Clone Wars 1x03 "Shadow of Malevolence" Grading Thread *SPOLIERS*

Following up on last week's Episode 2, Anakin and Plo Koon lead a retaliation strike with Y-Wing bombers against Gen. Grievance's ion cannon cruiser The Malevolence.

Me personally, I thought this episode was awesome. Brought back memories of the greatest space battles of the films.

Apparently, episodes 2, 3, and 4 form a "Malevolence Trilogy". Next week's episode concludes this story.

 

I hate Comcast. Their schedule line up showed that the first half hour was a repeat of last week's 1st Malevolence story, and the 2nd half hour would be the new episode. Figured I'd watch Atlantis and tape Clone Wars. I went to set up the VCR to tape it at a quarter after the hour and saw that the new episode was already half over. Guess I'll have to wait until Sunday... if Cartoon Network plans on encoring it.

 

Fun episode. Best SW space battle in decades. What's not to love?

 

ooooh, really good, the preview looks good, too

 

Not much else to say that hasn't been said but a great space battle (nice to see some proto-Y Wings), some good dialogue, and a good story. I didn't realize that there was going to be a 3-part story and definitely look forward to next week's conclusion. I STILL continue to wish that this had been a post-ROTJ series but I AM glad that they are focusing on some different characters and storylines that they didn't do with the Clone Wars microseries. Also, the character designs are cool. Did anybody notice how all of the fighting Jedi Generals wear that cool battle armor with their robes?

*Does anybody know if the series will, like the microseries, lead into ROTS and if so, what will be their point of reference? The Star Wars New Essential Chronology basically incorporates both the events outlined in the microseries, as well as the events outlined in James Luceno's "Labyrinth of Evil" which had Anakin and Obi-Wan chasing down Dooku on a desolate planet (it would be interesting to find out how Dooku got back to the Invisible Hand in the midst of a pitched battle).

 

Eh... I'd say it was the weakest one so far. Very little happened, and too many "cute" OT references. I wonder if we'll be seeing anything other than battles on this series... not that I was a fan of the PT politics stuff, but at least it was different and new. It'd be much better to explore stuff like podracing in a series like this than in an actual Episode.

 

Admiral, there be space whales here!

Obi Wan still looks to much like a ventriloquist's dummy.

 

Umm, just to clarify...it's called The Clone WARS for a reason.


I mean, here at last in a whole franchise that's called Star WARS, that we finally get a series that actually deals with a WAR. Of course, there's gonna be tons of battles. That's what a war is...a series of battles.


And very little happened??? Yeah...OK...and very little happened during the Battle of Endor either.

 

Good episode this week. Not quite as good as last week's but this one was very much in the vain of ANH with all the various dogfight expression. Some gorgeous CGI too, especially the shot of the Malevolence in hyperspace. The clone medical facility was cool too and it had some nice humor like Dooku reprimanding Grievous about the droids and Grievous wanting the escape pods destroyed to maintain his reputation. Great space battle too.

Looking forward to next week's episode with Padme getting into the mix.

 

You know they had sooo many OT 'homage lines'; given that the characters look like Gerry Anderson marionettes, where was "Thunderbirds are GO!"?

 

This was the first episode of the animated series that I'd seen so far. It was almost unwatchable. The alien apprentice girl, Ashokka, was whiny and annoying (Anakin must've rubbed off on her). Full of cliché lines: "Roger, Roger!" "I have a bad feeling about this!" Thank God I didn't watch the movie version.

 

Glad to see I am not the only one who finds Tiger Lilly unwatchable.

I just find the character design to be ridiculous.

 

I like Ahsoka, although I'm a bit annoyed with her "Artooie" nickname for R2D2. I mean, "Artoo" is already a nickname -- you don't need to make it even more diminutive.

My favorite part was the school of manta creatures in the nebula. That was just gorgeous. Totally unconnected to reality, but SW has always been pure fantasy. This is the sort of thing I want to see in a show like this -- not more tedious scenes of hunks of metal shooting blips of light at each other, but the creation of exotic and spectacular vistas, imaginative alien realms.

I also liked the design of the medical station, with the ships docking "vertically," their gravity vector perpendicular to that of the station as a whole. You so rarely see SF shows/films that think 3-dimensionally like that. (We won't get into the idiocy of the scene in the opening battle of Episode III where everyone inside the ship fell over when it tilted sideways, as if there were a single gravity vector in space.)

 

^^
The artificial gravity was on the fritz, changing the "down" of the field, as I recall.

Another enjoyable episode. Nice space battle. Space whales were cool.

One thing threw me though; I thought Kaminoans were intensely isolationist and refused to leave their planet, so it was odd to see one in the medical center. In the LOTF books when Fett tracked down the one Kaminoan wasn't it supposed to be a big deal that s/he was off-planet?

 

My Comcast DVR showed it right but they showed the repeat at 8:30PM EST and the new episode at 9:00PM EST right when the new Atlantis aired. The week before they showed both parts starting at 9PM which may be where the confusion was.

I'm not crazy about the character design either.

 

If that isolationism comes only from the books, then it isn't relevant. Despite Lucasfilm marketing's claims that the books represent some subordinate layer of canon, Lucas himself pays virtually no attention to them and there's zero effort to prevent new screen productions from contradicting them. Heck, this series isn't even in continuity with the previous Clone Wars cartoon. So don't expect consistency with anything beyond the films themselves.

 

Ah but Kamino didn't even exist as far as the Republic knew in AOTC, so we know from the movie how isolationist they were. And I recall movie-related material (novelization? official website?) saying something about them never leaving their planet/cluster. Of course I suppose they just left during the war to tend their clones and then went back to their retreat after the war.

 

Uh, maybe you missed getting the memo...this is Star Wars...after-all.

What exactly do you expect?

 

Yeah! It isn't Star Wars if someone doesn't say "I've got a bad feeling about this."

 

Exactly. I mean, Geez, what do people expect? For Lucas to reinvent the wheel?