Star Wars:The Clone Wars S3......so far

[Hunter X]

Mortis is not something that will have literal impact on the events of the galaxy. It's a warning and a foreshadowing. I wouldn't be surprised if after the Son is killed next episode (not a spoiler, just a guess) that everything will fade to white and our three heroes will wake up on their shuttle in space with their clone buddies calling them from their cruiser, wondering what's going on, with mere seconds having passed in real time.

Does this mean I win the internets?

I agree with those who are saying it's not a reset button, as the trio remembers what happened. But it's also not something that has literal impact on the galaxy as a whole. How could it be? That would change the premise of the entire saga too radically, what with this mysterious Son pulling the strings the entire time. That would be lame.

No, I stand by the idea that this trilogy of episodes is meant to be a retelling of the prophecy of the Chosen One, with symbols and story standing in for a direct text. It's also a retelling of the Star Wars saga as a whole, since that's what the prophecy pertains to.

 

[fett51]

Vader couldn't just decide to overcome his corruption, because the dark side is powerful, addictive. He had to reach that point the hard way, by going through all the experiences of his life that led up to that moment. He couldn't overcome the darkness dominating the galaxy until he overcame the darkness within himself, and he couldn't do that until the confrontation between his son and his emperor showed him what he'd become, and that confrontation couldn't happen until Luke was an adult and a Jedi. Hence, the ultimate fulfillment of the prophecy required the passage of time.

So the force can manipulate everything so finely as to ensure Luke ends up getting fried by Palpatine while Vader is two feet away? If it can do all that, why didn't it come up with a solution that skips the 20+ years of massive imbalance?

And I still think it's too simplistic to assume the balance of the Force is as simple as having equal numbers on the light and dark sides or whatever. The imbalance was the old, ossified system that failed to prevent Palpatine from tipping things over to a state of absolute monarchy and galactic domination by the dark side. Luke's new Jedi don't have to be "gray" to be healthier, more capable of maintaining balance, than the old Jedi order. It just has to be fresher, more flexible, less complacent and set in its ways.

Given Palpatine could singlehandedly screw up the force it's clearly not just a numbers game. We saw the Son feeding off the Ahsoka/Anakin/Obi-wan fight, and Yoda commented that "the shroud of the dark side has fallen" after the war started, so I think it's got a lot to do with the overall situation of the galaxy. AFAIK we still don't know why the Jedi let it get so bad.

Considering what we know about Anakin's fate, I'm still not sure what else you could have wanted from this story line. With the Mortis arc, particularly with Father's dying words, we are given a very clear exploration of why Anakin, despite the opportunity to learn from his mistakes, still chooses the wrong path. That provides a great deal of depth that wasn't evident before these episodes.

What I would have liked was a reason beyond "I NEED PADME" and self-delusion about the Jedi for why he went dark side. I don't feel like I got it. I still look at him as a someone who decided his personal issues were worth damning the entire galaxy. That he knew full well what he was doing had cosmic significance just makes it worse. I'd have preferred something to the effect that he wasn't ready yet and needed more power in order to fulfill his destiny.

 

[Christopher]

So the force can manipulate everything so finely as to ensure Luke ends up getting fried by Palpatine while Vader is two feet away? If it can do all that, why didn't it come up with a solution that skips the 20+ years of massive imbalance?

I don't understand why you're so surprised by this concept. Human literature and mythology are full of stories about destiny and fate unfolding in ways that are no less complex than what I'm suggesting. How can you have never encountered such a story before?

Don't anthropomorphize it. Don't think of this in terms of a single entity manipulating events like, ohh, George Lucas making a movie. Destiny, if one assumes it exists, is a complicated thing, because the universe is complicated. Some stories say that even destiny contains an element of free will and individual choice. Maybe it's not so much that some hand of God is micromanaging every decision; maybe it's more that things unfold as a consequence of many different factors interacting in complex ways and producing an overall probabilistic flow of events that can be predicted, much the same way that the random motions of water molecules confined within banks and acted upon by gravity, wind, etc. add up to the current of a river whose overall flow is in a predictable direction.

Given Palpatine could singlehandedly screw up the force it's clearly not just a numbers game.

See, my whole point about the old order is that it wasn't "singlehanded." Palpatine wasn't the sole cause, but the culmination of a process. What I'm suggesting is that maybe the old institutions had ossified and deteriorated to the point that they were unable to prevent Palpatine from seizing power. No one man can have so great an impact unless society already contains the necessary forces for him to harness and manipulate. Cortez and his small band of conquistadores couldn't have overthrown the Aztecs if there weren't already millions of Mexica who resented the Aztecs' abuses of power and only needed a trigger to launch a revolution. Hitler wouldn't have been able to build an empire of hate if the people of Germany hadn't already been bitter and angry about their harsh treatment after WWI and primed to blame their problems on other ethnic groups. These men were just in the right place at the right time to take potentials that already existed and set them loose. By the same token, if the Republic and the Jedi had been healthy to start with, Palpatine might never have been able to topple them.

 

[Listener4]

I really liked the first episode of the chosen one trilogy, but the last two were less satisfying. Still, they were more interesting than most episodes of this series. Definitely gave a depth and insight into the characters usually missing.

 

[fett51]

I don't understand why you're so surprised by this concept. Human literature and mythology are full of stories about destiny and fate unfolding in ways that are no less complex than what I'm suggesting. How can you have never encountered such a story before?

Encountered plenty. My problem is in this particular case is that it's straining credulity even more than such stories usually do. If the Force wants balance, if it's even just pushing in that general direction, the way it's represented gaining balance is very roundabout and practically nonsensical. It should be pushing back against the dominating dark side, but in RotS it surrenders to it. The only way I've made sense of it is that Anakin not whacking Palpatine at that time goes against its plans. After seeing these episodes and the way the Father was portrayed, that Anakin has to turn to the dark side makes even less sense as part of the plan.

These men were just in the right place at the right time to take potentials that already existed and set them loose. By the same token, if the Republic and the Jedi had been healthy to start with, Palpatine might never have been able to topple them.

Well, we do know Palpatine manipulated the whole trade dispute thing in TPM, presumably just using the Neimodians greed. It's even possible he introduced the offending tax and got it passed in the first place. Given that, he could have manufactured discontent by playing on the more selfish/greedy/power hungry aspects of sentient life, particularly if he did it slowly over decades building gradually towards the war. The Jedi then would've been hard-pressed to work out what the heck was happening, though as I commented earlier AFAIK we don't know what Lucas considers the failing that led to their downfall.

 

[Greylock Crescent]

What I would have liked was a reason beyond "I NEED PADME" and self-delusion about the Jedi for why he went dark side. I don't feel like I got it. I still look at him as a someone who decided his personal issues were worth damning the entire galaxy. That he knew full well what he was doing had cosmic significance just makes it worse. I'd have preferred something to the effect that he wasn't ready yet and needed more power in order to fulfill his destiny.

Quick question: I'm sure you're well aware of it, but have you read and internalized Campbell's Hero With A Thousand Faces? I ask because the notion of an agent of destruction and creation -- which Anakin clearly is in a mythic sense -- is not uncommon, incredulous, or nonsensical.

TPM clearly depicts a civilization in desperate need of revitalization. The Jedi are numbly and rigidly adherent to their "Code" (Qui-Gon is a perfect contrast to the lack of "humanity" within the Jedi order). The Republic is clearly depicted as dysfunctional and corrupt. The parasitic Sith are in ascendancy ... History and mythology are replete with stories about civilizations just like the Republic which grow too unwieldy and must undergo a period of transformation and rejuvenation. Anakin's character is the agent of that change. We knew that even before the PT and TCW. It's a tragedy on a grand scale. But what the Mortis episodes provide is an explicit exploration of exactly why his character becomes that agent.

Put simply, he could have superseded the conflict (become "Father" on Mortis and sacrificed himself) in order to maintain an eternal balance and tension (which, in and of itself, is not necessarily a bad thing). Or could have rejected self-sacrifice in the false hopes of ending the conflict. The Mortis arc demonstrates why Anakin chose (and will choose) a quick and easy path -- namely his desire to love and be loved, embodied by Padme. This isn't "self-delusion" and the episode is rather explicit that Anakin's attachments do not begin and end with Padme.

Again, this is explicit exploration never before see on screen in Star Wars. From three 22-minute installments no less. These episodes were clearly designed to frame Anakin's destiny on a large scale, leaving the details to future installments. What else could you have realistically expected from 66 minutes of screen time?

 

[Christopher]

Encountered plenty. My problem is in this particular case is that it's straining credulity even more than such stories usually do. If the Force wants balance, if it's even just pushing in that general direction, the way it's represented gaining balance is very roundabout and practically nonsensical. It should be pushing back against the dominating dark side, but in RotS it surrenders to it.

You're looking at it too simplistically. First off, this anthropomorphic assumption that it "wants" anything, that it functions like a conscious organism. It is, as the name indicates, a force -- a pressure or impetus in a certain direction. That doesn't necessarily imply sentience or conscious planning. It could be like the Chinese concept of the Mandate of Heaven. Traditional Chinese belief is that there is a fundamental cosmic force toward justice, but it's treated more as a law of nature that happens automatically than a personified divine will that acts by choice.

The second problem is your assumption that a straightforward, singular action is enough to achieve a goal of this magnitude. Life isn't that simple. History isn't monocausal. Any event, any process, is the result of countless interacting factors. You can't alter the outcome of history by changing just one of those factors, because all the rest are still in play. It's like the weather. A storm in Kansas in July can be partly caused by the flight of a butterfly in Fiji in April, and by numerous other processes all over the world interacting over a wide swath of time.

For instance, you probably couldn't prevent the Holocaust by killing Hitler. Someone else would just take his place in fulfilling the social dynamic that had been set up by the complex history that had preceded it. And that someone else might've actually been more competent and sane and made things even worse. If you wanted to prevent the Holocaust, you'd have to alter the outcome of the Paris Peace Talks after WWI, you'd have to prevent Germany's economic crises, you'd have to find the root causes of the widespread anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe at the time and nip them in the bud, maybe you'd have to go to England in 1883 and talk Sir Francis Galton out of publishing his book on eugenics. It took all those seemingly unrelated factors operating over a wide span of time to produce the situation that existed in 1930s Germany and led to the Holocaust.

So by the same token, the achievement of any specific historical outcome -- or any destiny, which is basically the same thing just with foresight substituted for hindsight -- can require a multitude of inputs spanning a wide range of time in order to accumulate sufficient potential to shift the flow of history. To make a different, cruder (no pun intended) analogy, history is like a supertanker -- if you want to change its course, you have to apply force gradually over a long time. It simply has too much momentum to turn on a dime.

 

[Temis the Vorta]

No, I stand by the idea that this trilogy of episodes is meant to be a retelling of the prophecy of the Chosen One, with symbols and story standing in for a direct text.

It could be that, too, but the purpose within the story is to give Anakin a motive to dabble in the Dark Side later on, and frak everything up because of it, in a way that doesn't require him to be stupid/fearful/weak/evil/psychologically messed up. The motive is consistent with the character so far in TCW (duty bound, heroic, concerned for the welfare of others, reasonably intelligent and psychologically stable) and with Vader as well (certainly not fearful or stupid, very self-confident, willing to take risks, cognizant of the extreme power of the Force). Everything fits beautifully now.

The idea of Mortis as a microcosm of the galactic balance Anakin must seek isn't a metaphor - it serves a literal purpose in the story, to show Anakin and the audience what "balancing the Force" looks like. You kill everyone on both sides! Wonderful. Well there are probably nicer ways of doing the same thing. But until now, there was a lot of debate in this thread over what "balancing the Force" means, so the writers were right to assume that the audience needs it spelled out for them.

First off, this anthropomorphic assumption that it "wants" anything, that it functions like a conscious organism.

The Father mentioned that the Force has a will. Maybe it is a conscious organism to more of a degree than we've assumed.

What I would have liked was a reason beyond "I NEED PADME" and self-delusion about the Jedi for why he went dark side. I don't feel like I got it. I still look at him as a someone who decided his personal issues were worth damning the entire galaxy.

We haven't gotten the full story yet. All we know so far is that Anakin now believes he is the Chosen One, and it somehow involves balancing the Force, which involves being able to control both the Light and Dark Sides, and it's incredibly important that he get it right. Not balancing the Force means bad things continue to happen and will probably get worse.

So what is it that Anakin is supposed to do? I don't know. He doesn't know. He probably emerges from this episode more confused and stressed out than ever. Events need to develop more before he understands what the next step is.

There's an evolution ahead that takes him from his current mindset - gotta hang onto the Light Side, avoid the Dark Side at all costs, bad and scary!!! - to a mindset that calmly regards Light and Dark as both mere tools that can be used together to bring peace to the galaxy. There's no reason to fear the Dark Side if it's a tool that's fully under your control.

Anakin is a very long way from that point. Right now, he doesn't even know how to get to that point. He doesn't yet know that his efforts to get to that point is what's going to doom him. But his motive is no longer about Padme. The chaos of the Clone Wars alone would be enough to motivate him. And he's never been depicted as psychologically unstable like in the PT, so that motive has never been in TCW.

He's a regular mortal guy trying to do godlike things - rise above the mortal level, give up all human ties, and either become some kind of remote eternal arbiter of the ongoing conflict between Light and Dark, or just slaughter everyone who could be involved in that conflict, Jedi and Sith alike.

It's not surprising that neither alternative seems palatable to him, and he tries something different. His actions in ROTS don't really make much sense in terms of actively trying "something different" - he just slaughters the Jedi and then sorta forgets about killing Palps, too - but I'm sure the writers could figure out some kind of strategy for Anakin to try, that doesn't depend on Palps leading him around by the nose. The strategy will fail, but let's see him really come up with something innovative, based on what he's learned on Mortis.

Luke represents a new generation of Jedi. He wasn't raised from childhood with Jedi doctrines and traditions, and so maybe he isn't as ossified and limited as the previous generations of Jedi.

Luke is a Jedi, so he inherently unbalances the Force by being a Jedi or just by existing. If he resurrects the Jedi, he's just asking for the Sith to come back into being, because that's how the Force works.

The Force wants balance. People want imbalance (their side to win). That tragedy is the whole story of Star Wars.

 

[fett51]

Put simply, he could have superseded the conflict (become "Father" on Mortis and sacrificed himself) in order to maintain an eternal balance and tension (which, in and of itself, is not necessarily a bad thing). Or could have rejected self-sacrifice in the false hopes of ending the conflict. The Mortis arc demonstrates why Anakin chose (and will choose) a quick and easy path -- namely his desire to love and be loved, embodied by Padme. This isn't "self-delusion" and the episode is rather explicit that Anakin's attachments do not begin and end with Padme.

The only thing of Campbell's I've read was "The Hero's Journey" and that was like 10 years ago, not long after TPM came out. I don't have a problem with throwing out the Republic or reforming the Jedi, I have a problem with why and how he did it. The self delusion I mentioned was referencing how in RotS he deludes himself into thinking the Jedi are bad and trying to take over the Republic etc, not Padme. What you said here doesn't change my analysis - he put himself and his emotions before everything else, and was rather stupid about it. He evidently did not think "If I obliterate the Republic, the Jedi, the balance of the force, and mass-murder kiddies on the way, everyone might hate me, including Padme." As I said, I was hoping for something that might give his choice in RotS an element of nobility, but he's still stuck being selfish.

You're looking at it too simplistically. First off, this anthropomorphic assumption that it "wants" anything, that it functions like a conscious organism. It is, as the name indicates, a force -- a pressure or impetus in a certain direction. That doesn't necessarily imply sentience or conscious planning. It could be like the Chinese concept of the Mandate of Heaven. Traditional Chinese belief is that there is a fundamental cosmic force toward justice, but it's treated more as a law of nature that happens automatically than a personified divine will that acts by choice.

Quite the contrary, actually. I was hoping to avoid doing "how does the force work round 3," but since we're here anyway, my view on the Force's will and it's balance is that it's roughly akin to temperature. Using that analogy, if a thing is hotter than its natural temperature, the pressure will be to cool it down, not make it hotter, which is what happened in RotS. If getting hotter was the pressure, it suggests some sort of intelligence at work, which leads me right back to wondering why it didn't find a better way achieve balance.

The second problem is your assumption that a straightforward, singular action is enough to achieve a goal of this magnitude. Life isn't that simple. History isn't monocausal. Any event, any process, is the result of countless interacting factors. You can't alter the outcome of history by changing just one of those factors, because all the rest are still in play. It's like the weather. A storm in Kansas in July can be partly caused by the flight of a butterfly in Fiji in April, and by numerous other processes all over the world interacting over a wide swath of time.

In real life you're perfectly correct, but not in this story. Here, you're saying if Anakin had instead taken Palpatine's head off and sent him flying out that window instead of Mace, the Empire, the Jedi Purge, and the Force being "left in darkness" would have happened anyway? Who else would've, who else could've stepped into Palpatine's shoes? He was the Sith at that moment in time, there was no one else in the galaxy who could've issued Order 66, no one else who could have declared himself Emperor, and the only other who could have pushed the force into such a dark place was Anakin.

So what is it that Anakin is supposed to do? I don't know. He doesn't know. He probably emerges from this episode more confused and stressed out than ever. Events need to develop more before he understands what the next step is.

It's certainly true we don't know how they'll develop Anakin from here and I certainly hope they have something brilliant under their hats, but for the moment, seeing as the dark side is clouding everything, priority number one would seemingly be "stop the Sith" which should jibe perfectly with his current mindset...and is exactly what he does the opposite of in RotS.

 

[Admiral_Young]

While we don't know how the show will develop Anakin...Filoni did say in a previous episode (I posted it in the Clone Wars Celebration V thread a while ago) that his development would be moving him towards the Anakin we see in ROTS. This seasons developments seem to be moing in that direction.

Off the subject for a brief moment...the Clone Wars toys have been revealed at Toy Fair, we are going to be getting an updated season three Ahsoka figure among others. I'll be picking her up.

http://www.rebelscum.com/TF2011/Hasbropix/

 

[Whofan]

Looks like we're getting another Yuzzhan Vong figure with Nom Anor. I think though, the toy design and a box art is a bit too 'skeletor' even for him.

 

[Christopher]

Quite the contrary, actually. I was hoping to avoid doing "how does the force work round 3," but since we're here anyway, my view on the Force's will and it's balance is that it's roughly akin to temperature. Using that analogy, if a thing is hotter than its natural temperature, the pressure will be to cool it down, not make it hotter, which is what happened in RotS. If getting hotter was the pressure, it suggests some sort of intelligence at work, which leads me right back to wondering why it didn't find a better way achieve balance.

It doesn't necessarily suggest an intelligence at work. It suggests that the specific event was merely one facet of a larger, multi-part process and you have to consider the entire context, the long run rather than just the immediate moment. As I said, any given historical change is the result of multiple inputs and pressures acting at multiple times and places. If you focus on only one specific event, it may be hard to see how it contributes to the eventual outcome. You need to look at the big picture, the long term, to see how that single, incremental step contributes to the eventual change.

To use your analogy, if there's some overall force making things hotter, and you try to apply a cooling effect at the wrong moment, it will just be a temporary thing and won't have much long-term impact. The "cooling" effect has to act at the right moment and in the right way to neutralize the greater forces that are generating the heat. As I've already said, Palpatine wasn't the single, exclusive factor in play here. He couldn't have had as great an effect as he had if the state of the broader society hadn't been primed to respond to his pressure, to amplify it rather than resisting it. Killing Palpatine while the frayed, decaying structure of the Republic and the Jedi Council were still in place would not have fixed the underlying problems. It would've merely delayed the inevitable collapse until the next corrupt and power-mad politician exploited the failings of the system to serve his or her own ambition. No, in the hypothesis I'm exploring here, the whole system had to be torn down before a new, healthier one could begin to be built in its place. Palpatine's short-term success at destroying the Republic and establishing the Empire actually helped in the longer term to accelerate the process of reform, because in a single generation he imposed such tyranny as to compel a devoted resistance that led to his downfall after a mere twenty-odd years in power. If he had been killed before dissolving the Republic and destroying the Jedi Council, then the old system might've staggered along under increasingly corrupt leadership for generations more, and the opportunity to start anew with a blank slate would've been delayed or lost.

 

[Set Harth]

Luke is a Jedi, so he inherently unbalances the Force by being a Jedi or just by existing.

The Jedi don't unbalance the Force. The Force is imbalanced toward the dark at a time when there are thousands of Jedi and two Sith. The balance of the Force is still not a Jedi/Sith head count. An equal number of Jedi and Sith is not an outcome that would be sought by the Jedi, nor is a lack of Jedi sought by the Force.

We haven't gotten the full story yet.

Actually, we did, and it was ultimately the same story as told by the PT.

So what is it that Anakin is supposed to do? I don't know.

Ghosts of Mortis indicates that he's still supposed to do what the films say he's supposed to do, which is what he ultimately does. There's no mystery.

There's no reason to fear the Dark Side if it's a tool that's fully under your control.

The problem with this mindset ( setting aside the whole Crime and Punishment angle and the typical fate of a Nietzschean-Vergereian superman to whom the rules supposedly don't apply ) is that it's canonically wrong, in the sense that focused, intentional use of the dark side is inherently corruptive. Anakin's downfall in ROTS demonstrated that there was in fact reason to fear the dark side.

The idea of Mortis as a microcosm of the galactic balance Anakin must seek isn't a metaphor - it serves a literal purpose in the story, to show Anakin and the audience what "balancing the Force" looks like. You kill everyone on both sides!

Anakin didn't kill the Daughter. He killed the Son ( the instrument of the dark side ). That is what balancing the Force in the galaxy looks like.

At the end, the Father essentially confirmed that wiping out the current representatives of both sides of the Force – and essentially washing away the old guard on both sides – had brought balance on Mortis, and then said that he would do the same thing for the galaxy.

The only denizens of Mortis were Father, Son, and Daughter. With all of them dead, "balance" was brought to Mortis by default. Anakin isn't destined to kill every living thing in the galaxy.

After his "failure" on Mortis, Anakin ought to learned not to take the quick and easy way.

He got the mind wipe reset button.

Besides, we all wanted some kind of exploration of what it means to bring balance to the force ... and we got it.

We already had it.

Anakin could achieve balance by either maintaining a state of continual conflict (as symbolized by Father's intention to have Anakin remain on Mortis as an arbiter between Son and Daughter)

That wouldn't have prevented Palpatine from taking over the galaxy. As Ghosts of Mortis explicitly stated, "balance" in Mortis and balance of the Force in the galaxy are two different things. If Anakin had stayed on Mortis his destiny to balance the Force in the galaxy ( by destroying Palpatine ) would have gone unfulfilled. In the films, the restoration of balance to the Force is not signified by continual conflict.

At least they dispensed with the silly notion that Anakin fell because he was in a panic about Padme dying.

They didn't dispense with that. It still happens in ROTS, which remains unchanged by TCW.

And lo and behold, this episode establishes that the Force does have a will!

That was already established in a film called The Phantom Menace (1999).

The Jedi are so mired in their incomplete and flawed understanding of the Force - with a goal of totally wiping out the Dark Side, rather than keeping it in balance with the Light - that they might not even understand what Anakin needs to do.

Still nothing more than bullshit. The Jedi are not trying to totally wipe out the dark side. They never said such a thing, nor did Lucas. The Sith are not the dark side. The Jedi believe that the Force should be balanced, as the PT made clear.

But since "wiping out the Sith" doesn't balance the Force (unless he also wipes out the Jedi), then ROTJ no longer makes sense.

According to Lucas wiping out the Sith does balance the Force, because - as you seem to acknowledge in some places but ignore in others - the balance is between the sides of the Force and is not a Jedi/Sith head count. Not only did the Mortis arc fail to somehow contradict this fact, it actually reinforced it in the final episode. ROTJ is still canon and the Jedi are not tantamount to the Sith.

Luke is still around and presumably goes on to re-establish the Jedi, which just fraks things up all over again.

No, it doesn't, because the Jedi are not the problem.

Maybe TCW should just keep rolling on, through ROTS, through the 20 year interval to ANH, and keep going until they can revise ROTJ

Maybe the whole OT should be knocked down in order to back up your mistakes? It's not going to happen.

 

[Temis the Vorta]

I don't have a problem with throwing out the Republic or reforming the Jedi, I have a problem with why and how he did it. The self delusion I mentioned was referencing how in RotS he deludes himself into thinking the Jedi are bad and trying to take over the Republic etc, not Padme. What you said here doesn't change my analysis - he put himself and his emotions before everything else, and was rather stupid about it. He evidently did not think "If I obliterate the Republic, the Jedi, the balance of the force, and mass-murder kiddies on the way, everyone might hate me, including Padme." As I said, I was hoping for something that might give his choice in RotS an element of nobility, but he's still stuck being selfish.

You're right, that's all nonsense. It was nonsense in ROTS because it was a bad story (but not illogical). It's now even worse nonsense because TCW has contradicted it and in addition to being a bad story, it is now also illogical and doesn't flow at all from the character of Anakin has he's been portrayed, particularly in light of what he learned in the Mortis arc.

I honestly don't think there's anything TCW can do to erase the blatant flaws of ROTS. The only solution is for a TCW version of the events of ROTS that depicts Anakin's fall more consistently with what TCW has established: he's not stupid and given to self-delusion; he knows that being the Chosen One means balancing the Force, not joining the Dark Side; and he's seen for himself that the Dark Side exerts mind control over a person and turns them into an evil monster who is willing to slaughter their friends.

After seeing Ahsoka try to kill him, how can Anakin not anticipate that joining the Dark Side would also have disastrous effects on him? If he's somehow got the notion that being the Chosen One makes him immune (something that hasn't at all been established), Ahsoka can tell him about his own little Dark Side jaunt, which was perfectly parallel to hers, based on what she saw him do. He was totally under the Son's control and would have tried to kill her if she hadn't managed to evade him. He even had the trademark yellow eyes! The fact that neither of them recall their own experience underscores the fact that they were parallel events.

For the really blatant mistakes, ROTS needs to be overwritten, not explained away. What you described can't be explained away. (Or if you can think of how, please describe it, but it's beyond my powers of imagination.)

seeing as the dark side is clouding everything, priority number one would seemingly be "stop the Sith" which should jibe perfectly with his current mindset...and is exactly what he does the opposite of in RotS.

The way I'd rewrite ROTS to make them jibe is this: Anakin gets more evidence to underscore the notion that he needs to balance the Force, which requires balance between Jedi and Sith, not the destruction of the Sith. He also gets more information on how this can be accomplished (right now, he'd have no clue - who or what are the analogues of the Daughter and the Son in the wider cosmos? how does he find them?)

He comes up with a plan how to enact this balance and presents it to the Jedi Council as the one and only solution to the chaos that is increasingly enveloping them. (The threat to Padme's life is just one aspect of this chaos, but also the war is going badly, the Republic is falling apart, etc - I'd really throw the kitchen sink at the Jedi.)

The Jedi realize that Anakin's plan is a Hail Mary pass that could go badly wrong since it exposes him to the Dark Side, and they don't think he can pull it off. (And they're right about that.) So they sensibly and prudently reject the idea. But Anakin is convinced he can do it, and embarks on the plan on his own initiative, keeping it secret from the Jedi.

I'd also have Anakin almost pull it off. I don't want him to look like a rash fool. There should be a make or break moment when he's almost got Palps and the Dark Side under his full control. But Palps is just a bit more clever and savvier, and pulls some counterstrategy that fraks it all up.

After that, the mind control that the Dark Side is capable of exerting explains everything else that happens. When Anakin becomes Vader, he is simply a different person. That explains how he could do horrible things like kill the padawans and blow up Alderaan.

Filoni did say in a previous episode (I posted it in the Clone Wars Celebration V thread a while ago) that his development would be moving him towards the Anakin we see in ROTS.

Filoni plans to turn Anakin into a weak, whiny simpleton? This seems like a rather odd creative choice.

ROTS only works if you assume Anakin is entirely naive about what being the Chosen One means, what joining the Dark Side does to you, and what the proper way is to solve all the chaos and trouble in the cosmos (balance, not victory by one side or the other), and is also extremely gullible, so that he believes Palps' bullshit. But TCW has established that Anakin knows quite a bit on the topic, and would never believe what Palps has to say now, even if he were depicted as being as dense as he was in ROTS, which is no longer the case either.

 

[DWF]

It's nigh impossible to compare the 2+ years of The Clone War TV series to the movies OT or PT and in any event the events in ROTS take place over several months, in that time according to the novel of the movie Anakin has lost sleep and can't properly eat because of the vision. The forces that drive Anakin to the dark side isn't as simple as people have been suggesting in this thread.

 

[Temis the Vorta]

Are you saying that Anakin falls to the Dark Side because he's hungry and sleep-deprived? Some Chosen One he is! This is supposed to be tragedy, not farce.

 

[DWF]

Are you saying that Anakin falls to the Dark Side because he's hungry and sleep-deprived? Some Chosen One he is! This is supposed to be tragedy, not farce.

I'm saying the visions led him to make bad choices and it's in bad taste to make of sleep deprived people. He's a man in his early 20s faced with a series of choices that make him spiral out of control. If you saw the death of a loved one whenever you closed your eyes it'd have an effect on you as well. Anakin had visions of his mother's death as well which caused him to lose sleep you can see that scene in AOTC when Padme notices him awake and asks him about the visions, he certainly didn't want to repeat what happened with his mother with Padme as well.

 

[Set Harth]

The way I'd rewrite ROTS to make them jibe is this: Anakin gets more evidence to underscore the notion that he needs to balance the Force, which requires balance between Jedi and Sith, not the destruction of the Sith.

The balance of the Force is not automatically the balance of anything else. The words "of the Force" can't be thrown out and replaced by something else, unless you're talking about some other type of balance entirely, one which the series is not actually concerned with. It's specifically not the balance of Jedi and Sith, not only because this contradicts every reference to balance in the entire PT along with ROTJ, but also because only an evil douchebag would insist that Jedi efforts must be countered by an equal number of Sith. Once again, the rewritten "improved" Anakin is a slimeball whose turn to the dark side is nothing more than a formality, so the whole concept of turning to the dark side as laid out in the OT becomes meaningless. If your theory says that the survival of the Jedi order in the form of Luke in ROTJ no longer "makes sense", then there's something seriously wrong with your theory.

This seems like a rather odd creative choice.

In Bizarro World, perhaps. In the actual universe, having TCW lead up to ROTS is the exact opposite of an odd choice. That was what it was intended to do all along.

what the proper way is to solve all the chaos and trouble in the cosmos (balance, not victory by one side or the other)

The proper way to solve the trouble in the cosmos is not to have an equal number of good guys and bad guys. The problem here seems to be an inability to distinguish between the two. This is not consistent with Lucas' message in any way.

and is also extremely gullible, so that he believes Palps' bullshit.

Since everything Palpatine said to Anakin was true, it doesn't make him gullible.

 

[Temis the Vorta]

That would keep the core of the story at the psychological level but now they've elevated it to the mystical level, with psychology and politics as contributing but not main factors. It can't be merely about Anakin's psychological state - it's gotta be about his battle to complete his mission to bring balance to the Force. And when he fails to do so, the defeat must be depicted at the mystical level, not because of anything merely psychological or physical.

For instance, if the visions/sleep deprivation/etc are caused by the Dark Side encroaching on his mind, then that works, because it's the mystical fight, not the psychological/physical one that is relevant. But since when does the Dark Side take you over by stealth?

So there needs to be more clarity of how being taken over by the Dark Side actually works. The Mortis arc has done a nice job clarifying how things work so the audience and Anakin understand the rules of this fight. But the way the Son easily turned both Ahsoka and Anakin can't be part of the rules, because it's too easy. Presumably he could do that because he was so much more powerful than a mere Sith like Palps. If Palps could do that, he would have won long before now.

There's some contradictory information about how a Sith would use the Dark Side to take over someone. Firstly, is it rational or emotional? Is it a matter of convincing someone to join the Dark Side with rational argument ("you'll be powerful and able to achieve all the good things you want") or is it emotional (making them angry enough to create a chink in their psychic armor to let the Dark Side in)? If the Dark Side is sneaking into Anakin's mind because of the chink created by fear of Padme's death, that's circular - the fear was caused by the visions, so how did the Dark Side get in to place the visions?

Also, to keep the story fair to the hero and not be a cheat, Anakin needs some forewarning that the Dark Side can work by stealth, to give him a chance to be on his guard against it. Just as the Mortis arc has given some information he can use to come up with a plan for balancing the Force and defend against the Dark Side (for instance, he now knows that joining the Dark Side means losing control of his mind, and is simply not an option), there need to be more episodes in the future that provide other vital information.

The biggest flaw in ROTS is the way the hero went into the fight entirely unarmed and never had a chance to put up any coherent fight at all. This time around, let's see a real contest, not a walk-over.

 

[P0sitr0nic]

There's some contradictory information about how a Sith would use the Dark Side to take over someone. Firstly, is it rational or emotional? Is it a matter of convincing someone to join the Dark Side with rational argument ("you'll be powerful and able to achieve all the good things you want") or is it emotional (making them angry enough to create a chink in their psychic armor to let the Dark Side in)? If the Dark Side is sneaking into Anakin's mind because of the chink created by fear of Padme's death, that's circular - the fear was caused by the visions, so how did the Dark Side get in to place the visions?

Why would a Sith choose one or the other? Attack from all sides.

The fear of death and loss was always within Anakin. He feared to lose his mother. He feared to lose Padme. He feared he was not good enough to save them. He also feared he would not be recognised as "his greatness" by the Jedi, as seen by his temper tantrum when he was begrudgingly put on the council but not made a master.

Of course, he was on the council at Palps demand, because Palp knew it would cause these stress fractures thru which he could manipulate.