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Sep. 30th, 2017 03:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsWe have finished Season 1 of the Clone Wars TV show, and are a good chunk of the way through Season 2! A sign of progress: I think we've now officially hit our first ominous foreshadowing usage of the 'Imperial March.'
21. Liberty on Ryloth
This is the one where Mace Windu has to go convince Dashingly Suspicious Twi'lek Revolutionary Leader Cham Syndulla to team up with the Republic in liberating the planet. Important note: THE MINUTE Cham Syndulla appeared in the same frame as Mace Windu,innerbrat shouted "Ship it! WHOOPS!" My notes indicate at least 32 clone buddies killed in the liberation of the planet, which is a very large and also a very specific number.
22. Hostage Crisis
OK, so this is the one where bounty hunters make the mistake of holding the entire Senate hostage while Anakin is secretly in Padme's office for a booty call and it is. HILARIOUS. Funniest moments include:
- Anakin asking Padme to hold his lightsaber in the most Freudian fashion imaginable
- Anakin straight-up diving under Padme's desk when her colleagues walk in
- Padme desperately attempting to convince Bail Organa that she just found Anakin's lightsaber, it was just, like, rolling around somewhere, gosh! he must have lost it somewhere! mysterious!
Anyway after the events of this episode it is clearly impossible for the entire Senate not to have noticed that Padme Amidala has a Jedi boytoy, so it seems like they're all just politely pretending not to notice?
1. Holocron Heist
More bounty hunter hijinks! This time the bounty hunters successfully steal top secret information about Force-sensitive children ... FROM THE JEDI ARCHIVES! Jedi library and information systems management does not seem to be particularly efficient, I will say.
Two clone buddies died in the making of this episode, plus one SUPER CUTE droid that was unwittingly used as a bomb by the bounty hunters. :( Pour one out for the tragedy of droid exploitation.
2. Cargo of Doom
Anakin comes up with a genius plan to recover the stolen top-secret information from the bounty hunters that results in Ahsoka kidnapped and tortured, Anakin forced to give up the top-secret information's encryption key, and the bad guys escaping. Good job, buddy! Meanwhile, military contact spends the entire episode alternating between facepalming and muttering 'I told you so.' Casualties: at least two clone buddies, plus one Jedi who let himself be electrocuted instead of giving up the top-secret information to the enemy ... which Anakin gave up ten minutes later, ah well.
3. Children of the Force
Baby hunt! Our intrepid heroes go on a mission to rescue some Force-sensitive tots who have been kidnapped from the bad guys (including some culturally interesting scenes of suspicious moms who are not necessarily thrilled by the idea of Jedi carrying off their tots either.) No clone buddies die in the making of this episode, and the kids are rescued, and it's all very adorable until you remember that those selfsame tots are probably going to be murdered by Anakin himself in just a few short years, WHOOPS.
4. Senate Spy
IT'S THE NOTORIOUS EPISODE. I love that movie, and I also kind of love all the absurd romantic episodes of the Clone Wars because they are just SO CONSISTENTLY FUNNY. In this one, Padme gets recruited for a bout of Romantic Spying on her traitorous Senator ex; Anakin spends the entire episode sulking and glowering helpfully in the background.
Alas, then Padme is poisoned by her ex's co-conspirators! Padme's ex asks for help in exchange for taking the steps necessary to get the antidote; Anakin is like '...mm,' lets Padme's ex compromise himself with EVERYONE in order to get the antidote, then is like "LATER SUCKER" and leaves him on the planet to presumably get murdered by his co-conspirators. Noble in love, Anakin Skywalker is not.
5. Landing at Point Rain
This episode struck us both as surprisingly bloody and surprisingly pointless -- it's basically just an attack sequence with a very high body count in terms of both clone buddies and bug aliens, many of which are just straight-up SET ON FIRE. (This does begs the question of whether it's more acceptable to show the brutal murder of sentient aliens onscreen in a children's show if they're non-humanoid; probably yes, because humans are bad at empathizing with the other.) Anakin and Ahsoka start the episode joking about their number of kills and end it the same way, while we watch in vague horror. No lessons were learned this day.
6. Weapons Factory
Anakin and Jedi Luminara set their padawans up on a playdate! Which in this case means a joint mission to infiltrate a weapons factory while Anakin and Luminara lead a decoy on the outside. Unsurprisingly, everything goes horribly wrong and Ahsoka and Barriss nobly sacrifice themselves for the mission in a near-fatal fashion. It's a super interesting episode for Jedi-Padawan relationships -- I think we're meant to assume the dynamic between Luminara and Barriss is more traditional than Anakin and Ahsoka's - and for the question of what the Jedi philosophy of detachment means in practice. At the end of the episode, when it looks like Ahsoka and Barriss are almost certainly dead, Luminara is ready to grieve and walk away while Anakin is like 'UH NO NO ONE IS DEAD NO ONE IS DYING I WILL DIG THROUGH EVERY PILE OF THIS RUBBLE -' And in 99% of television shows, that attitude would be rewarded as the correct one, as indeed it is here, but on the other hand, everything in this show is colored by the knowledge that Anakin's Attachments are going to get many many many people killed in the end, which makes the moral much murkier.
7. Legacy of Terror
This is a straight-up horror movie episode which very cleverly combines two genres of horror - BUGS and ZOMBIES - into one extra-nightmare scenario! Luminara goes off on a solo mission and is kidnapped by the queen of the sentient bug people, who uses tiny larvae to make mind-controlled zombies out of her own dead soldiers. Anakin and Obi-Wan go after her and lose five clone buddies in the process.
As a sidenote, this is the first time we see Luminara and Obi-Wan hanging out, and I think maybe the first time we see Obi-Wan hanging out with a peer Jedi (rather than a pupil or a pupil's pupil) at all? Anyway, we both kind of dug their dynamic.
DEBI: I kind of feel like maybe they have banged previously?
BECCA: I mean, maybe, but that's also just how Ewan MacGregor sounds with everyone. (I forgot in this response that it was not actually Ewan MacGregor doing the voice acting, but James Arnold Taylor is definitely doing his best Ewan impression so I think it still counts.)
Sidenote: Shortly after watching this episode, I ended up rewatching Down With Love, and if nobody has dubbed Ewan MacGregor's lines in that movie over Clone Wars footage yet then that seems like a void waiting to be filled.
8. Brain Invaders
In this episode of a fun children's show, Ahsoka has to decide whether to kill a zombie-brain-worm-infected Barriss to prevent the zombie worms from spreading, or put lives at risk by trying to save her friend! IT'S VERY STRESSFUL. Debi in particular was very stressed. I was a little less stressed because one of my few spoilery bits of knowledge related to this show is that Barriss lives and is important later, but nonetheless the narrative tension was high. Ahsoka does kill at least three zombie-worm infected clones. We hope the other zombie-worm-infected clones were eventually rescued but we don't have high hopes.
In other fun children's show news, Anakin secretly Force chokes a bug prisoner to get information about how to defeat the zombie worms and save Team Padawan. Imperial March alert!
9. Grievous Intrigue
I just watched this episode last week and already I remember almost nothing about it, so it can't have been that interesting. Anakin, Obi-Wan, and another side character Jedi go to rescue another Jedi from General Grievous, which they do, and also to capture Grievous, which they do not. Lots of lightsaber battles and falling off things. At least six clone buddies died in the making of this episode.
10. The Deserter
On the other hand, maybe I just forgot all information about the last episode because this one was so good?? In the course of a battle, Clone Captain Rex is injured; his buddies leave him at a farmhouse with an armed-to-the-teeth Twi'lek and her two adorable children ... and, it turns out, her husband, A CLONE DESERTER!!! They argue about duty and free will and choice, and also team up to save the family from droids, and it's very good. Also the clone and his Twi'lek family are basically Pacho's family from Emperor's New Groove and that also was very good.
Enhancing the experience was the fact that we were watching this one with Debi's small niece, who was very stressed out whenever danger threatened the children and loudly cuddles and reassurance that everything was going to turn out all right. (It did.)
21. Liberty on Ryloth
This is the one where Mace Windu has to go convince Dashingly Suspicious Twi'lek Revolutionary Leader Cham Syndulla to team up with the Republic in liberating the planet. Important note: THE MINUTE Cham Syndulla appeared in the same frame as Mace Windu,
innerbrat shouted "Ship it! WHOOPS!" My notes indicate at least 32 clone buddies killed in the liberation of the planet, which is a very large and also a very specific number.22. Hostage Crisis
OK, so this is the one where bounty hunters make the mistake of holding the entire Senate hostage while Anakin is secretly in Padme's office for a booty call and it is. HILARIOUS. Funniest moments include:
- Anakin asking Padme to hold his lightsaber in the most Freudian fashion imaginable
- Anakin straight-up diving under Padme's desk when her colleagues walk in
- Padme desperately attempting to convince Bail Organa that she just found Anakin's lightsaber, it was just, like, rolling around somewhere, gosh! he must have lost it somewhere! mysterious!
Anyway after the events of this episode it is clearly impossible for the entire Senate not to have noticed that Padme Amidala has a Jedi boytoy, so it seems like they're all just politely pretending not to notice?
1. Holocron Heist
More bounty hunter hijinks! This time the bounty hunters successfully steal top secret information about Force-sensitive children ... FROM THE JEDI ARCHIVES! Jedi library and information systems management does not seem to be particularly efficient, I will say.
Two clone buddies died in the making of this episode, plus one SUPER CUTE droid that was unwittingly used as a bomb by the bounty hunters. :( Pour one out for the tragedy of droid exploitation.
2. Cargo of Doom
Anakin comes up with a genius plan to recover the stolen top-secret information from the bounty hunters that results in Ahsoka kidnapped and tortured, Anakin forced to give up the top-secret information's encryption key, and the bad guys escaping. Good job, buddy! Meanwhile, military contact spends the entire episode alternating between facepalming and muttering 'I told you so.' Casualties: at least two clone buddies, plus one Jedi who let himself be electrocuted instead of giving up the top-secret information to the enemy ... which Anakin gave up ten minutes later, ah well.
3. Children of the Force
Baby hunt! Our intrepid heroes go on a mission to rescue some Force-sensitive tots who have been kidnapped from the bad guys (including some culturally interesting scenes of suspicious moms who are not necessarily thrilled by the idea of Jedi carrying off their tots either.) No clone buddies die in the making of this episode, and the kids are rescued, and it's all very adorable until you remember that those selfsame tots are probably going to be murdered by Anakin himself in just a few short years, WHOOPS.
4. Senate Spy
IT'S THE NOTORIOUS EPISODE. I love that movie, and I also kind of love all the absurd romantic episodes of the Clone Wars because they are just SO CONSISTENTLY FUNNY. In this one, Padme gets recruited for a bout of Romantic Spying on her traitorous Senator ex; Anakin spends the entire episode sulking and glowering helpfully in the background.
Alas, then Padme is poisoned by her ex's co-conspirators! Padme's ex asks for help in exchange for taking the steps necessary to get the antidote; Anakin is like '...mm,' lets Padme's ex compromise himself with EVERYONE in order to get the antidote, then is like "LATER SUCKER" and leaves him on the planet to presumably get murdered by his co-conspirators. Noble in love, Anakin Skywalker is not.
5. Landing at Point Rain
This episode struck us both as surprisingly bloody and surprisingly pointless -- it's basically just an attack sequence with a very high body count in terms of both clone buddies and bug aliens, many of which are just straight-up SET ON FIRE. (This does begs the question of whether it's more acceptable to show the brutal murder of sentient aliens onscreen in a children's show if they're non-humanoid; probably yes, because humans are bad at empathizing with the other.) Anakin and Ahsoka start the episode joking about their number of kills and end it the same way, while we watch in vague horror. No lessons were learned this day.
6. Weapons Factory
Anakin and Jedi Luminara set their padawans up on a playdate! Which in this case means a joint mission to infiltrate a weapons factory while Anakin and Luminara lead a decoy on the outside. Unsurprisingly, everything goes horribly wrong and Ahsoka and Barriss nobly sacrifice themselves for the mission in a near-fatal fashion. It's a super interesting episode for Jedi-Padawan relationships -- I think we're meant to assume the dynamic between Luminara and Barriss is more traditional than Anakin and Ahsoka's - and for the question of what the Jedi philosophy of detachment means in practice. At the end of the episode, when it looks like Ahsoka and Barriss are almost certainly dead, Luminara is ready to grieve and walk away while Anakin is like 'UH NO NO ONE IS DEAD NO ONE IS DYING I WILL DIG THROUGH EVERY PILE OF THIS RUBBLE -' And in 99% of television shows, that attitude would be rewarded as the correct one, as indeed it is here, but on the other hand, everything in this show is colored by the knowledge that Anakin's Attachments are going to get many many many people killed in the end, which makes the moral much murkier.
7. Legacy of Terror
This is a straight-up horror movie episode which very cleverly combines two genres of horror - BUGS and ZOMBIES - into one extra-nightmare scenario! Luminara goes off on a solo mission and is kidnapped by the queen of the sentient bug people, who uses tiny larvae to make mind-controlled zombies out of her own dead soldiers. Anakin and Obi-Wan go after her and lose five clone buddies in the process.
As a sidenote, this is the first time we see Luminara and Obi-Wan hanging out, and I think maybe the first time we see Obi-Wan hanging out with a peer Jedi (rather than a pupil or a pupil's pupil) at all? Anyway, we both kind of dug their dynamic.
DEBI: I kind of feel like maybe they have banged previously?
BECCA: I mean, maybe, but that's also just how Ewan MacGregor sounds with everyone. (I forgot in this response that it was not actually Ewan MacGregor doing the voice acting, but James Arnold Taylor is definitely doing his best Ewan impression so I think it still counts.)
Sidenote: Shortly after watching this episode, I ended up rewatching Down With Love, and if nobody has dubbed Ewan MacGregor's lines in that movie over Clone Wars footage yet then that seems like a void waiting to be filled.
8. Brain Invaders
In this episode of a fun children's show, Ahsoka has to decide whether to kill a zombie-brain-worm-infected Barriss to prevent the zombie worms from spreading, or put lives at risk by trying to save her friend! IT'S VERY STRESSFUL. Debi in particular was very stressed. I was a little less stressed because one of my few spoilery bits of knowledge related to this show is that Barriss lives and is important later, but nonetheless the narrative tension was high. Ahsoka does kill at least three zombie-worm infected clones. We hope the other zombie-worm-infected clones were eventually rescued but we don't have high hopes.
In other fun children's show news, Anakin secretly Force chokes a bug prisoner to get information about how to defeat the zombie worms and save Team Padawan. Imperial March alert!
9. Grievous Intrigue
I just watched this episode last week and already I remember almost nothing about it, so it can't have been that interesting. Anakin, Obi-Wan, and another side character Jedi go to rescue another Jedi from General Grievous, which they do, and also to capture Grievous, which they do not. Lots of lightsaber battles and falling off things. At least six clone buddies died in the making of this episode.
10. The Deserter
On the other hand, maybe I just forgot all information about the last episode because this one was so good?? In the course of a battle, Clone Captain Rex is injured; his buddies leave him at a farmhouse with an armed-to-the-teeth Twi'lek and her two adorable children ... and, it turns out, her husband, A CLONE DESERTER!!! They argue about duty and free will and choice, and also team up to save the family from droids, and it's very good. Also the clone and his Twi'lek family are basically Pacho's family from Emperor's New Groove and that also was very good.
Enhancing the experience was the fact that we were watching this one with Debi's small niece, who was very stressed out whenever danger threatened the children and loudly cuddles and reassurance that everything was going to turn out all right. (It did.)
no subject
Date: 2017-09-30 08:28 pm (UTC)"Hostage Crisis" is the Die Hard episode! I remain forever sad they didn't have Anakin say some weird Star Wars version of "yippie ki-yay motherfucker!"
no subject
Date: 2017-10-01 02:35 pm (UTC)THAT IS THE ONLY THING THAT WAS LACKING.
no subject
Date: 2017-09-30 11:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-10-01 02:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-10-01 12:54 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-10-01 02:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-10-01 04:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-10-01 07:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-10-10 04:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-10-01 02:23 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-10-01 02:43 pm (UTC)babiesbrothers who die at an average rate of 5 per episode' ;___;no subject
Date: 2017-10-02 04:55 pm (UTC)Be sure to follow this up with Star Wars Rebels, where Cham Syndulla's daughter and her Padawan boyfriend help save the galaxy with their adopted kids (ignore that one is older than them, he's their kid) and their murderdriod.
no subject
Date: 2017-10-03 03:44 am (UTC)