I actually found that arc okay for the most part. The episode that consists of the droid team wandering the alien desert is rather tedious, clearly just meant to be a low maintenance job for the animators. And though it is a bit for a chore to get through, I give it points for at least its really nice and impressive visuals.
The 2D Clone Wars vignettes were lots of fun, but perhaps a little too abstract. They were the "Samurai Jack" of the Star Wars franchise. The 3D series fixed all the problems with the prequel trilogy, problems which never should have existed in the first place and necessitated a whole TV series to address them! Kor
Naturally, since they were made by the same creator. Still, it's not as if the rest of Star Wars has ever been all that naturalistic. The whole thing is a fantasy that's often cartoony and larger-than-life. So I don't quite see why the 2D series can't fit into that. It seems the 3D series pretty much occupies the gap between the initial episodes (which show Anakin's graduation from padawan to Jedi) and the last block of episodes (which show the abduction of Palpatine leading right into ROTS).
The only major difference is a matter of how over the top something is. A tad too much exaggeration, like a single long gun emplacement almost covered with explosives. Or perhaps the seismic weapon and Mace Windu's single handed battle with an army of B2 super battle droids....with most of it being without his lightsaber. It was cool, but a little over the top compared with what we usually see a Jedi being able to do.
I just watched season 4's "Mercy Mission" & "Nomad Droids", which are a very fun pair of Artoo and Threepio adventures.
So the Krell arc was pretty great, although I'm a little disappointed that Krell turned out to be MUHAHAH Evil in the end, since it conveniently absolves the clones of all their actions and removes all the ambiguity. Kind of sad to hear Rex say how they're not droid and don't have programming because WELL....... I think the fourth episode must hold the record for fewest number of voice actors in a Clone Wars episode (only three!)
Ok, season 4's in the bag. Definitely the best season so far. Started out rather weak with the Mon Calamari episodes and the Jar Jar episode after that, but started to pick up after that and remained strong for the rest of the season. Wish they would've done a little more with Death Watch than a mere single episode in the middle of the season. Would've preferred that over the slaver arc. I like what they did with Ventress. Frenemy now!
Oh don't worry, the show isn't quite done with Deathwatch yet. And yeah, what they did with Ventress was both surprising and made her a much more interesting and dimensional character. I never read the old EU Clone Wars era comics that covered it but from what I gather the flashbacks are surprisingly faithful to that material when it really didn't need to be. On a related note, I love how they completely reinterpreted Dathomir & the Nightsisters. The EU version was *awful* IMO.
While researching episodes I want to watch on Clone Wars, I noted that Ventress' story continues beyond the show in the novel Dark Disciple by Christie Golden, and that's a novel is based on unproduced scripts and it's considered Canon. Not really a fan of Golden's Star Trek work, but I am interested in this particular novel. Has anyone read it? Is it worth the time?
Yes I have and yes it is. The long and short of it is that's it's an adaptation of the last two Ventress arcs penned by Katie Lucas that never got produced. Eight scripts total IIRC so it's almost half a season's worth of story focused entirely on Voss & Asajj, though the tone of it quite appropriately feels a little more grown up than the TV show, even by the standards of the later seasons. I won't say any more since there are some things in there you really don't want spoiled, but I'd say it's easily one of the better canon novels they've produced.
I've just finished rewatching the incredibly dull 2-parter about corruption on Mandalore, and I realized something odd: The character designers chose to populate Mandalore exclusively with extremely pale-skinned, Nordic-looking types, and not a single person who looked anything like Jango Fett or any other ethnic type. The weirdness of which is compounded in retrospect, given that the most prominent Mandalorian character currently is the Asian-looking Sabine Wren on Rebels. But then, I looked it up on Wookieepedia, and apparently modern canon says that Fett was not actually Mandalorian, though he claimed to come from their moon Concord Dawn. But it also says Sabine was born on Mandalore. So, what, is Mandalore's population racially segregated? Or was this just a case of Filoni's team changing their minds about what the Mandalorians should look like?
Or too lazy to make new civilian textures/models. Mandalorian space consists of thousands of worlds IIRC.
From what Filloni has said, Mandalorian space accounts for something like a thousand systems, many of which were acquired though conquest long ago and their peoples assimilated into Mandalorian culture, which allows of a very wide variety of human ethnicity. So think "Space Romans" rather than the EU's "Space Viking" nonsense. And that's even assuming the people of Mandalore are all of the pale skin and blonde hair persuasion. All we know for sure is that particular group appears to be predominant in the capital. Such may not be the case elsewhere. It's not like every other human world we've seen has consisted of only one group. We've also seen people from several different ethnic groups hailing from Alderaan. Of the four Naboo Queens we've seen, three are definitely from different ethnic groups (the animation style makes it tough to be sure about Neeyutnee) and of course there's Panaka & Typho.
Which actually makes it worse if taken literally, because it implies that the capital is deliberately racially segregated. I mean, surely the capital of a diverse civilization should be its most diverse and multicultural city, the center where all the constituent groups come to interact and be heard. If the capital is absolutely monoracial, that suggests a policy of apartheid. I'd rather chalk it up to a bad design decision and just ignore it. Kinda like how the universe of the original trilogy had only one black guy in the whole thing, but these days the universe looks a lot more multiethnic.
Remember that Mandalore society operates on a clan and house system, which generally means for the vast majority of cases, people stick to their own territories. That's not racial segregation it's the an artefact of a particular kind of society.
No, that's pretty much the exact literal definition of segregation -- keeping one group separate from others. If a planet's populations live apart and do not intermix physically or socially, then the correct word to describe that is "segregated," whether they define the basis for segregation as being about race or clan or whatever term they use. And again, it just doesn't seem very logical for the capital city of a vast star-spanning empire with a diverse population to be inhabited exclusively by members of a single community within the empire. That's just not how metropolises (i.e. seats of power) work. There's a very strong economic, political, and social incentive for people from all segments of the population to travel to the metropolis and interact with one another. That's part of how they exercise their rights as citizens and pursue the fulfillment of their needs. What we saw here was a capital city inhabited purely by members of a single ethnicity, a single clan if you will, and that implies that others segments of the population are not fairly represented or given access to the seat of power. More than that, it implies they aren't even allowed to travel freely. We were even shown the ruling council, consisting entirely of pale, Nordic individuals. Does that mean a single clan holds all the legislative and executive power in the Mandalorian state?
I'm not going to get into a pedantic discussion on semantics with you mate, because I know you love those. But to put it simply: segregation is enforced. This is not that. You're making sweeping assertions based on a very limited data set.
And you aren't? I'm arguing from logic. I've explained that, normally, the metropolis of a multicultural state would have a diverse population, at least in the general public if not in the ruling elites, because there are strong political, cultural, and economic incentives to draw people there from all over. I cannot see a way that such a metropolis would be completely devoid of diversity unless that segregation were enforced, unless other groups were actually barred from entering it. Also, again, the Ruling Council of the entire civilization (or at least the pacifist New Mandalorian faction that controlled the system at the time) was portrayed as monoethnic. That's pretty hard to handwave away. If Mandalore's population is based in clans, then shouldn't all the clans be represented on the council? You can't brush aside the implications of what you're arguing just because you don't like them. If your thesis is that different ethnic appearances of Mandalorian characters represent different clans, then it follows that the New Mandalorian Ruling Council consists of members of only a single clan, or a single group of closely related clans. And that means it's not a democratic or representative government, but just an oligarchy. I'm merely following the chain of logic from your own postulate to the conclusions it suggests. Which is why, as I said, I'd prefer not to take this as literally as you always seem to want to with Star Wars. It's a television show. They made a bad design decision. They made a mistake of defaulting to white, and since then they've been doing better at designing and casting characters more diversely. If they went back and made these episodes today, maybe they'd make the population more diverse.