Wars alien civilisation, this is the Nightsisters of Dathomir who employ witches and zombies in their defence. Like so many episodes of Clone Wars, it keeps you captivated with the sensation that anything can happen.



It's very cinematic, too, I can imagine it looking great on a movie screen. Directed by Steward Lee and written by Katie Lucas, it returns us to the ongoing troubles of Asajj Ventress (Nika Futterman), former apprentice of Count Dooku (Corey Burton). After failing in her attempts to get revenge on him, Ventress returns to her home world Dathomir to join the fold of the Nightsisters.



She's baptised in a special ceremony before feasting begins. Meanwhile, General Grievous (Matthew Wood) is marshalling his forces for an onslaught. It seems like a one-sided battle until an ancient member of the Nightsisters (Kathleen Gati), hidden safely in a secret chamber, raises an army of zombies.



The Nightsisters are so impressive in this episode it strengthens the impact when they start to lose. You come away from the episode with a new sense of the strength of Grevious and his droids as well as a surprising sadness for the Nightsisters, even if they are a whole population of murderers. Even before the Disney acquisition, making both sides villains was likely the only way the show could get away with something like this. It's a liberating concept, as Quentin Tarantino showed with several of his films.

Clone Wars is available on Disney+.

Twitter Sonnet #1436

The av'rage trek was deemed a lofty myth.
Behind a veil of glowing bugs we dance.
The whispers claimed the nervous ghost's a Sith.
But something mild took the polished chance.
The endless show would never roll the cast.
The thought of broken legs preserved the sea.
A clutch of words was nailed against the mast.
In neutral waters, stronger fish can see.
An easy trap for air was just a can.
The building's height was built around a fall.
The watcher turned to be, of course, a man.
And something moved the mind to build a wall.
Escaping sides create the boundless square.
A billion eyes reflect the Devil's stare.

The final episode of Clone Wars is a great visual treat with pacing that appropriately lingers on its painterly images. From the destruction of the ship's reactor to Ahsoka jumping across falling debris to that lovely snow-swept epilogue. Director Nathaniel Villanueva delivered the goods in spades, it almost didn't matter how empty Dave Filoni's teleplay was.

Beginning immediately after the previous episode, we find Ahsoka (Ashley Eckstein) and Rex (Dee Bradley Baker) fighting their way out of the medbay against their former comrades. Surprisingly, Ahsoka spares a moment to tell Rex to put his blaster on stun because, after all, they don't want to kill any of their friends if they don't have to. When Ahsoka tells Rex that she let Maul (Sam Witwer) free to cause a distraction, Rex's reaction is astonishment. He clearly can't understand why Ahsoka thought this was a remotely good idea.



I think we can all agree with Rex in this reaction. Later, the nonsensical nature of Ahsoka's decision is referred to again in the form of Maul's taunt, reminding her she wanted "chaos". Along with a mention of the fact that Ahsoka is no longer a Jedi, so why should Order 66 even apply to her, a lot of the episode felt strangely like replies to fan criticism. Obviously the whole episode couldn't have been written and produced in one week so it seems to me someone screened the previous episode and then handed Filoni a bunch of notes long before the final season aired. The trouble is, he doesn't seem to have realised that acknowledging the problems isn't enough, especially with a mistake as big as Ahsoka setting Maul free.



There could have been a good scene of Ahsoka realising, in horror, what she'd done. Wondering to herself what she could have expected in sicing one of the galaxy's deadliest, most ruthless Force users on her friends. As it is, her motives are totally ambiguous and her strangely muted emotions make her come across as kind of dumb. We sympathise more with Rex, just as Anakin and Obi-wan seemed more sensible a couple episodes earlier when Ahsoka made that weird argument about how trying to prevent the Separatists from attacking Coruscant and kidnapping the Chancellor was just "playing politics". Again, the basic impression I have is that Dave Filoni has no idea how to write Ahsoka. Which is hardly surprising--before this final season of Clone Wars, he was a credited writer on only one episode, the finale of season two, which was co-written by Drew Z. Greenberg. Why is it, exactly, Dave Filoni has come to be seen as the great talent on Clone Wars and the potential saviour of the franchise?



My suspicion is that, before Disney bought Lucasfilm, Lucas promoted Filoni in order to downplay his own creative involvement. A heavily edited interview between George Lucas and Dave Filoni was released on YouTube last week and it makes clear what a hands-on approach Lucas took to the series.



A key point is when Filoni recollects advice Lucas apparently gave him multiple times:

FILONI: . . . you [Lucas] would watch stuff we did all the time and go, "What are you trying to say? What does that mean?" And I would explain it you and you would say, "That's great. Everything you said, do it there [pointing at the screen] because you're not going to be in people's homes to explain it to them."

Lucas constantly pushed Filoni to do better. Maybe without Lucas around, he doesn't see any reason to go that distance.

Filoni directly mocks Lucas' desire for a story arc about banking regulations, possibly referring to the season three episodes "Heroes on Both Sides" and "Pursuit of Peace". Filoni suggests this is something children can't relate to. I would argue that great children's fiction is often filled with things children have absolutely no frame of reference for. Think about the bank scene in Mary Poppins or the stuff about college and mortgages and taxes in the original Ghostbusters. If kids don't understand it, there's still stuff going on that they can understand--and then, the great part is, as they get older and find themselves confronting these problems, they can think back and maybe the stories they loved as a kid gave them a model they can still look to as adults. And by the way, those are two great episodes--with some terrific action sequences.



Whatever problems the final season may have, it is visually splendid and it will always have years of incredible television behind it.

Rarely has so very little been animated so very well. We already knew the outcome of the conflict on Friday's new Clone Wars. Rebels has already established who lives and dies. That doesn't mean the story can't be interesting--Better Call Saul and, indeed, the Star Wars prequels and earlier episodes of Clone Wars have shown just how great prequels can be. Unfortunately, Dave Filoni sticks mainly to connecting dots in an episode with a distinctly fan-fiction-ish vibe.



The episode begins without narration for once and the opening music sounds very little like Star Wars and quite a lot like the work of the recently deceased Krzysztof Penderecki, best known for his music's inclusion in the scores to The Shining, Twin Peaks, and other films. This gives the episode an eerie tone right off the bat and adds to the ominous quality of Maul (Sam Witwer) hinting at the impending Order 66. Something, again, which would be more effective if Rebels hadn't established Ahsoka's clones as having resisted the order. I hope at least some of the clones she relied on turn.



The question to ask is, what does this story add to what's already in Revenge of the Sith? Obi-Wan (James Arnold Taylor) tells Ahsoka (Ashley Eckstein) about Anakin being asked to spy on the Chancellor and she's angry on Anakin's behalf. She's still loyal to him, which is certainly tragic, but we know she won't have a real confrontation with him until the very unsatisfying episode of Rebels where she meets Darth Vader. She and Maul make an interesting pairing because they're both disillusioned apprentices who have turned their backs on their respective orders. Maul reaching out a hand to Ahsoka seems as though it was meant to evoke Kylo Ren and Rey in Last Jedi--it would have been interesting to see Ahsoka work with Maul for a while. Certainly a lot more interesting than seeing them engage in a fight that goes nowhere and proves nothing. But it sure was well animated.



Even better than Ahsoka and Maul teaming up would be Vader and Ahsoka teaming up. In fact, that would be a great premise for the live action series. Why should Ahsoka be so sure the Empire is the wrong way to go? She doesn't like the Jedi Order. Vader slaughtered the Jedi Order and that's much farther than Ahsoka would go. But what if Vader and Ahsoka were stranded on a planet together or had to work together for some other reason? Maybe Ahsoka would start thinking the Empire makes life more safe and secure for people than the constant volatility of the Clone Wars. She can't redeem Vader, that's Luke's job. She and Vader need another kind of conflict to chew on.

But spare us Maul's undergrad thesis on how "justice is a construct." Oof. Star Wars dialogue is infamously bad but that's pathetic.

Last night's new Clone Wars ended the Bad Batch arc satisfyingly enough with Echo making himself useful and Anakin starting to look a bit more like Vader.



The two stories are an interesting juxtaposition with Echo (Dee Bradley Baker) using his partly mechanised body to assist our heroes while Anakin's (Matt Lanter) decent into the Dark Side will be symbolised partly by the exchange of flesh for machine, becoming "more machine now than man".

Interestingly, last night's episode, "Unfinished Business", featured a moment where Mace (Terrence C. Carson) randomly decides to offer a legion of battle droids the opportunity to surrender. A reply from one of them of the familiar line, "Blast them!" suggests the machines have no such capacity for free will. However frequently we see the battle droids comically bemoan their obvious fates, they're apparently hard wired to take the punishment. It's no wonder Echo has to struggle to prove himself.



Anakin, showing more anger in the kind of ruthless interrogation tactics we've already been seeing him employ, interestingly chooses to cut off the spider alien admiral's mechanical arms--this character, Trench (Dee Bradley Baker), had appeared in a previous episode where he evidently lost half his body in a battle with Anakin. Considering what happens to the clone troopers, as far as free will goes, the series more and more seems to be blurring the lines between the two factions.

Clone Wars is available on Disney+.

The second episode of the new Clone Wars season aired last night and was a puzzlingly severe drop in quality. "Distant Echo" feels unfinished, featuring a suspiciously similar opening shot to the previous episode and weakly choreographed action scenes. The subtextual conflict, though, between independent thought and mindless following remains interesting.



Poor Anakin (Matt Lanter) never learned how to spot early pregnancy.

A clandestine transmission between Anakin and Padme (Catherine Taber) gives the episode a strong feeling of connexion to Revenge of the Sith, something that has generally not been present in previous seasons. It makes sense given how much closer the show is drawing to the final prequel film. The very brief dialogue between Obi-Wan (James Arnold Taylor) is amusing as it suggests again how well aware Obi-Wan is of Anakin's secret romance.



My favourite scene in the episode, though, was the argument on a hilltop between the Bad Batch (Dee Bradley Baker) and Rex (Dee Bradley Baker). There was no clear good or bad side in the argument even though Rex's anger is overplayed to make him seem like he's making a mistake. The Bad Batch clearly look down on the "regs", the regular troopers, an interesting turn after how much the clone stories on the show have emphasised the value of teamwork. We know just how right the Bad Batch will prove to be in the events of Revenge of the Sith, something I suppose they won't live to see.



The attack on the droid base was so badly directed it was confusing. One scene had Anakin standing in a thin corridor while two droids gently took turns firing at him from each side. The episode's credited director is Steward Lee but Dave Filoni is supervising director. I'm wondering if the sloppiness of this episode is the first real sign of George Lucas' absence as executive producer.



The episode's conclusion, when Rex finds the mangled Echo with his mind being plundered by machines, was pretty effective, though. The always slightly offputting effect of clones interacting is always even better when a healthy one is talking to a sick or dying one. These guys must think about death a lot.

Rex thought he'd left Echo behind to die, it turns out Echo's fate was even worse than death.

Clone Wars is available on Disney+.

Seven Samurai and The Hidden Fortress aren't the only Kurosawa films that have been translated to Star Wars. I recently watched "Lightsaber Lost" again, a second season Clone Wars episode written by Drew Z. Greenberg based on a film noir directed by Kurosawa in 1949 called Stray Dog. I was also afforded an opportunity to marvel at and ponder over why Clone Wars succeeded so well where Rebels did not (Resistance isn't even worth mentioning).

Unlike Hidden Fortress and Seven Samurai, Stray Dog has a contemporary setting--that's one of the quite remarkable things about it because it features extensive location footage of Tokyo's massive black market amid ruins in the aftermath of World War II. Against this backdrop we have the story of a young cop, Murakami (Toshiro Mifune), whose pistol is stolen by a pick-pocket. His frantic search for the item shows his sense of duty and honour in how urgently he desires to get it back. His youth and inexperience compels him to play rough with suspects or plead with them pathetically. An older cop, Sato (Takashi Shimura), takes him under his wing to show him the value in being friendly with potential informants and in taking a slower and subtler approach.



In "Lightsaber Lost", Ahsoka (Ashley Eckstein) loses her lightsaber to a pickpocket. She partners up with an elder Jedi who shows her the value in slow and careful detective work even when Ahsoka's anxiety compels her to rush pell-mell after her target. The episode features some wonderful chase sequences on Coruscant, including a bit where Ahsoka gets stuck on a massive video screen showing a pontificating Palpatine.

Greenberg, like many of the writers of Clone Wars' best episodes, hasn't written for Star Wars since Disney purchased the franchise. But, while it may be my imagination, I maintain there's a fundamentally different feeling to the stories for more reasons than that. One way I might put it is that Clone Wars has a greater sense of freedom, the feeling that at any moment the story could go in almost any direction. There were clear boundaries on Rebels and so far on The Mandalorian. I don't think Disney would allow a young protagonist make a mistake that she feels so much anxiety about--or be as willing and eager to torture suspects like Ahsoka, Anakin's padawan. The movies are a different matter--one of the reasons Rogue One is the best of Disney Star Wars so far is for how morally grey its protagonists were allowed to be, particularly Cassian Andor. Which raises an interesting question about the upcoming series centred on Cassian. A neutered Cassian Andor would be a particular egregious case of missing the point. The Mandalorian could stand some shadows, too.

The tragedy is that, if Disney institutes this policy under the theory that it's better for children, they're very wrong. I can see kids getting a very valuable lesson in personal responsibility by empathising with Ahsoka in "Lost Lightsaber" along with some potential respect for their elders.

I finally got caught up on the new season of Star Wars Rebels, which as of Monday is eight episodes in. Unfortunately I'd been rewatching Clone Wars so the problems with Rebels were even more painful. It's not as bad as those excruciating Forces of Destiny shorts, there are one or two things about Rebels that'll keep me watching, among them the almost constant stream of stunt casting. Which is itself a sure sign the people behind the scenes are well aware the show can't stand on its own.

Spoilers after the screenshot



Why isn't Rebels as good as the cgi Clone Wars? I was still only in the first season of Clone Wars in my rewatch, generally considered the weakest, but even at that point the characters had better chemistry, the serial style plots were more exciting and unpredictable, and above all everything felt less sanitised than Rebels. Yet Rebels has many of the very same writers as Clone Wars--Henry Gilroy, Steven Melching, and of course the same showrunner, Dave Filoni. Disney has been unwilling to hire any of the female writers from Clone Wars for some reason--for obvious reasons as far as Katie Lucas is concerned but there's no reason they couldn't bring in Bonnie Mark or Melinda Hsu. Anyway, I'm starting to think the real missing element is George Lucas, not necessarily for what he contributed, which I suspect was more than seems obvious at first, but surprisingly for his willingness to get out of the way.



Katee Sackoff was the stunt casting in this season's two part premiere, "Heroes of Mandalore". Stunt casting on Rebels is either in the form of a celebrity voice (Tom Baker, Gina Torres), a character from elsewhere in the franchise (Ahsoka Tano, Princess Leia), or, as in this case, both since Sackoff is reprising her role as the Mandalorian Bo-Katan Kryze from Clone Wars. She's mostly in the background in these episodes, though, as Sabine (Tiya Sircar) and Ezra (Taylor Gray) are centre stage showing us the new ways they're going to be annoying this season--one of the show's problems, the seasonal rebooting of character development, probably arises from attempts to make things better. Ezra has gone from misfit street rat searching for his parents to wouldbe Jedi with the power to commune with and command animals to troubled, generic brand Anakin tempted by the Dark Side, to who he is to-day, which in the premiere seems to be Jar Jar Binks.



Jar Jar was one of the weakest aspects of Clone Wars so it's fitting that Rebels would choose to emulate him, making Ezra's latest personality and role that of the bumbling, anachronistically zany fool, comically unable to handle his Mandalorian jet pack but, like Jar Jar, somehow managing to accidentally take out the bad guys anyway. Sabine, meanwhile, who in the previous season looked to be on the path to being an imitation Ahsoka after Disney received so much flack for its poor attention to female characters, gives up the Dark Sabre she'd spent so much time training to use. Is there any talk of giving her a lightsabre? Nope. Not that I mind that she's not going to be a Jedi--the show needs fewer Jedi not more--but it doesn't help remove the impression of an untethered, schizophrenic production.



I say untethered but maybe I should say yoked. The first half of "Heroes of Mandalore" ended with what appeared to be the death of Sabine's mother, apparently killed by a weapon Sabine herself had designed. It was a stunning moment that gave me hope the show had finally found some guts and it ended with Sabine overcome by grief and guilt. But--right at the beginning of the next episode--look, Sabine, it's your mom, she's fine, she was just offscreen the whole time because nothing really bad ever happens to the supposedly desperate rebels fighting against the evil Empire! This certainly ranked among the worst, most awkwardly artificial moments in television of 2017.



This season has so far of course seen Star Destroyers and Imperial bases destroyed while the Rebels get off scot-free again and again. Listening to the characters talk about how tough things are has all the charm of the poor little rich kid complaining about his caviare being served two minutes late. Obviously policy is running the show more than any storytelling instincts--or to put it another way, the show is more bureaucratic machine now than man. Though I am happy to see that policy has been updated to allow for romance and Kanaan (Freddie with a stupid fucking Z Prinze Jr) and Hera (Vanessa the best voice actor on the show Marshall) almost kiss.



Hera is another reason I'll keep watching--I actually like her. I only wish she'd find a better guy than Soul Patch Jedi. In fact, more and more I've been building in my head-canon an impression on Rebels that makes it work with the rest of the franchise. What if the whole series is in fact Rebel propaganda produced during the period between Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi? We know Hera is a real person because she's mentioned in Rogue One. What if the Rebel Alliance PR team decided to put out stories involving the famous heroic general Syndulla of the Rebellion? That would explain why the Rebels constantly win on the show, why the Empire's characters are almost uniformly baffoonish and one dimensional. And then we could say Kanaan and Ezra are totally made up so Luke showing up with a lightsabre isn't robbed of the impact it wouldn't otherwise have if there had already been two Jedi around just a couple years before A New Hope. This way the show would fit into canon while the franchise wouldn't be married to its worst elements.



Which I've barely scratched the surface of, by the way. Monday featured a two part episode with a badly conceived homage to Princess Mononoke. Ezra's previous ability to commune with animals is of course never mentioned when the wolves from Mononoke show up to lead the group out of danger. The writers then introduce a big smoky ore crawler piloted by the episode's stunt casting, Seth Green as a ridiculously stupid lizard man the heroes are too stupid to keep out of audio range from the transmitter when Ezra uses it to try to fool the Empire. This ore crawler is introduced to show us that one of the best parts of Princess Mononoke, the fact that it doesn't demonise people trying to use metal in order to live, will be obnoxiously ignored.

I do like that they aged up Ezra and Sabine. If only they'd taken the opportunity to change Ezra's voice actor. It's amazing how everything he says sounds like a whine, I guess it's almost impressive in its way.