Star Wars Saga's Loose Ends Get Tied Up in Lost Episodes

What's This?

Yoda discovers the answers to some of the galaxy's most persistent questions in the final season of the Clone Wars.

Image: Lucasfilm

By Chris Taylor2014-03-04 00:00:26 -0800

The Clone Wars began in 2008 as a much-maligned animated movie — or rather, three episodes of an animated series that was trying to find its feet, stitched together and pushed into theaters by Star Wars creator George Lucas. It ends this Friday, when the sixth and final season — seemingly lost when Lucasfilm unceremoniously cancelled the show last year — arrives en masse on Netflix.

I've watched the final four episodes of this final season, and I can safely say it's some of the best work to ever have the Star Wars name attached to it. Whereas the 2008 movie was a confusing mess with weak plotting and less-than-state-of-the-art CGI, the series ends on a high note with gritty, gripping stories and eye-candy animation.

See also: Netflix Nabs 'Star Wars: The Clone Wars' Final Unaired Season

This is all a testament to how much Dave Filoni, the showrunner on both Clone Wars and the upcoming Star Wars Rebels , has learned over the course of five years. Parts of these final episodes are darker, more mysterious and more apocalyptic than anything you'll find in the live action movies — yes, even Revenge of the Sith or Empire Strikes Back.

For those who don't know, Clone Wars is set between two of Lucas' prequel movies, Star Wars Episode II (Attack of the Clones) and Episode III (Sith). It tells the story of the three-year conflict led by the Jedi Knights and their Clone army against the Separatists, led by Count Dooku (played by Christopher Lee in the movies and voiced by Corey Burton in the show).

Anyone who has seen Episode III knows how it all ends — the entire war is a sham orchestrated by Dooku's Sith master Darth Sidious to destroy the Jedi and turn the Galactic Republic into an Empire. Sidious had arranged for the creation of the Clone Army in the first place, and when he issues the mysterious Order 66, a switch flips in the clones, leading them to murder all the Jedi. Brave Jedi general Anakin Skywalker is flipped too, and becomes Sidious' new right-hand man, Darth Vader.

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Given we know how it turns out, it has often been hard for the Clone Wars to maintain any kind of tension. At the same time, there have been a number of questions burning in the brains of Star Wars fans — the kind of questions that made the prequel movies hard to swallow for many.

Chief among these: how in the name of the Force did the Jedi get suckered into this whole thing? They're meant to be the galaxy's sharpest, most perceptive, highly trained gurus. Were they really so incurious about the Clone Army that showed up out of nowhere, supposedly ordered up by a Jedi they hadn't heard from for ten years? Did they really never find out that the clones were part of a Sith plot, with orders for betrayal baked into their brains?

It's not just Clone Wars questions that the prequels failed to answer. What about Yoda — why did he choose to go into hiding on the swamp planet Dagobah? How did he and Obi-Wan Kenobi end up as Force ghosts after their deaths in the original movies, a skill that no other Jedi seemed to have? At the end of Sith, Yoda tells Obi-Wan that he's "made contact" with his former master, Qui-Gon Jinn, who has apparently figured out how to live on after death. How and when did that happen?

Warning: spoilers follow, but it's not really a spoiler to say that the final season of Clone Wars manages to answer all of those questions.

The final four episodes of the season follow Yoda, troubled by visions, as he takes off on an unauthorized mission around the galaxy (check out how he breaks free from the Jedi Temple in the scene above). We see him go through a terrifying series of trials and tribulations, some of which may be considered too scary for small children. On the other hand, seeing the little green guy fearlessly overcome a giant evil version of himself might be the best way to equip those kids to deal with the nighttime terrors.

Yoda makes contact with the long-dead Qui-Gon, voiced by Liam Neeson, on Dagobah, and has a series of visions of the future on a variety of other worlds, including the Sith homeworld, never before seen on screen. It's even hinted that he foresees all the way to the end of Return of the Jedi — or at least, he hears the very last thing he is to say on his own deathbed.

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There's a strong sense of fatalism in the Yoda arc, as this is also when the Jedi Council discovers that the Clone Army's creation was tied to Dooku. But they make a very salient point in response — what could they do about it now, in the middle of a war, with no other army waiting in the wings? If word got out, the Republic would fall in an instant. And thus we discover that one of the last acts of the Jedi, ironically enough, was to suppress the very information that might have saved their own lives.

The Clone Wars Season 6 debuts on Netflix, along with all the other seasons, at 12:01am PT on Friday March 7. If the Star Wars fan in your office calls in sick that day, or arrives bleary eyed, now you know why.

Topics: Lucasfilm, Star Wars