The final episode of Star Wars: The Clone Wars aired May 4, 2020 on Disney+.
By Palmer Rubin
*SPOILER WARNING*
This is, in part, a review of the final season of The Clone Wars, but it’s also, in part, an examination of the somewhat strange place this show has had in the wake of the Star Wars universe. When the show was initially canceled, the sequel trilogy did not exist, and now that it has ended today, truly ended, the sequel trilogy has concluded, and it feels like one final punctuation mark on the series. Nothing else of Star Wars remains except for whatever Lucasfilm decides to do next with their new High Republic series, and we have no idea what that’ll look like. Star Wars is, surprisingly, in the most uncertain place it’s ever been for its entire history. The discourse over the prequels might as well be ancient history considering just how much has happened over the past few years. It’s strange to think about, that for a little while, there simply won’t be any more Star Wars in any form.
I am a little bit of an outlier since I didn’t watch the series in its entirety till this year. I had always wanted to, and with the help of my grandmother’s Disney Plus subscription, I figured it was time to properly take a look and see what the fuss had been all about. I had seen the original animated film when it first came out in 2008, a theatrical prequel, and the response to that was almost universally negative. A film completely hinging on the rescue of a character whose actual canonical nickname was Stinky the Hutt, Clone Wars 2008 feels like a parody of the show that it would eventually spawn. All of the cast that would eventually appear in the show was there, and in retrospect, they all did just fine, but the movie is widely disliked by most people. It’s the worst episodes of the show stretched out to feature length.
The other reason why it’s incredibly difficult to talk about The Clone Wars is because its quality is unbelievably inconsistent, and that seems to be a long-running joke with most of its fanbase. It is the best and worst of Star Wars wrapped up in a single package. At its best, it’s able to properly find the heart and soul of the prequels that George Lucas himself was never able to accomplish (a lot of people jokingly call it “the prequels, but good”). It expands on character motivations that were barely there and even makes the most cringeworthy of Lucas’ additions feel wholly necessary. I don’t actually dislike the prequels anymore, they’re highly flawed films that proved that Lucas is fantastic at treatments and horrible at screenwriting, and their legions have defenders have largely prevailed. But you still get complete portraits of beloved characters and suddenly you understand exactly what Lucas must have imagined those films were going to mean to people all along. The show, of course, has the advantage of hindsight, and it seemed to continually benefit from that even when it wasn’t around. If the first five seasons of the show reflect the pre-Disney acquisition of the franchise, the final two largely reflect the fandom around the creation of the sequels and serve as partial reactions to the shows that were supposed to be its proper successors, yet never achieving the same level of success.
The other full disclosure: I have not seen either Rebels or Resistance (though I plan to give them a cursory look, it comes off like neither of them could ever live up to that which came before), so there may be certain inconsistent elements that come without knowing all of the canon.
Perhaps the three biggest contributions that the series would make to the canon (being among the only properties to remain after Disney completely eliminated the Expanded Universe from canon) was the rehabilitation of Anakin Skywalker as a character, the ascendancy of Ahsoka Tano as the series’ most significant character, and the numerous contributions of Dave Filoni, who is probably as close to a proper successor to George Lucas as we currently have.
I’m an outlier as well as someone who overall enjoyed the sequel trilogy even while being able to pretty clearly see their numerous flaws as films. The Force Awakens seemed to only exist for one segment of the fandom, The Last Jedi only seemed to exist for another, and something like The Rise of Skywalker seemed to be for no one at all by trying to be for everybody all at once. Yet The Clone Wars takes pretty liberally from them in terms of the sort of content and aesthetics it presents in its official last season. Anakin and Ahsoka are revealed to have a Force bond that’s almost exactly like the one Rey and Kylo Ren develop in The Last Jedi, down to the way its filmed and portrayed. In a heartbreaking moment where Anakin realizes his former Padawan is the one who is on the civilian ship trespassing on military fly lanes and lets her go, it even uses the exact subtle sound effects in that film to signify the connection in the Force. Much of the series’ final arc (in my opinion, the strongest the show has ever been) feels pulled aesthetically from Filoni’s own contributions to The Mandalorian in its subdued tone and highly contrasted images. And of course, in a series infamous for its constant subtle references to itself, the main antagonist from Solo: A Star Wars Story is shown briefly communicating with Darth Maul before he attempts to fight Ahsoka to the death.
It’s funny to think about that latter film in comparison to this. Solo is probably the biggest financial and critical flop the franchise has experienced since its transfer to Disney, and every one of its attempts to mine nostalgia for its most rabid fans never gains any steam because it shoehorns Han Solo’s entire backstory into mere hours of his life. Han’s last name is given because he’s literally alone trying to sneak off his homeworld, and he meets Chewbacca and Lando, gets the Millennium Falcon, and flies the Kessel Run all on the exact same day. All of the attributes we associate with him happen all at once with a breakneck pace, and all of it done to awkwardly try and force a sequel starring Darth Maul that would never happen. It would be the same obsessive deference to throwing references and connecting characters by bloodlines that would make The Rise of Skywalker as divisive of a film as it was. The Clone Wars’ final season, despite being made in the middle of that film’s production, almost seems to anticipate those stumbles by having its final moments taking place around the final prequel instead of during them. I entered the season dreading a Back To The Future Part II style scenario where Ahsoka is always close by to Anakin’s fall to the dark side and never doing anything about it. Instead, she gets an arc almost completely separated from him, while still remaining thematically relevant. Discovering that Maul’s entire plan hinges around killing Anakin before Sidious can get to him, and his fury that Ahsoka has been sent instead, both completely throws her off her game and ups the stakes in ways that make the inevitability of Darth Vader more frightening than it’s ever been. His first appearance in the prequels is a moment long mocked by the fanbase for how utterly over-the-top it is, yet his first appearance in this series is both silent and heartbreaking as it’s revealed he’s further driven to madness believing Ahsoka is dead. In a way, she has died, having fully abandoned the Jedi Order the way Anakin always wanted to, but proving it’s possible to do so without falling to the dark side. This is a moment also averted by her future appearances in other Star Wars media that takes place after this, but there was a long while in which the fandom was convinced she and other fan favorites would be killed offscreen and forgotten.
The scariest implication the series makes, when it stops being so much about bite-sized hijinks in its earlier seasons, is that every single Jedi other than Ahsoka may have fallen to the dark side long before Anakin did. Later seasons of the show all deal with just how deeply corrupt the Jedi are to their core. Ahsoka’s wrongful imprisonment for a crime she didn’t commit in season five is the most famous example, where the Council turns on her despite having no concrete evidence of the murders she’s accused of. They’re so eager to find a scapegoat and solve the matter quickly, and even Obi-Wan Kenobi, long seen as a paragon of good, is seen encouraging all of this, completely throwing his Padawan’s Padawan under the speeder because he refuses to imagine a possibility where the Jedi could ever be wrong. The real murderer is found, Ahsoka’s best friend in the order Barris Offee, and her motivations are correct but the means are deeply unethical. Watching the series in chronological order, the shift in Ashley Eckstein’s tone from essentially being the Ash Ketchum of Star Wars (they sound and act very similar at the beginning of the series) to having lost all faith in the only life she’s ever known is a shift so gradual that it’ll catch you by surprise when it’s fully kicked in. But I was glad that the show doesn’t turn her into a misanthrope, and that she ultimately aspires to be better than the Jedi ever could. In her complete series arc, she essentially lives out an arc that Rey wasn’t able to get despite absolutely deserving it. While the sequel trilogy could never decide if its protagonist should be a literal nobody or descended from an ancient line of Force-users, whether the Jedi should end or reborn (and ultimately chooses…neither), Ahsoka definitely benefitted from Rey in some small way, considering how closely Filoni and the rest of the creative team got to work with Lucasfilm compared to other projects.
Even more impressive than that was the show’s choice to hinge the rest of its emotional fulcrum on the clones themselves, hiding a stealth arc about them within the course of what seem to initially be throwaway episodes. You’ll become familiar with Rex, the most prominent clone character, but with clones like Fives, Echo, Tup, Hevy, Ninety-Nine, way too many to name, and you’ll get to truly known them as individuals right as they begin to be unceremoniously killed off. The series openly expresses the reservations on the Republic training an army of what are functionally people born and bred to be killed for naturally-born citizens of the galaxy. The clones can often feel like replicants from Blade Runner considering how they question their own autonomy or lack thereof, and in the end, very few of the named clones remain. Probably the most devastating arc involves Fives accidentally discovering an inhibitor chip that reveals they only exist for the purposes of Order 66, and gets himself killed trying to free the rest of his siblings from Sidious’ control. It’s the closest the series ever gets to a 1970s style conspiracy thriller, contrasting with Ahsoka trying to prove her innocence like the Star Wars equivalent of a neo-noir film. Star Wars always works its best when it’s creating its own version of other genres of media, and those two arcs lead up to how the series ultimately ends. The final episodes of season seven feel as close to a Shakespearian epic as Star Wars has ever gotten, even turning Maul from a one-note villain designed only for his appearance into a tragic construct completely unable to shake himself of his programming. The son of a Dathomiran witch and a Zabrak, raised from infancy by Sidious himself, the more we learn about Maul, the more you can understand his motivations even as you can understand what a sadistic and twisted bastard he is. And again, the final choices with his character here feel like the series adapting to the ways Kylo Ren faltered as a character at times.
The fact that he and Ahsoka end the series on neutral terms because they share similar status as those forced out of their respective orders is a far more fascinating choice than just having one trying to kill the other. This ultimately changes, if Rebels is any indication, but they do leave this series having, if not a mutual respect, something approaching a mutual understanding. Maul despises the Jedi, and Kenobi in particular, but he definitely holds Ahsoka in higher esteem than any of them simply because she was the only one brave enough to walk away from power when it was offered to her, a choice he’s not mentally capable to make himself.
And that’s ultimately what seem to make Ahsoka and Rex the two audience surrogates and the two with the most significant emotional journeys out of everyone else. Both get exactly what they started the series wanting and choose to walk away from it, living the rest of their lives in relative obscurity while still helping where they can. Ahsoka always wanted to be a Jedi Knight and to live up to Anakin’s expectations, and she knows she can only get both by completely compromising her own values. Seeing the Jedi as dishonest, corrupt and privileged, she decides to pursue the light side of the force without the bureaucracy of the Jedi. Rex starts off seeking personal glory for himself and his unit, and upon reaching a rank only a Jedi could previously reach (having had to work for a rank Ahsoka was given by default), realizes he was only created to execute mass genocide and completely abandons his programming to assist the only real friend he’s ever been able to make, who doesn’t see him as just a unit, but a person. Even if you never plan to watch Rebels, where their ultimate fates are revealed, their quiet planetside funeral for their brainwashed squadron they were forced to kill in self-defense feels like a fitting end for the series. The prequel films treated clones as disposable plot devices, but the show encouraged their individuality, and it’s even more incredible that every single clone in every bit of Star Wars media since the prequels has been played by one man, Dee Bradley Baker. Every single clone feels distinct, and how he’s able to create dozens if not hundreds of characters, all with the same voice, but all feeling unique and multifaceted, is nothing short of miraculous considering everything else.
It feels like Star Wars because after the big battle, they mourn what had to be done. I think that might be the context that most modern Star Wars media tends to miss: being the hero isn’t fun. Being a Jedi is not fun. Being a bounty hunter isn’t fun, being a smuggler isn’t fun, being all the Halloween costumes isn’t fun. Doesn’t mean you, as a fan, can’t enjoy the series, but the original trilogy is distinct in the way that it can make the events fun while stressing just how utterly traumatic these experiences were for its characters. The sequels, for their many flaws, do correctly posit that they’d completely fall apart under the pressure of true leadership and having to live up to legacies. The sequels ending with characters who (mostly) aren’t descended from them, without the same burden, succeeding where they failed, is the most subversive bit about all three of them. The Clone Wars understands how to make an action-packed series fun without making it look like the characters are enjoying it, but also without falling into a misanthropic, edgy mess of itself. The sequels are at their lowest when the characters are under the threat of constant death and seem to be enjoying themselves like they’re in a theme park ride. I actually think that’s the reason so many people responded so negatively to the Canto Bight sequence in The Last Jedi, despite its implications and aesthetics being really fascinating to me. That sequence posits that the entire conflict between the First Order and Resistance is being engineered by this planet purely for their own profits so they can sell weapons to both sides, creating a war economy. Yet what ultimately keeps it from being as profound as that bit of it is comes purely from Rose and Finn laughing their way through the destruction of the entire city, financially crippling the First Order. Blaming Loan Tran or John Boyega or Rian Johnson for that is kind of like missing the forest for the trees: take out any moment where any of them are laughing during the conflict and the scene exponentially improves and makes the point I think they were trying to make in the first place. It’s not to say they should all be angry and swearing and screaming at the top of their lungs. Hell, they could all taken a note from The Clone Wars to see how to make an action sequence that still allows for emotional expression.
I don’t want that to be read as me throwing barbs at Rose Tico and Finn as characters, since I actually really like them both as characters, and I think their performers did a good job. But it’s moments like that where it feels like the sequels are trying to make their characters act out the Star Wars rides at Disney World instead of putting them in a literal life-or-death situation. It’s a really difficult thing to do, and I don’t envy any of them for it, and again, I’m someone who likes all three sequel films in spite of the issues I have with them. Nor do I think The Clone Wars is necessarily better than they are, just that there’s particular things one of them does really well and things the other is very strong at.
As far as Anakin Skywalker is concerned, he’s difficult to talk about considering what a curse the role has seemed to be for both of his previous actors, Jake Lloyd and Hayden Christensen. Lucas has long been an atrocious director of performers despite his skill at worldbuilding, and both of them were viciously mocked for Lucas’ inability to quantify human emotion in a meaningful way. There’s so many stories about how much the actors in the original film struggled with him, all the anecdotes, but during the 1970s, Lucas was kept on a tight leash. For the prequels, he wasn’t given any, and I think Anakin suffered the most as a result. Lloyd being bullied as a child as badly as he was by an entire fandom and by the people in his life lead to severe trauma and mental health issues, and Christensen’s career would never recover after being pegged as a wooden actor in a franchise film. Christensen has mostly seemed to take all of this in stride, and he’s been seen fondly received at various events recently, but it felt like the precursor to the absolutely abysmal treatment that Daisy Ridley and John Boyega and Loan Tran would receive for their respective roles later on. He’d even go on to very briefly lend his voice among many others during a climatic scene in The Rise of Skywalker that felt completely hamfisted, but you enjoyed moment all the same hearing him and Ashley Eckstein at the same time. The Star Wars fandom has developed a decades-long reputation as the most toxic out there, and it’s well earned. But you can’t really talk about Anakin Skywalker, and why he’s no longer considered a joke, without acknowledging the bantha in the room.
The issue with Anakin in the prequels is that Lucas didn’t seem to know how to show that he started off as a compassionate peace-seeking person who then fell to the dark side. He switches from obsessive devoted attraction to Padme Amidala (to the point where a lot of critics blasted that subplot for being incredibly creepy) to abruptly choking her to death during their last scene together. His heel shift is so sudden and abrupt that nobody bought it, and Lucas adding in dialogue like “YOU UNDERESTIMATE MY POWER” that’s hysterical to hear played out didn’t help either. The Clone Wars has the advantage of hindsight and the advantage of letting that shift play out in far longer stretches, showing his initial idealism but also displaying his temper and his ego in ways that feel very human. A person is not a binary state of good and evil, and by the time he properly falls to the dark side, it feels more like a formality than a surprise. Anakin does want to help people, but he’s also very much a narcissist and definitely enjoys the public attention he receives for his exploits. He does seem to love his wife, but he’s also deeply insecure and possessive of her, to the point where their final episodes together feels like a portrait of emotional abuse. One of the scariest moments of the show is during an arc where he correctly posits that Padme’s ex-boyfriend, Rush Clovis, has feelings for her, but he responds to all of this by beating him nearly to death in front of her and claiming that he snapped. Even worse, Padme had absolutely no intentions of being unfaithful and fully understands that he’s a corrupt Separatist politician, and the show goes even farther to show that the two have technically separated before his fall to the dark side. Their reunion and supposed bond in Revenge of the Sith is given additional context as them not having seen each other in months after awful arguments and Padme being forced to defend herself to her own husband. The show also is very explicitly showing how competent Padme is (in sheer contrast to the strangely passive and maternal role she played in the films) both as a politician and as a fighter, without having to make a point of her having to do better than anyone else to prove her worth. Every other character aside from Anakin is fully aware of this and deeply respects her for it, yet it’s Anakin who treats her like she’s incapable of doing anything for herself without his help, and there’s several occasions where his impulsive rescue attempts makes things worse. The show makes it scarily plausible to imagine how this person could so easily decide to murder his own wife impulsively at the end of the third film, the obvious emotional abuse and controlling behavior of the shows giving way to murder. The novelization of the third film makes it even worse by showing that Anakin is so paranoid and convinced that Padme is cheating on him that he thinks she’s having an affair with Obi-Wan (she’s not, and the book itself is highly worth reading on its own, and even if she was, there’s no excuse for that). Rush Clovis does turn out to be exactly as corrupt as they all suspected him to be, but Anakin only reacts violently when he thinks a woman he sees as his literal property is going to cheat on him, despite her never having any desire to do so. It’s Star Wars by way of Raging Bull as far as he’s concerned.
One of the strongest scenes in the prequel films is the scene in Attack of the Clones where Anakin and Padme get into a political argument during a date on Naboo (it’s the scene where he gets tossed on his ass trying to ride an alien beast to impress her, right before the infamous “I hate the sand” line). During that scene, there’s a throwaway moment where he ever-so-casually posits that a dictatorship is the best form of government, and that anyone who disagrees should be forced into service. It’s a really chilling moment if you watch that scene now, one of the few times it feels like Lucas figured out how to turn Anakin’s demeanor into something approaching a Patrick Bateman. The show seems to be that scene stretched out over seven seasons the more Anakin devolves into madness. He’s paternalistic and controlling of everyone he sees as an inferior, not only Padme but Ahsoka and Rex as well. It’s not to say that he doesn’t actually like any of them, it’s that he’s a control freak, even more so after the death of his mother, and that these tendencies can be turned against him to create the monster that made him famous.
It also helps that Matt Lanter is so effective at conveying both his inherent cockiness but also how casually he gives into his darker impulses even before Darth Vader. He’s shown very casually killing his enemies even when he isn’t supposed to and making weak excuses for it, and there’s so many scenes of him doing something unethical and Ahsoka giving him a concerned look that we understand her growing fear of him. But it doesn’t mean Anakin isn’t ever kind to anyone, that’s the most tragic part of all. A fundamentally bad person can have good intentions and can do caring things for people, because “good” and “evil” are never as straightforward as they sound. A really horrifying arc is a Jedi called Pong Krell gradually abusing and killing off many of Anakin’s squadron out of his inherent prejudice and hatred for clones, and in an attempt to impress Count Dooku into letting him join the Sith. The clones are eventually able to kill him (foreshadowing their designs for Order 66 before they’re brainwashed into it), but also all collectively realize the inherent corruption of the systems set in place to subjugate them. It’s no accident that most of the dissenting clones that eventually try to make a name for themselves outside of indentured servitude come from the same squadron attacked by Pong Krell. The fact that Anakin was called off to another assignment and forced to hand over leadership to Krell, despite him having a history of these abuses the Council was clearly ignoring, is scarier still. Pretty much every line spoken about him till he shows up is how his abuses are public record, and he’s still being given leadership regardless, because the clones are not seen as people deserving of life unless they work hard for their masters. Even Ahsoka being given the second-highest rank in the army before fighting a single battle is meant to highlight this, and the way she benefits from these systems until she’s forcibly removed from them. Good people and bad people can equally benefit from these cruel systems set in place.
It’s that kind of morally grey territory the sequels mostly ran away from. Only The Last Jedi seemed interested in going in that direction and those attempts had vastly different results depending on who was watching. But this is the sort of path The Clone Wars walked, even in series arcs that were lighter-hearted in tone. There’s an entire arc about a sect of Force-users whose leader is in love with Jar Jar Binks, and how he’s ultimately able to save the entire group from being destroyed by the Nightsisters of Dathomir despite Mace Windu’s best efforts. There’s also an entire arc about a group of Jedi younglings pretending to be circus performers to rescue Ahsoka Tano from a group of space pirates that’s comically ridiculous compared to how dark things get later on. It’s also a given that any episode with R2-D2 or Threepio as the main characters is probably going to feel like weak sauce compared to everything else, and that the first season of the show largely suffers compared to the rest of its run. This does not make this series anywhere close to perfect, and it definitely faltered at points. It is perfectly imperfect, perhaps the most expansive run of Star Wars lore that never succumbed to the mass lunacy that was most of the Expanded Universe. Pre-Clone Wars, the Expanded Universe had a rabbit Jedi, a storyline where Luke Skywalker let a computer possess one of his dead students so he could have sex with it (seriously), a clone of Luke Skywalker called Luuke (seriously), and a lot of really awkward implications about the Force only being strong in bloodlines that smacked heavily of accidental eugenics. There was also the implication that Palpatine only created the Empire because he anticipated an alien invasion by the Yuuzhan Vong, which stunk highly of implicitly endorsing fascism as the only viable governmental system. The Expanded Universe, without any real kind of supervision, was a huge mess and barely coherent. And I promise each and every one of these were canon at one point if you’ve never read them. Star Wars novels from the 1980s-1990s were just absolutely buckwild, written by people trying to make Star Wars act more like Robert Heinlein than its more spiritual beginnings, in the worst possible way. I am that rare outlier who read a lot of Expanded Universe books as a kid, enjoyed them then, and then couldn’t help but dislike it immensely as an adult.
The only parts of it that still feel viable are the bits involving Thrawn and the two Knights of the Old Republic games, which largely introduced the morally grey sections of lore that’s still remaining today. But The Clone Wars has the distinction of being among the only Star Wars media to count as Expanded Universe while still remaining in the Disney canon, and it’s confusing and convoluted as hell. It’s not to say that the Disney canon, under the thrall of the world’s largest media conglomerate, is a universal good, and the Expanded Universe was a universal bad. I mean, hell, I’m the person who counts the KOTOR games and Star Wars Battlefront II (the original, not the EA micro-transaction bundle) as among my favorite video games ever. It’s sort of impossible to navigate something that’s been around twice as long as I have been alive, that was originally only a single film made by a married couple who really liked Flash Gordon and Akira Kurosawa movies and movies about World War II dogfights and wanted to combine them all into one. That was all it was ever supposed to be, released as the second film in a double-bill in a single theater in May 1977. The film 20th Century Fox was really anticipating was called The Other Side of Midnight, and if you paid to see it, you got to see Star Wars as well. And yet, the opposite happened. The other film became the huge franchise and that film faded into oblivion. Probably the most notable thing about it is that it starred a pre-fame Susan Sarandon in a supporting role, and I hadn’t heard of it till I did some cursory Google searches.
And here we are, talking about the offshoot of the franchise that was supposed to be a single film by a husband and wife terrified they weren’t going to get to make movies anymore after their previous failures. The film would destroy their marriage, despite the wife winning an Oscar for editing the film and now being regarded as one of the greatest editors of her generation, and her husband one of the greatest directors. This series would be the last piece of media the husband would have any sort of direct involvement with before the sale to Disney. And now it’s finished, that last piece from before finally and truly completed after moves from Cartoon Network to Netflix and now to Disney Plus.
Now there’s only The Mandalorian and whatever else comes next from the planned High Republic series. Leaving Dave Filoni to as close of a successor as this franchise will ever have. With no way to prove this, I’m even willing to bet that other than Rian Johnson, he’s the most likely person to direct the next Star Wars film. The two of them seem to be the chosen stewards for this franchise (indirectly) the way Kevin Feige seems to be for Marvel. They’re the only two whose collective projects haven’t completely collapsed into themselves. The Disney era has been notable for how many creators have been kicked off of their projects in various states of production. Josh Trank is gone, off making a biopic about Al Capone that’s barely getting a release. Phil Lord and Chris Miller are gone, rebounding with probably the best Spider-Man film ever made. Colin Trevorrow is gone, off making movies about dinosaur vacations till hell blows over. Blame Kathleen Kennedy for this if you feel like it, though that’s not gonna help anything. I don’t blame her any more than I blame Kevin Feige for firing Patty Jenkins and Edgar Wright way back when for the second Thor and the first Ant-Man. There’s a secret project apparently heading our way from Sleight and Sweetheart director J.D. Dillard, but that’s about it.
Here we are. We’re there. And for all its ups and downs, this did literally cross over as the franchise, and the entire world, changed in its wake. It feels strangely prescient that the worst massacre in the history of the galaxy appears on our television screens right as that unspoken thing going on around us the day this was published is going on, and it happens almost entirely offscreen the way many of us are seeing it. Some of us are unlucky enough to have to see and experience firsthand, some of us only hear about indirectly or through the people we love suffering when we do not. If you’re reading this after this has passed and we came through the other side, then you definitely remember the impact it had on you. Such is the way of tragedy and all the deaths that could’ve easily been avoided if not for the malevolence and apathy of those who were supposed to protect us. Feels strangely relevant for a show that ended production before this became an inevitability. Doesn’t mean Dave Filoni and company are prophets. Just means that he unconsciously sensed the same thing in the air that we all have, spending so much time anticipating. And now it’s here. And now we live with it, or we don’t.
That’s all we do now.
TV and City 