This season has easily been one of the best of the show’s run, even with some of the boring arcs we’ve encountered. One reason for this season’s excellent run has been the focus on Ahsoka Tano. Whether she’s fighting pirates, guiding young Padawans in the art of lightsaber construction or solving mysteries, her character has shown some great growth and development this season. This all leads us up to this week’s episode where Ahsoka again finds herself evolving, this time into a wrongly accused fugitive. While questioning Letta, the bomber from last week’s mystery, someone uses the Force to choke her to death just as she was about to tell Ahsoka of a Jedi who had helped her blow up the Jedi Temple hangar.
Of course Ahsoka becomes the prime suspect since there were no other Force users present. The set up doesn’t end there though as someone also helps Ahsoka escape, killing clone troops in the process only to make Ahsoka look even guiltier. Anakin chases Ahsoka through a water pipe, and in a scene paying homage to Harrison Ford and Tommy Lee Jones’ The Fugitive, Ahsoka leaps from an open ended pipe after convincing Anakin that she must run to clear her name.
This had to be one of the more exciting episodes this season with the Ahsoka chase being a truly great highlight. Seeing her dash and spin and flip while deflecting blaster bolts with her lightsaber left me letting out verbal oohs and ahs multiple times. I’ve heard several times that some people are down on the animation, and to tell the truth, I just don’t see where they are coming from, especially after the crisp animation delivered during the chase. Even though its not Pixar, let us not forget that this is where the technology was born that also birthed Pixar, and Clone Wars puts its to great use.
Another great moment was when we were introduced to the prison where Letta, and later Ahsoka, was being housed. Seeing the Imperial symbol adorn the outside of the prison combined with the slow Imperial March soundtrack made this scene quite ominous, and we hadn’t even been inside yet. The inside of the prison made my jaw drop with its overwhelming similarities to a certain planet destroying space station, from the hallways and blast doors right down to the red lit grated cell floors. That is the stuff I loved about the prequels and this show, I flipped out in theaters when we first see the Jedi Battle Cruisers which we know will become Star Destroyers one day, or the plans for the Death Star at the end of Attack of the Clones, these nods to the original movies always get me in an origin story kind of way.
Back to the story, so we all know Ahsoka is innocent, but that now leaves us wondering which Jedi could possibly be behind her set up. This part drove me nuts with curiosity. I always count out any main characters, or those we see a lot of like Mace Windu and the like. So who could it be? I was hard pressed to think of a Jedi who could be the guy behind the attack, and I have reservations about thinking its Palpatine because this kind of task seems beneath his stature. As I was writing that last sentence it hit me! Maul! We already know that Palpatine spared his life because he had something special in the works for Maul, could this attack possibly be it? Could he have convinced Letta that he was a Jedi and sympathetic to her cause. I can’t say for sure, but having the Jedi Order fighting amongst its own over Ahsoka’s innocence and how this could affect the public view of the Jedi certainly helps Palpatine’s cause, and Tarkin has already confirmed that Palpatine is trying to minimize Jedi involvement in conflict. I guess only time and next weeks’ episode will tell.
Overall this was a very strong episode that had a great story combined with that action that I oh so crave from this series. Things are getting really hot leading into the season finale in a few weeks and I can’t think of a better time to be a Clone Wars fan.
4.5 out of 5 nerds
Follow Christopher on Twitter @AUDone44 and The Nerd @nerdfollowing
Marc
Marc is a self-confessed nerd. Ever since seeing Star Wars for the first time around 1979 he’s been an unapologetic fan of the Wars and still believes, with Clone Wars and now Underworld, we are yet to see the best Star Wars. He’s a dad of two who now doesn’t have the time (or money) to collect the amount of toys, comics, movies and books he once did, much to the relief of his long-suffering wife. In the real world he’s a graphic designer. He started Following the Nerd because he was tired of searching a million sites every day for all the best news that he loves and decided to create one place where you can go to get the whole lot. Secretly he longs to be sitting in the cockpit of his YT-1300 Corellian Transport ship with his co-pilot Chewie, roaming the universe, waiting for his next big adventure, but feels just at home watching cartoons with his kids….
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