I liked this episode. It was a nice character- and dialogue-driven piece, with lots of witty dialogue from
Buffy/Firefly veteran Drew Z. Greenberg. Lt. Tan Divo (is that a Corellian name, given its similarity to "Han Solo"?) was a fun character and he got off some good zingers. It was nice to see Bail Organa and Mon Mothma participating as characters, though it was a bit odd to hear Phil LaMarr's voice coming from a character who looked so much like Jimmy Smits.
My one problem was that C-3PO was mute here. He didn't have a single line. Probably that means Anthony Daniels wasn't available, but it's just out of character for C-3PO to be speechless.
First, Padme looks like an idiot for supporting the Anti-Clone Production Bill.
On the contrary, she looks prophetic. Let's keep the bigger picture in mind: Palpatine/Sidious engineered the entire Separatist movement and Clone Wars in order to build the power base he eventually used to overthrow the Republic and establish the Empire. The breeding of a vast clone army is a key part of Palpatine's scheme to seize power. And I think Amidala was already suspicious of Palpatine's ambitions back in
Attack of the Clones, which preceded this series. I think she, Farr, Organa, and Mothma recognize that there may be an ulterior danger in allowing the Clone Army to become too large.
Cutting troop production when you do not have a clear cut victory on the horizon seems idiotic to me.
Maybe the existing troop levels were already large enough according to military analysts, and the request for additional production was seen as an unnecessary waste of resources. After all, the sponsor of the bill to increase troop production was a Kaminoan, a member of the culture that creates the clones. It's no different from a US senator trying to get a plum military contract for a defense contractor in his state, getting hundreds of millions of dollars poured into his state's coffers to produce million-dollar widgets that the military doesn't actually need and that you could get for a buck fifty at the corner hardware store. It's pork-barrel spending. I'm sure the argument of Farr and Amidala's bloc was that Kamino was more interested in its own profit than in the actual military need. And pouring too much money into troop production could've diverted necessary funds from other parts of the war effort such as ship construction, medical aid, refugee aid, etc.
