I actually enjoyed the Jar Jar/Mace/Talzin arc and it had some fun and deeply satisfying little moments. When I originally heard that some of the final episodes would focus heavily on Jar Jar I experienced some of the trepidation that other fans certainly did, but I had to keep reminding myself: Jar Jar is written better and given more constructive and better things to do in this series than he ever was in the Prequels (well, for the most part, anyways). Going into the arc with the knowledge that Mace and Mother Talzin would also reappear gave me hope that the episodes would entertain even if Jar Jar descended into some form of inanity. And they did.
I think it's a good way to explain TCW Nightsister "magic" which is clearly different from the straight-up dark side powers that the original Nightsisters used in the EU. If interpreted as a normal Force-user or darksider Talzin would run the risk of overshadowing Palpatine, who is supposed to be the strongest Force-user in the saga ( or one of the strongest, at least ). It probably doesn't have anything specifically to do with Netflix, as all of the previously existing episodes from the first five seasons are available on home video in a format which does not include commercial breaks.
6X9 The Lost One Great episode! Great to see Sifo-Dias and Valorum come back. I could have sworn Valorum was killed in a novel, though... Great to see Anakin and Obi dueling Dooku. The lighting and dust particle animation on this episode was gorgeous. I can't believe the Jedi found out that Dooku created the clone army!!! The fact that they basically decide to do nothing and keep going forward is kinda beautiful in a way... it shows just how powerless and trapped they were by Sidious. And it also makes their suspicion of Palpatine and their readiness to turn on him in ROTS make a little more sense. They already knew everything was rotten about the war.
It is a little hard to believe, though, that the Jedi didn't suspect Palpatine of being Sidious. They knew the Sith Lord had orchestrated the Clone Wars for his own ends, and here was Palpy accumulating more and more power as a result of the Wars. Cui bono?
I suppose that's a testament to just how incredibly powerful Sidious/Palpatine was in manipulating the Dark Side to cloud the judgment of the Jedi Council and hide his own direct involvement in the conflict. It hasn't always made much sense that two or three years into the wars a Jedi as immensely strong and gifted as Yoda can't see through the Chancellor's veneer and realize he's been up to no good, but as many have theorized Darth Sidious was just so deftly skilled with the powers of the Dark Side that he could even protect himself and his agenda whilst in the regular company of the highest-ranking and most powerful Jedi in the galaxy. Any being who could pull the wool over the eyes of Yoda, Mace Windu and Obi-Wan for well over a decade is clearly no novice in the ways of darkness and subterfuge.
I always felt that Palps had so much dark side with him that he 'threw' it around the room to misdirect. Still - hard to imagine not once during the 3 years that were The Clone Wars Mace and Yoda may have said... "uh, what about Palpyteen? Anyone tapping his phone?" As for the visual of Yoda not recognizing Palps in the final episode - I guess we, the audience, needed to know who it really was and have to suspend disbelief on that one.
But in ROTS the Jedi Council is already suspicious of Palpatine. They warn Anakin about being friends with him because of all the power he was accumulating.
6X11 Voices Aaaah! I totally nerded out on this episode!!! Yoda and Sidious are my two all time favorite Star Wars characters, and it's been criminal that Yoda only got featured episodes in the pilot and then at the very end of the series. I love Yoda. I love the "compassionate all knowing always kind always right wizard" character, be it Yoda, Gandalf, Dumbledore, etc. Liam Neeson!!! In the whole damn episode!!! Aaaaah!!! The set up for Yoda learning how survive after death! YODA GOES TO DAGOBAH! WITH ARTOO!!! Artoo has already been to Dagobah!!!! Yoda goes into the Dark Tree!!! And sees a vision of the Jedi FIGHTING CLONES AND SIDIOUS!!! Despite a complete lack of action this episode had me on total nerd alert Complaints: -Yoda enlists Anakin's help to break him out of the Temple.... he walks him to a ship and he flies off. Wow, that was dramatic. Thank god he had Anakin there. Missed opportunity: when they go to leave the medbay, Yoda force bonks the two guards at the door the exact same way he does to the two red guards at the end of ROTS. -This is a complaint for the series as a whole, but it was particularly egregious here. There is a brutal war going on, raging across the entire galaxy. So why is every single memeber of the Jedi Council sitting around the Temple doing absolutely nothing??? How many clones and innocents are dying while they're on vacation??? As far as I'm concerned there should be about ONE Council member at the Temple at any given time and the rest should be on hologram. -I thought it was a little weird the way everyone turned on Yoda when he thought he heard Qui-Gon. Particularly after Anakin and Obi-Wan saw Qui Gon on Mortis (Yoda mentions this to Anakin but not to the Council- I don't remember that episode well). And that Ki-Adi is convinced that Yoda is being influenced by the Sith. Particularly when they say there is no life after death... do you mean to tell the Jedi have never heard of the Sith Ghosts, because they are lousy throughout the EU!
Yeah, but he wouldn't have been allowed to leave his room and wander the corridors at all if Anakin hadn't been escorting him. You don't have to get into a big fight in order to play an important role. Err, there was a temporary ceasefire being observed for Life Day? But seriously, in the SW universe it seems to take a matter of minutes to travel practically anywhere in the galaxy through hyperspace. So it wouldn't be that hard to commute from the Temple to any given crisis area. The thing that bugs me is the holographic technology itself. These guys have figured out artificial intelligence and faster-than-light travel, but they can't figure out how to broadcast in hi-def, or even in full color? I can excuse the scan lines and constant static for an interstellar transmission, with the assumption that there's bound to be interference over great distances. But even when characters call up holograms from their own desks, they still have the same heavy scan lines and ripples and fritzing, which is ridiculous. Why would anyone tolerate that? And how hard could it be to fix it?
Well, after the events of ROTJ it's largely if not completely been discarded for the benefit of screenwriting and charting a new course. We know that. Disney jettisoned what would interfere with the Sequel Trilogy and that continuity, but pretty much everything else stands so far as I'm aware. For now anyways. Hell, I don't know, I and others could be wrong thanks to Disney's decision to put the entire Expanded Universe under intensified scrutiny. Don't get me wrong, much if not most of the post-JEDI timeline can go for all I care and there are elements predating the Saga films I don't care for either, but Lucasfilm will end up retaining a great deal of the EU as official canon even if we don't agree with nor like the stories and characters.
There are any number of in-universe reasons as to why the full council was present in those scenes, but in the real world, you have to allow Filoni and the creators some leeway as I am sure they simply wished to have one last final view of all the main Jedi in that room. I mean, if it was my series and it was closing up shop, I would certainly take some creative liberties and indulge by showing the main Jedi cast all together again in the council chamber. I loved seeing them all there again, I could care less if it doesn't make logical sense.
I finally finished the season the other day and absolutely loved every episode! There wasn't a bad one IMO...even the Jar Jar two parter was bad ass, and I adored the finale and oh man I WAS NOT expecting who appeared to appear!!! I'll be checking out the Darth Maul arc mini-series comic, but I wish this had not been cancelled. I'm looking forward to "Rebels" but last season and this season proved the show was only getting better.
6X12 Destiny only one more episode left ever :sob: This one didn't have me geeking out as much as the Dagobah episode but it was very interesting. I guess these people are The Whills? It is very nice to actually how and where and why Yoda learned to become a Force ghost. I also appreciate the definition this arc is giving between the Living and Cosmic Force, but I'm a little confused at this place being the birthplace of the midi-chlorians. I thought they were just a fundamental part of live in the GFFA like bacteria. If they started in one spot, how long did it take for them to permeate throughout the entire GFFA? And does that mean using the Force would only be native to the GFFA? Didn't the Vong used to have the Force before Sekot stripped it of them? I'm slightly troubled at seeing Yoda's dark side as I always think of him as being the perfect Jedi, but he was able to conquer it... eventually... Random thought: if Artoo knew Yoda this well, I'm curious to watch ESB again with that knowledge in mind.
More like mitochondria, which they're clearly based on. Mitochondria are symbiotic organelles within our cells, and the source of our cellular energy. They were once separate organisms and they have their own DNA, but they evolved a symbiotic relationship with all cellular life and we're totally dependent on them for the biochemical energy -- the "force," if you will -- that powers our life processes. My impression was that the planet was the source of all life in the galaxy, with midi-chlorians being a fundamental symbiotic element of that life just as mitochondria are for terrestrial life. Probably just a few billion years, according to what I can find on panspermia theory. This article (Section 5.1) suggests it would take 10 billion years if the entire galaxy had the same concentration of star-forming nebulae as our part of the galactic disk, but adds that the inner disk has about 5 times that concentration, so the spread would probably be considerably faster -- assuming that the GFFA is structured much like the Milky Way and that the origin system was near the core. One thing that's often misunderstood is that midi-chlorians don't create the Force, they just provide the interface with it. The Force -- at least the Cosmic Force -- is presumably universal. Beings from another galaxy may have evolved their own method of interfacing with the Force. Well, of course you can't eliminate your dark side, you can only master it. What I liked was that Tom Kane's portrayal of Yoda's dark side was a much better Frank Oz impression than his Jedi Master Yoda generally is.
And also a pretty good Gollum impression. Yeah, with a number of recent releases I find that I both win some and lose some as far as commonly-disputed plot points are concerned. What's nice about the living Force/cosmic Force stuff in this arc is that it stomps all over certain misinformation about the living/unifying terminology that appeared in the Jedi Academy Training Manual and thus became more or less permanently entered into Wookieepedia: namely, the assertion that "living Force" and "unifying Force" are competing, divergent philosophies about the nature of the Force as opposed to complementary parts or aspects of the Force which coexist. In theory, we shouldn't have needed TCW to clarify who was right and who was wrong on this issue, since Wookieepedia's position was contradicted by Lucas in quotes appearing in The Making of Episode I, not to mention the presentation of the living Force in the TPM novel. But Wookieepedia appears to operate on the principle that anything printed in an officially licensed SW product is canon, period, to the exclusion of such things as critical thinking or fact-checking against the intent of the author who created the concepts in the first place.
Now that was a pretty solid final season for the series to end on. There were a couple of episodes I'd never rank among any of my favorites and I'd have added another arc or two to tie up more loose ends, but for what we got Season 6 was a lot of fun. Definitely a lot more satisfying for a SW and Clone Wars fan than having the final scene of the final episode be a character slowly walking away into the sunset with no other resolutions to the wider storyline and a lot of loose ends left dangling.
If only the conclusion to the Maul storyline had happened in one of these arcs as opposed to an upcoming comic. I gave up comics about 10-11 years ago and don't see myself going back anytime soon, and I really got into TCW's Maul.
Yeah, opting to conclude the Maul arc in the comics was a weak decision. I'd much rather have seen and enjoyed two or three final Maul episodes than the Clovis arc and I imagine I'm far from the only one who thinks that.