Transcript
Speaker: A bunch of my co-workers are also leaving for grad school because it's that time of year. And in the department, there's a group of like seven of us who are all leaving for grad school in the fall.
Speaker: And some folks are leaving like in like three weeks and some folks are leaving in like two months. Yeah. a week before things start. And like that's a choice, girly pop. But you know what?
Speaker: Your choice to make. hmm. And so one of my co-workers was like, we're going to like a little like bye party. So everyone who's leaving, send me a baby picture. Oh, is that why you were sending baby pictures in the group chat?
Speaker: Yes. So i I went to my mother and I was like, hey, do you have a favorite baby picture? And she was like, you were the most photogenic goddamn baby. Yeah. sent me a bunch of baby pictures and miles commented that i have the same skeptical expression you do pretty much all of them you look very suspicious about why there's a camera in your face like why are you are you looking at me like that something weird
Speaker: And yeah, I did realize that there are of that those seven, at least but more than half of them are 2000s babies.
Speaker: Oh, of the co-workers. Of the seven co-workers. I was thinking about your but I was still thinking about your pictures and I was going, wait, you but you weren't born in the 2000s woman with math meme. We got there. We got there. I mean, i had been born by the 2000s, but... But you were not born in the 2000s. You were born in the 20th century, as they say.
Speaker: I once had a kid make a comment about me being born in the nineteen hundreds And that was pretty good. Because no matter what shit a tween says to me, it never gets to me because A, I'm an adult and I can compartmentalize. B, i can go, well, that's great.
Speaker: I have as much screen time as I want. I have a phone. I have a car. Fuck you. I'm an adult. Yeah, that sounds great. Go do your math homework.
Speaker: I have, yeah, I have disposable income. I don't have a bedtime. Yeah, sure. So you can feel all high and mighty. There was, I think it was actually the same kid made some derisive remark about, oh, you probably like podcasts. And I went, yeah, I do like podcasts, actually.
Speaker: and also I can say as many swear words as I want. So there's another one. i would hope that you like podcasts. Yeah, I like them quite a bit, as it turns out. I like nearly 100 episodes into our podcast. At this point, you know, the the trial period is over. i think I'm ready to commit and firmly say i like podcasts.
Speaker: Good. You had things you had Oh, yeah. Speaking of this podcast. So I had a silly little video to make you watch today. ah The Apprentice finally has a piece of media because I've said on the show before, but it's been a while. I am a huge, huge, huge Homestar Runner fan. My dad was really into it when I was younger.
Speaker: i watched episodes as they were coming out in the early 2000s. I was too young to be watching them, but it's fine. There's no swear words in it. So, you know, could be worse. There's nothing horribly bigoted. It aged kind of okay for, you know, early 2000s Flash cartoons. But There is one of the most, if you're not familiar with Homestar Runner, it's an extremely absurd Flash video series that used to also have this immersive website experience that went with it. But now that Flash is dead, it's not really the same. You can watch videos on YouTube, but it's not it not the same experience.
Speaker: But there's a lot of series within series and worlds within worlds in Homestar Runner. And one of the most obscure self-referential niche pieces of Homestar Runner Media is a 2004 video called Cheat Commandos. And the only thing that really matters for the initial reason why I thought of it was because they're all of these little action figure toy guys.
Speaker: And their characters are playing with the toys and they go, we need reinforcements. And then another one shows up. Did somebody say my name? Reinforcements. You're here. And so anytime anyone ever.
Speaker: says something about needing reinforcements, which happens a lot in the Clone Wars. I just go, reinforcements. But then I went to rewatch it because I was like, you know, I've mentioned this to Rin before, but I need them to see it because it's funny.
Speaker: But in the context of also watching Clone Wars for the first time, it's so much funnier because they're a bunch of identical military shooty guys who each have a jokey name and their one little gimmick that they do that makes them different from all the other ones.
Speaker: And the tagline for Cheat Commandos is buy all our playsets and toys. And they have a tie in cartoon to advertise the toys And yeah, that's, it's the same.
Speaker: If I had to make a two minute parody of Clone Wars, I would make Cheat Commandos. No, it's, it was pretty glorious. It was really good. Even the scene where there's the tanks firing the two different colored lasers at each other in the fucking canyon.
Speaker: Uh-huh. Yeah. In just a line at each other. Like, nobody uses cover yeah the Clone Wars. Everyone just kind of stands there and shoots because also nobody can fucking aim.
Speaker: The density of laser fire doesn't make sense for how infrequently people die. There is just a fucking curtain of lasers.
Speaker: And people can stay up for a pretty long time despite it. Plaid armor.
Speaker: Hello everyone, and welcome back to yet another episode of The Phantom Apprentice. My name is Rin, I'm one of your hosts. I grew up with Star Wars and with Lord of the Rings and with other sci-fi and fantasy series that my dad either read to me or that he showed me.
Speaker: And as an adult, I have made it my mission to inflict this media upon my friends who did not grow up with it, such as my dear friend, sam Hello, I'm Sam. I'm the other one. I did not grow up with Star Wars. But circling back to our pre-music banter, another thing that I had the epiphany of right before we started recording is that for my birthday this year, I can make a PowerPoint lecture explaining the world of Homestar Runner and I can intersperse it with my own watch order of videos that we should watch because they're all like two and a half minutes long. They're very short.
Speaker: And I can subject all of my friends to this because they love me. And also it's a milestone birthday. So people will feel obligated to come. So look out for that later this fall. That's going to be my birthday party. It's going to be amazing. Amazing.
Speaker: So we are, yeah, well on our way to 100 episodes. Whoa. And I am sorely determined to not get a tight intro bit anytime in there.
Speaker: Here on The Phantom Apprentice, we have spent roughly two years going through Lord of the Rings. And then we took a brief interlude into the Corporation Rim where we went through Murderbot.
Speaker: And now we are going through all of Star Wars in a specially crafted machete order designed to cause Sam emotional trauma. It's working.
Speaker: And we're barely into the Clone Wars. There is so much more trauma to come, bestie. is Grumble, grumble.
Speaker: So we have gone through so far. We started out watching Star Wars New Hope. We watched Empire. Then we went back to the very beginning of the Skywalker saga.
Speaker: We watched Phantom Menace. We watched Attack of the Clones. And now we are delving into the Clone Wars, the animated 2008 series.
Speaker: The 3D animated series, not the 2D animated series by Gendy Tartakovsky, whose name I probably just mispronounced. So today we have a pretty hefty batch of episodes because I'm really determined not to spend two years just in the Clone Wars.
Speaker: We could, but we're not going to do that to you or to ourselves. No, so we're going to like... Rip through a bunch of these episodes. We are taking them roughly in chronological order, more or less in the timeline. So we watched the Clone Wars movie last time, which introduced Ahsoka Tano.
Speaker: And so today... directly following up the Clone Wars movie in chronological order. We are starting out with season three, episode three, Supply Lines, which is then immediately followed by season one, episode one, Ambush.
Speaker: And what we've done for these episodes is i have written just a snappy little one line summary for each one because we are not going to go through the plot of every single episode in exhaustive detail.
Speaker: No, because they're 23 minutes long We'll talk about the things that we have things to say about. And if we don't have things to say, we won't say anything. So supply lines. All of these episodes start with, I think of them as the little fortune cookie messages. There's some little. That is that is that is what people refer to them as, is the Jedi fortune cookie.
Speaker: Amazing. Okay. I was so, I was connected via the force to other fans of Star Wars, but no, I thought of them as little Jedi fortune cookies. Exactly.
Speaker: i didn't write them down because I didn't think they were that interesting, but they all have their own thing summarizing the moral of the episode. So we're not getting into the moral of the episode right now. It's just the plot.
Speaker: So supply lines. Leia's dad, her real dad, not Anakin, protects Jar Jar Binks from himself during sensitive negotiations while a Jedi and clones sacrifice themselves to save the Twi'lek home planet.
Speaker: he Yeah, this one was very, it was really interesting to me to, I guess, start out the more or less chronological order of the series with a logistics episode.
Speaker: Mm-hmm. Like... we Yeah, if you're going in chronological order, like we had our sort of like submarine warfare episodes and we had our sort of pseudo heist adventure with the new character.
Speaker: But still very early on, we're like, nah, this one is about logistics and negotiation and deception. Fucking everything is about supplies in these episodes.
Speaker: Everyone's trying to get supplies somewhere. There's always a humanitarian crisis, which... Yeah, it's war. But I feel like I could make my own mini list of episodes where Anakin has a straightforward mission to get supplies from point A to point B and refuses to do that. He, i don't think is really in this one, but there's he hates getting supplies from point A to point B. Somebody else needs to be in charge of supplies.
Speaker: Yeah. This was also, I think, why this one landed in the middle of season three is because when the directors and when the producers were putting this all together, they thought it was maybe not the best idea to have a movie that introduces Ahsoka Tano and then immediately have two episodes where she and Anakin don't show up at all.
Speaker: Mm-hmm. Our main characters are nowhere to be found. I had two things to say about this episode that have wildly different vibes. m The first thing was that Jar Jar has to cause a distraction at this formal state dinner so that they don't see all of the ships doing shit with supplies right outside the window. And I really don't like cringe humor. I think that's probably another reason why I don't really like Jar Jar. But it just, I am very empathetic. I would not call myself an empath because I'm not obnoxious. And I don't think that. i just have a normal, regular amount of empathy.
Speaker: But it stresses me out to see someone being cringed for laughs. But I did absolutely love that he spun his stupid bullshit as a sacred Gungan ritual of performance art.
Speaker: That was very funny to me. Anytime a character does stupid bullshit and then claims some kind of sacred ritual, that's always going to land. That's always hilarious.
Speaker: As somebody who studied rituals as a thesis. Oh, yeah, I did. i forgot that. And you remembered. Yeah, I maybe know a thing or two about rituals. And so dumb bullshit, but everyone's too polite to say anything.
Speaker: Love it. But then on the other end of the spectrum, while this big battle is happening... The Jedi and his clones fucking die. and it's so sad. It's heartbreaking. And he's falling to the ground and his calm is flashing with the message that relief has arrived and the day is saved. But it's literally a second after he died. So he died not knowing whether or not the relief was going to come. And he sacrificed himself forever.
Speaker: And he has a stupid joke name. It's too much. It's too much. Tell the people the stupid joke name. I'm not going to dignify it by saying it. The Jedi Master in this episode is Jedi Master Imagundi.
Speaker: and he does. I-M-A-G-U-N-D-I. And I liked him. he was nice. He was. Well, yeah, he and his clones sacrifice themselves so that the Twi'leks can get to safety.
Speaker: i keep I keep thinking that nobody's going to die. i keep thinking it's a kid's show. Surely they won't die. Surely they'll... No, they die. They die all the time. It's intensely violent.
Speaker: Yeah. Yeah. my My couple of thoughts on this episode was, Cham Syndulla and Gobi, we see them again. And good God, they look so young. They're babies. Two, I know that you don't recognize accents.
Speaker: I don't have any guesses as to what the Twi'lek accent is based on. Not the foggiest fucking idea.
Speaker: They're French. They're meant to be the French resistance. Oh, okay. I was also critically a French major in college.
Speaker: That's the one that I typically can get. Nope. Sorry. Yeah. I mean, they're space French. So like, sorry to my French professors. Yeah. No, didn't get, it didn't even really occur to me that they had much of an accent at all. I just thought, okay, that's their voice.
Speaker: Yeah. Maybe it's because I'm so desensitized to French. maybe We'll say that it's that. But speaking of accents and voices, we would not be able to understand Jar Jar without the subtitles. He's mumbly the whole episode.
Speaker: That also didn't even really occur to me because I always watch things with subtitles on. Right. So... Yeah, without that, I think that would have been really difficult. Also, Jar Jar's design is really scary. I do not like the animated look. He has this kind of sinister mouth and these weird thin Jack Skellington limbs. I really, really don't like.
Speaker: And his eyes. His eyes are so kind of creepy. No, I don't like Jar Jar at all. No. He is voiced by Ahmaud Best in the episodes that we see him in here, because, spoiler alert, he appears again later.
Speaker: He will be voiced by another voice actor later in the series, which is also deeply jarring. Jar-jarring, you will. Jar-jarring, if you will, yes. Yeah. There's a line at one point because Cham Syndulla, who is the Twi'lek resistance leader, gets pissed basically that the Republic has not followed through on their promises of aid.
Speaker: isn't And Jedi Master Ima Gundai has this really poignant line. War turns promises into hopes.
Speaker: I wish it wasn't so. And that one just hit me a little bit. Yeah. The other piece that hit me about this is we have, we meet, I don't remember if we've seen him before in the series, but we meet Senator Lot Dodd, who is the senator specifically for the Trade Federation.
Speaker: Yes. Not the Neimoidians, not Cato Neimoidia, the Trade Federation. The corporations don't need to buy senators. They are nation states in their own right with their own senators in the Galactic Republic.
Speaker: Screaming. Screaming. Yeah, there's these corporatocratic nations that have their own representation in the Trade Federation. And and this this will be a point that comes up later on as people being like, well, you're a Neimoidian, so obviously like the Trade Federation and the Neimoidians are one.
Speaker: isn And some of them having to be like, no, the Trade Federation is doing that. Not all the Neimoidians are part of the Trade Federation. Yeah. And then sometimes there's the government of, again, to just use them as an example, the Neimoidians being like, the Trade Federation does not represent us. We have no interests.
Speaker: that overlap with the Trade Federation. And it's like, no, absolutely, your interests overlap. Yeah. Anyway, that was pretty much everything from the episode. There is one piece where jar Jar's preparing for his performance art, and he's just dumping everybody's food off the floating table.
Speaker: And I love that it's following. and at one point, the soldier glances back at it falling, flashes away, more of it falls, and he just moves like two inches to the right to get out of the way.
Speaker: That was fun. i don't know what other bullshit he's seen at state dinners, but this can't be the weirdest one. He's not paid enough to care. Moving on.
Speaker: Moving on. Back to season one. Season one, episode one, Ambush. Yoda is a chaos gremlin in the battle for Toydaria's loyalty and wins them over for the Republic, which I thought Toydaria was neutral because there was a whole plot about that.
Speaker: in another are they is this before or after that are we talking to different people this is directly following that okay okay area was neutral and then the events of supply lines occur okay so toy daria seeks out alliance with the republic gotcha i was very confused by that because we were skipping from season three to season one and then going wait what the fuck who hadve thought they were neutral No, when I like did my first full Clone Wars watch through, I watched in release order.
Speaker: And so when we got to, and so you know started with season one, episode one, where Toydaria is joining the Republic and then got to season three, episode three, where Toydaria is suddenly neutral again.
Speaker: Like, wait a minute. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, so that's why we're watching in this order, is to prevent pieces of confusion like that. Gotcha. There's another episode bunch later on, which is if we watched it in release order, you'd have an episode about somebody getting murdered, and then they show up as a significant character in a later episode.
Speaker: Yeah, that's confusing. That's too much. Yeah, continuity errors. Anyway... the music The intro music here is a little bit different than in the rest of the series. And I was noticing this through this whole sort of section because from here on, we're in the first season for all of the rest of this section that we're covering today.
Speaker: The music clearly hasn't quite settled in and some of the animation is a little bit janky. I feel like sometimes it leans in really hard into like 2008 3D animation.
Speaker: So it's very, very blocky, very polygons, not a ton of detail on anything that moves. I was playing Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic the other day and was like, oh, this is incredibly similar.
Speaker: in Just like in shapes and vibes as the starships are moving through space. And sometimes it leans in really hard into everything is painted. Yeah, there are some very clear, especially painted backgrounds.
Speaker: Oh yeah, the backdrops are all painted. And that shit's gorgeous. That's that's super cool. But there are some definitely like janky bits of animation, especially so with some of the movements of the characters and...
Speaker: Little uncanny valley with the way they speak. It feels like Matt Lanter hasn't quite settled into Anakin's voice yet. e he Especially because I've been now rewatching through all of Clone Wars in like rapid succession to make sure that my watch order.
Speaker: is correct for all of this. And I've rearranged one or two things, but most of it's staying the same. But yeah, I feel like season one, like a lot of shows in season one, they're they're very much ironing out the kinks.
Speaker: he Everyone's kind of... discovering their characters and the animation is they're working with the technology that they've got and it will improve by leaps and bounds over the course of the series and like many pieces of star wars filmmaking they will develop brand new techniques and such and improve 3d animation drastically for evermore other thing about this episode this is where we see gremlin yoda Yeah, this is real gremlin energy. This is that Yoda that we met back in the swamp.
Speaker: Yeah, we've gotten Jedi Master Yoda, but this is like, oh, I'm seeing how 20 years alone in a swamp turns this dude into the dude we meet in Empire. Yeah, it's all making a lot more sense now.
Speaker: e And we talked last time about how Obi-Wan Kenobi was committing war crimes. Last we thought that it was just the Jedi committing war crimes.
Speaker: Attacking diplomatic envoys is a war crime. So the separatists are also committing war crimes. This won't be the last war crime they commit over the course of these episodes.
Speaker: Indeed not. Yeah, that's pretty much everything I've got for this episode. I just had two little things for this one. The first is that Ventress's rank is supreme leader, which is kind of wild because she's, as far as I can tell, maybe third in command. So I don't know what that makes Dooku and Sidious or if they're operating more secretly. I don't know what her duties as the supreme leader entail, but that is more power than I thought she had or at least a cooler title. Mm-hmm.
Speaker: I don't really, again, I don't really know what being the supreme leader means, but ah I was impressed by that. i Yeah, I did notice that one. We also have Yoda trying to dispense wisdom to the clones who basically look at each other and go, and do you have any fucking idea what that guy just said? Because he's spouting all this Jedi wisdom about believing in yourself and teamwork and whatever, and they don't internalize it at all. And then eventually, There is a pep talk that does get through to them that's actually very sweet.
Speaker: And he's talking about how, you know, you all look the same and you're being down on yourselves because you think that I won't care about the differences between you. But in the force, you're all very different.
Speaker: And so I'm not just looking at you with my eyes. I'm looking at you in the force. And I thought that was nice. And there is. an overarching theme through all these episodes about Jedi valuing clones as individuals. Sometimes if the clones are their friends and they're close to them, because, you know, there are still soldiers and somebody is still got to die. But there are multiple times where various Jedi will say, you know, you're not expendable to me. You're not interchangeable to me. I care about you as specific people.
Speaker: And this is a value that the Jedi seem to share. And so I'm writing it out here. Right. Even though they are created life and they are created for the purpose of war.
Speaker: I don't know whether it's this episode or the next episode where the clones, one of the clones literally says that they were created to die. The Jedi value life of any kind and seek the preservation of that life. Right.
Speaker: in comparison to the separatists who are like these are tools the battle droids they're they're tools and tools break isn and that's how we're going to treat them although dooku is upset occasionally because they're expensive so don't break too many of them on purpose there was a later episode where ah droid is recklessly destroyed And I had the thought, damn, those must cost a lot of money. And then immediately Dooku goes, those battle droids are expensive.
Speaker: yeah Yeah. Moving on to the Malevolence arc, which I have more commentary on because this is sort of our our like first big overarching arc. It's three episodes.
Speaker: And we are introduced during this, for the first time in the Clone Wars, to General Grievous. Yeah, I'm going to have some things to say about him because this is my first time seeing him in anything. I think like growing up, I thought he was a bionicle. I didn't realize that he was a Star Wars guy. For these more arc sections, do you want me to do the little snappy lines, one, two, three, all of the episodes or still go through them one at a time?
Speaker: i think we can do them sort of like one, two, three, and then we'll go through the whole arc. Sure. So, Season 1, Episode 2, Rising Malevolence. Anakin and Ahsoka go on a noble but reckless side quest to find survivors of an ion cannon attack.
Speaker: Season 1, Episode 3, Shadow of Malevolence. The Jedi try to stop the malevolence from destroying a clone medical base. Ahsoka gets Anakin's head out of his ass but gets no credit for it.
Speaker: And Season 1, Episode 4, Destroy Malevolence. Padme and 3PO are here. The ship is destroyed. Yeah. First thing, because the first episode is, there are heavy pieces of it that just take place like in an escape pod with three clones and Jedi Master Plo Koon.
Speaker: Plo Koon's voice is tragically doing something for me. He does have a pretty good voice. There's him and there's another Jedi later that I went, oh.
Speaker: Okay. I'm still a monster fucker. Lest we forget. Plo Koon is voiced by James Arnold Taylor. So that is Obi-Wan Kenobi. and Well, there you go. There you go.
Speaker: He's calm under pressure. He's a good leader. He has a very sweet bond with Ahsoka because he's the one who brought her to the Jedi Temple, which, you know, tearing her away from her family. We don't like that. Child soldiers, boo.
Speaker: But still they have a bond. I like him. I love how much Plo's men clearly trust him. Because again, lest we forget, we're in the first six months of the war here.
Speaker: Yeah. And, okay, during these episodes, I came up with my mental headcanon, which I am going to be thinking about this the whole way through and ignoring anything about time.
Speaker: The way my mind needs to process this time block is that There was like, two-year period in between Attack of the Clones and the start of the Clone Wars movie.
Speaker: And then the Clone Wars, instead of taking three years, takes, in fact, six years. That seems reasonable. That is the only way I think that this all makes sense. We have clones that look, like, visibly aged. Yeah, there's some who have gray hair. Like, when did you grow gray hair?
Speaker: You were just born. You know, and and for some of them, it's like, yeah, yeah if you were just born 10 years ago and, like, you're just Gen 1 off the front lines, but also many clones are dying and so some have to be rushed into service, from where? How far behind the first set that was, you know, fully trained and shipped off were they? Mm-hmm. this isn't that far behind clones age at double the rate of natural born humans. So six months is a year in clone years. i have to like assume that the years we're being given for all of this are clone years.
Speaker: So I like it. Yeah. So it is in fact, in my mind, it is six years and that is how we're tracking this. And my head cannon says that Ahsoka is like 12 years.
Speaker: When she first shows up. Yeah. And, you know, we'll like end the series at like 17 or 18. Speaking of Ahsoka. and unless Speaking of Ahsoka, fucking love her. She's so good. So the whole thing with this first episode is that there's a big scary ion cannon, big secret weapon, and it's not supposed to leave any survivors. But we have this life pod of people waiting to die in this really beautiful, poetic, tragic setup.
Speaker: And Ahsoka is saying, you know, we don't know for sure that there aren't any survivors. We have to go and look for them. And she speaks out of turn on a Jedi Zoom call, basically.
Speaker: And then after that, Anakin snaps at her in this way that gave me a really visceral reaction, even though technically it wasn't out of line. She was out of line and he was correcting her. And all he does is go like Ahsoka firmly. But it really, i don't know, something maybe it's my deep-seated parental issues or something, but it really upset me to see him snap her like No, that upsetting of the flip and...
Speaker: yell, basically. Yeah. Maybe it's because I don't believe in raising my voice at children or raising my voice at anyone. yet well, and also... Because Anakin has never followed orders once in his entire fucking life.
Speaker: And he's not going to here. And so, you know, the lesson here that he's trying to teach Ahsoka is you have to know what the rules are to break them.
Speaker: And you have to know how to break them. I said in my notes he'd make a good fae. Because he's saying, I'm following orders. i am just following them in a way that also lets us do this other thing that we want to do. Because it was my plan to search for survivors all along. Which, okay, sure, but you didn't have to yell at her to make that point.
Speaker: Just to connect to our overarching story and the fall of Anakin Skywalker. Like Dooku did on that one mission. Oh, yeah. following orders.
Speaker: but in a roundabout way where he achieves his goals. The poison goes so far back. At one point, one of the clones is like, how are we going to make things worse? And Plo Koon turns to him and like, he says a line, but so Plo Koon, for those of you who have not seen, is a Keldor, which is an alien that cannot breathe oxygen.
Speaker: And so wears a mask where you don't see any of his facial features. Right. But the turn to the clone and look, no facial difference change in this animation is just, bro, do not tempt the force like that.
Speaker: Yeah. It has a sadistic sense of humor. i also liked just visually that there's one shot where we get a really tight close up of his face. And his breathing mask that he wears is very beautifully ornamented.
Speaker: It's really nice and decorated. And yeah, of course it would be. But I just thought that was a lovely, thoughtful little design detail. And then apparently... he can survive in the vacuum of space for a couple minutes because the droids are coming to destroy survivors. And so the clones can put their helmets on and go outside. And he goes, i can chill in the vacuum for a few minutes. And there's this whole standoff where they're there on the outside of the pod, trying to face down the droids and accepting their inevitable death.
Speaker: And again, just really beautiful and heartbreaking and sad because people and I think I was already primed to be sad because I just watched another fucking Jedi sacrifice himself and his clones. But they get to live this time and it's nice. And he gets to give Ahsoka a hug, but she should be getting more hugs.
Speaker: Yeah. How many hugs do Jedi children get? Are these Jedi children just totally touch starved? Oh my god, that's devastating. Maybe that's why Anakin was so weird about Batman.
Speaker: But no, that was before he was even a Jedi. But yeah, they need hugs. Because there's the one Jedi, Wolf, who is Plo Koon's right hand clone.
Speaker: Wolf currently is not in his armor. We will see him later in the series in his armor. Wolf is like in a navy uniform and so he's in the pod but two of the other clones and plo kun are on the outside of the pod and waiting essentially either to die or be rescued and one of them goes well general this is another fine mess we've gotten into and plo kun goes your sense of humor is improving And this is where we get another line of the clones being like, we're meant to die.
Speaker: We're just clones, sir. We're meant to be expendable. And Plo Koon goes, not to me. Yeah. He did not order his men out of the pod while he sat in the pod and waited for them to do the work.
Speaker: He was like, I'm going out there. You guys can come out there with me, but I'm going to go do this task. Mm-hmm. There's also a scene in in just this first one where one of the droids is, quote, humming the Imperial March.
Speaker: There's no Empire yet. No, but I do love that the Imperial March throughout Star Wars will, like, end up being diegetic in numerous situations.
Speaker: It is... When the Empire comes around, like, the Empire itself uses the Imperial March as, like, a this is their hail to the chief, this is their battle hymn of the Republic shit. But I have this little headcanon that this fucking battle droid composed it.
Speaker: Yeah. Uncredited. and then at one point when Yoda's discussing whatever the fuck Anakin and Ahsoka are getting up to, he goes, twice the trouble they have become.
Speaker: This is on you, my guy. Yeah, this was your idea. what did you think was going happen? And we'll we'll talk about Ahsoka and her time with Luminara later.
Speaker: But my God, when we get there, I was like, oh, she's fully like... Yeah.
Speaker: yeah she had the snark jean but putting her with anekin just turned it up to eleven o also this series of like three has so so many references to a new hope yeah We have you know lines like, you may fire when ready, that Dooku says at one point.
Speaker: We have a scene where a big laser goes down an empty hallway and two technicians, in this case droids, have to cower away from the giant laser because there's no fucking railing or protective equipment because there's no OSHA in space.
Speaker: Also, just for our war crimes discussion, killing shipwrecked survivors. It's a war crime in times of war h and considered just generally against international law as murder on the high seas if done outside of an armed conflict.
Speaker: Hint, hint, U.S. Coast Guard. You know, I'm not an expert in war crimes, but I think deliberately attacking medical facilities is probably also one Yes, it is. Attacking medical personnel or facilities is a war crime.
Speaker: And that's the whole plot of the next episode. Uh-huh. Yeah, Grievous is going to take his giant fuck-off superweapon and go murder a bunch of convalescent clones. Yeah.
Speaker: atrocious. Yeah, yeah, that is a war crime also. So Grievous is just racking them up here. This also is full of little lines from A New Hope. We have cut the chatter.
Speaker: We have gold two standing by, gold three standing by, the you know red five standing by. Mm-hmm. We have, we're too close, loosen up. And my personal favorite, immediately, watch those towers, boys.
Speaker: Also, clone names predicting how they're gonna die. Yeah. Matchstick got burned up and Broadside got taken out by a Broadside.
Speaker: in Anyway. There will be more and I'll be upset about it. but There are nice things. In this episode, um there's a gonk droid and i just wrote my notes, gonk, heart emoji.
Speaker: Also, Anakin giving dad terrified of letting his daughter drive because Ahsoka realizes that he is deliberately making it so that she can't fly ship. And she goes, wait, you don't like my flying.
Speaker: Which, you know, maybe when your adoptive dad is one of the best pilots in the galaxy, the bar might be a bit high. i can see him perhaps being anxious, having someone else behind the wheel. But he's just going, nope, this is the level of recklessness where I draw the line is letting Ahsoka drive.
Speaker: But also, she's fucking 12. Yeah. listen how old was he when he was piloting ship he was like nine nine piloting the pod racer and also destroying yeah the trade federation thing and yes technically this 12 year old is a child soldier and has a military rank of commander however the only thing she should be commanding is her fucking math homework ah My refrain just forever will be, she should be writing in her diary. She should not be here.
Speaker: But as it happens, she is here. There's also the Balmora giant mantas, which are just these cool space creatures. And I just thought they were very beautiful. And that scene had a lot of nice space ambiance.
Speaker: And then Later on towards the end, i was thinking more about this destroying the medical base and then destroying the medical transports, just going after the ambulances.
Speaker: I thought, wow, this is cartoonishly evil. And then remember that this is a cartoon. So, yeah. Yeah, this did lead me to thinking about and I'm workshopping a rule of fantasy.
Speaker: ooh do tell. But it's something to do with evil has to go hand in hand with incompetence, overconfidence and cowardice. Oh, I like that.
Speaker: Yeah. So workshopping exactly how that's phrased. And if that is exclusive to children's media, where the good is always going to triumph over evil.
Speaker: isn or exclusive to like this era of star wars you know will that be slightly different when we get into the imperial era although now that i think ahead to like some of the imperials in like andor yeah they're overconfident as shit we'll get there into shadow of malevolence oh you mean destroy malevolence into destroy malevolence yes thank you Yeah, Palpatine sends Padme straight into the battle and I don't understand how they didn't realize he was Sith before because he's not fucking subtle.
Speaker: He does this every time. Every time he interacts with Padme, she's just headed straight into a dangerous situation and he is pushing her out the door while also saying, no, don't do it. Oh my God. And giving her a little kick. Like, yeah.
Speaker: You know, she has to be the damsel in distress and she's a fucking professional damsel in distress at this point. I love that the ship is so goddamn ginormous that it has trains in it and that the trains tell you to mind the gap.
Speaker: I did love that there's just little safety announcements. There's no OSHA, but there are some precautions sometimes. Giant space laser, we don't need barriers. Minding the gap getting off a train?
Speaker: Better do that. Mm-hmm. Anakin and Obi-Wan sneak on board and Obi-Wan chastises Anakin that spinning is not flying. But it's a good trick. I love that.
Speaker: And later on, when they're escaping, Obi-Wan goes, time for some clever tricks, Anakin. And it flashes to the outside of the ship and the ship spins.
Speaker: There was a moment Grievous chasing after Obi-Wan. Obi-Wan does a forced leap like onto one of the trains. Grievous does his cybernetically enhanced leap onto the trains. And then a bunch of the battle droids jump after and just fall.
Speaker: i missed that. Oh my god. And then Anakin and Padme go into the bridge and they take out all out the droids and Anakin goes to reprogram the computer. And Padme goes, I guess I'll clean up the droids then.
Speaker: And then when they come back to that scene, he turns to her and goes, how's the house cleaning going? And I was like, bro, shut the actual fuck up right now. Yeah. then at one point, she mans the guns when they're escaping on the ship.
Speaker: And Obi-Wan goes, she seems to know her way around. Oh, yeah. Like, Obi-Wan's like, I know that you two are fucking on this ship. Like, on the regular. It should have included him maybe leading on a surface and then taking his hand off going, oh, I don't want to think about what's touched this and just scanning every horizontal surface of the ship. Oh, God.
Speaker: Can I get a black light? Yeah, maybe better not to. i believe in my heart, I don't know if this will happen, but just watching...
Speaker: Anakin get the distress call like, oh my God, it's Padme. You could play off the first name thing as he's known her since he was a literal child. They're very familiar. But I think Ahsoka is going to figure them out. And I think she's going to figure them out fast. I do not think that this will get past a savvy teen girl.
Speaker: i think she's going to know. and I don't know if if she ever canonically figures it out, but in my mind, in my heart, it's basically now she immediately goes, oh, there's something happening here.
Speaker: No, I mean, Obi-Wan knows, 3PO knows, R2 knows. Yeah. And I have decided in this episode... that I think I can root for Padme and Anakin if I pretend they're completely different people from the people in the movies. Because they did have a couple of cute moments.
Speaker: There are, you know, they're on top of a moving train or something and clinging to each other centrally, but not kissing because we can show people being beheaded. We can show a lightsaber going through the chest of a living man. We can show explosions. We can show living humans being sucked into the vacuum of space to die a horrible death. We cannot show kissing. they will Their lips shall not meet on screen. Don't get it twisted. She can have the pointiest nipples in the world, but... Oh my godling god. did that
Speaker: So they're, you know, centrally embracing everything else. The things you do to get me alone. Or she says it. One of them says it. And it's very funny. And they do seem to have a little bit of chemistry.
Speaker: ah More than the zero that they had in the movies. And so if I pretend that these two characters, this Padme and Anakin, are not the same people. And maybe had completely different upbringings.
Speaker: And we're closer in age. Maybe. I can just, what is it? Compartmentalize. and root for this version of them maybe they did have a couple of moments that i thought were funny meanwhile r2 is rescuing his stupid husband and their relationship continues to be the most charming and charismatic of any of them oh my god r two's like yeah i'll go get him oh my god any other thoughts for malevolence
Speaker: I didn't take Grievous super seriously in these episodes. Just looking at him and going, okay, his design is scary. He's obviously a guy that I'm supposed to be afraid of. But having no other context of him besides what I've seen in these episodes and the very sort of silly way that he conducts himself...
Speaker: Nothing. No impact. Later, episodes that we watch later in this recording today, he does get fucked up and I go, oh, okay, now I see why this is a very scary man.
Speaker: But this is not painting a picture of a villain that I should be afraid of. Well, yeah, he like Grievous appears in Revenge of the Sith. So we had to get his backstory through Clone Wars here.
Speaker: And like many characters, he had an extensive backstory in the like expanded universe, now like Legends content. that some of this meshes with some of it doesn't and to be honest with you we'll talk a little bit more about it in a little bit and i'm not entirely sure like what's technically legends now and what's technically canon but the big piece here is through these episodes we are getting again that incompetence in evil who that incompetence and overconfidence
Speaker: ruining evil. Dooku has his essentially two major hench people. He has Grievous and he has Ventress. And they both keep failing.
Speaker: They have not succeeded in anything they've tried so far. And you can see Dooku slowly losing patience with all of them. I like that that came up because you could very easily ignore that and go, oh, yeah, it's a kid's show. You know, the bad guys will always lose. And that's just what happens. You know, kind of a team rocket situation. But no, Dooku's pissed. They're failing all their missions. There are consequences for them, which I enjoy tremendously.
Speaker: isn' it On to rookies. Yes. Our friends from Domino Squad have to defend their base without help from the Jedi, and it doesn't work. But at least some of them survive.
Speaker: So this was the first one of the, this is why we started out with ah the episode that we did. I wanted you to get introduced to Domino Squad right off the bat, and then they're gone.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, they fucking are. These are our friends. like these guys. Yeah, we so over the course of the episode, we also have a couple of others. There is um Nub, whose name is not spoken and CT327. We don't get his full name. And we have the sergeant whose name is Sergeant O-Niner, but I don't think we get his name either.
Speaker: Mm hmm. So we have those three, and then we have Domino Squad, Cut Up, Droid Bait, Heavy, Fives, and Echo. isn And i I have to think, like, for the two non... Like, the sergeant knew he was going to be with a bunch of dudes, like...
Speaker: that he didn't know. But like the two other dudes who are not Domino Squad, how did they end up here on Rishi? Yeah. And how much does it suck to be with these five dudes who've like been together their entire lives?
Speaker: Yeah. Yeah, CT-327 gets killed first by the droids invading. He's the deck officer. Also, he has the thing where he like he sees something in the distance that's suspicious, and then all of a sudden, in the binoculars, boom, there's the enemy. That's also the new from A New Hope.
Speaker: Cut up, gets eaten by an eel, so he's not really cut up, but... Chewed up. Chewed up. Droid bait is droid bait. He dies at the beginning with Nub.
Speaker: And so, you know... The only ones who initially escape Heavy, Fives, and Echo. And then Rex and Cody show up. They fix things.
Speaker: And Heavy sacrifices himself. Yeah. ah I feel like he was my favorite. I don't even have a reason why I was just the most attached to him. So that it was just very sad.
Speaker: Yeah, no, that one sucked. Also, another war crime, the executing of prisoners. grant Granted, the battle droid goes, do we take prisoners?
Speaker: And then they aim their weapons and Heavy goes, I don't. And blows them all up. Also, again, one of my sort of overarching questions that I know I have to ignore because Star Wars is how the fuck does hyperspace work?
Speaker: And it moves at the speed of plot because, you know, sometimes you can't possibly get there in time, through even through hyperspace. And sometimes the signal stops and all of a sudden, boom, the entire fleet's just there.
Speaker: Yeah. I have to think that like this is close to Kamino. This is like on a hyperspace lane from Kamino. And so knowing that there's a fleet around Kamino, I have to assume that like the signal stopped and boom, the Kamino fleet went, ah, and just jumped in.
Speaker: My assumption is like somebody was on the other end of whatever that wormhole was. Hyperspace is very pretty. There's a lot of nice shots On the malevolence on the bridge and there's all of these big windows and you see this sort of blue, almost aquatic, like you're in one of those aquarium shark tunnels, which I've never been in. i would like to, but it's just a very nice...
Speaker: pretty atmosphere with all this bright blue and teal as opposed to black starry space. This is this is a interesting episode, but we will get more fives and Echo.
Speaker: Don't worry. The only other thing that I had for this one was there was a couple references to Kamino as the clone's home planet, which obviously Yeah, it's where they were born and raised. But I guess I just hadn't thought of it in those terms before. It hadn't occurred to me that they might feel fondly towards it.
Speaker: But, you know, if you are grown in a lab for a specific purpose and indoctrinated from birth, that this is your thing you're supposed to do.
Speaker: then yeah, I can see maybe feeling fondly towards it and feeling like you believe the things you've been told. And there was that one clone, however many episodes ago, who was like a clone liberationist and he was working with Ventress and he is very clearly an outlier.
Speaker: And right most clones at this point do not seem to feel this way. But that was also just kind of a little bit of a mindfuck to go, oh yeah, you know, this is their home, obviously, but also the conditions of that home and of their entire existence are so fucked up. lot of There's not enough therapy in the galaxy for all these clones.
Speaker: Well, they've they've also been raised to see each other as brothers. Yeah. isn And they refer to each other as brothers.
Speaker: And they are literally brothers. Right. They are literally, like, they all literally have the exact same genetic makeup. And so it makes sense that whether or not they see, like, Kamino as, like, their home, that's where their family is.
Speaker: The other clones are their family. And it's extra sad when they freaking sacrifice themselves and we leave their bodies in a hallway full of droids.
Speaker: Yeah, well, and more to the point, this is their first mission. They got stuck out in the ass end of nowhere because it was assumed that it would be fine.
Speaker: isn This is quiet. Nothing should happen here. No, things still happen here. The war is still here. It doesn't matter if you're brand new.
Speaker: It doesn't matter if you're young in clone years. Shiny, one might say. Yeah, the war can still get you. The downfall of a droid, duel of the droids duology.
Speaker: I did not separate these. They go together very well. So the summary for both of those, Downfall of a Droid, Season 1, Episode 6. The Malevolence is destroyed and R2 is lost.
Speaker: Anakin refuses to accept a substitute. Season 1, Episode 7, Duel of the Droids. It's a mission to rescue R2. Anakin is burning goodwill fast. Strictly speaking, it's not the Malevolence. It's just it's other ships.
Speaker: Yeah, we're we're like, in a different battle, Grievous has gotten a different flagship that he will get destroyed now. i Downfall of a Droid in particular was the second lowest rated episode this season, according to IMDB.
Speaker: Interesting. The lowest rated episode this season was Bombad Jedi. Yeah. Yeah. It's, this was very much like these two episodes were where I really felt the animation issues of 2008 animation and also felt like they're not settled into like scoring or you know voices particularly I felt like things were getting like over acted or overemphasized or like I felt like Ashley Eckstein had been like, you got to play Ahsoka as more approachable, more friendly, more kid.
Speaker: I felt like she was really pushing it kind of hard. who In these episodes, I have no idea if somebody, if that was like a direction that she was given. But I felt like, yeah, there's there is the super harsh lighting when Anakin wakes up.
Speaker: I hated that. I thought there was something wrong with my screen. And then when I realized it wasn't, I was thinking, okay, is this some sort of vision that he's having where he thinks that he's in a medical bay and then he'll wake up and really be somewhere else? Why was it like that?
Speaker: No, it's like an infamous fuck up, I think. I don't know whether it's meant to be like the harsh light in one of these rooms or whether it's just like they fucked up the lighting here. you know, I found some old Reddit threads of like people arguing about this one.
Speaker: And some folks were like, yeah, this episode sucked. Some were like, I don't really understand the hate for this episode. Yeah, the animation kind of sucks, but the music was super different and super cool.
Speaker: I was like, okay, the music to me didn't feel Star Wars-y. I think through Clone Wars movie and particularly the rest of the the series, like Kevin Kiner puts his own spin on things, but it still feels Star Wars-y. Here it's like we've got like club music, dance beats playing over the battle.
Speaker: And the animation just felt kind of unfinished. I think the only place where I really noticed that was when Anakin and Ahsoka are wearing their Jedi ponchos of disguise. And the ponchos just look so bad. They have no dimension. They have no shading It just looks like they're not fully rendered.
Speaker: That was the only visual that I really noticed going, oh, this just looks atrocious. But most of it, I was just so focused on trying to follow the plot that a lot of the less good parts just went over my head.
Speaker: Yeah, there's a lot of like places where the shading isn't there, or like they tried to build in some shading to be like, yeah, this is a shoulder. I'm i'm looking at one image of where Ahsoka is being like, here, look at R3.
Speaker: And there's shading of her shoulder to like almost give her a clavicle, but it really looks like this is where the couple of polygons of her body shape are mushed together.
Speaker: This is the rotation point for the animation. This is not different color. It it doesn't look good. Yeah. And the episodes were fine. The big theme to this is Anakin's got attachment issues and everyone knows it.
Speaker: Yeah. Because he is willing to risk it all to rescue r to And Obi-Wan goes, i know you like that droid, but you literally cannot do this.
Speaker: And then it turns out Anakin hasn't been erasing R2's memory like he's supposed to. So he has left this extremely dangerous cache of information just in the hands of whoever wants to get it.
Speaker: Which I don't think that he did on purpose either. So that he would have an excuse to rescue him in the future. Because I don't think Anakin can think that far ahead.
Speaker: But as soon as he realized that, instead of going, oh shit, I made a mistake. He goes, yes, now I'm validated. i can go rescue Right.
Speaker: And I kind of hate that. I think if there's anything I'm going to grumble about with this episode and the next one. We are validating Anakin's attachment issues in all of this because he is the most specialist boy in the whole galaxy and he needs his special droid friend.
Speaker: And it's good that he risked himself and everyone else and the cause and the mission and everything to go get him. Because obviously, yes, it's good to... He says, you know, R2 is more than a droid. He's a friend. He is a friend.
Speaker: And also, you're military leader in a war, And I don't think that the fact that you personally feel attached to this droid is a good enough reason to fuck shit up trying to get him back.
Speaker: It is stupid and reckless. And, you know, he is validated because he has the sensitive information and whatever. But he is, like I said in my little summary, he is burning through goodwill.
Speaker: People, i can tell, are getting increasingly tired of his shit because it's getting more and more dangerous. For less and less valid reasons.
Speaker: And it makes me angry. Yeah. It's a very solid character moment. Yeah. to you know, show us... yeah We know that Anakin's got attachment issues, but to show us specifically, like...
Speaker: We know in real life that having attachments is not a bad thing. The Jedi have taken it to this extreme of like, you can never have attachments.
Speaker: But what we're showing here is that Anakin allows those attachments to rule him or will be reckless in pursuit of those attachments.
Speaker: will disregard the life and safety of others for those attachments. isn Anakin does not have the utilitarian mindset that Jedi are supposed to have.
Speaker: Anakin's trolley problem is, yeah, I'm saving the one person I know, not the thousand other people over on the other track. Yeah, he's flipping that switch no problem. Yeah.
Speaker: I also have to think about, like, was Anakin not a erasing R2's memory in part to preserve, not out of, like, malice or disregard, but, like, to preserve R2?
Speaker: To what extent do droids lose personality when they lose sections of their memory? Mm-hmm. which this has come to a fan theory, and I don't know if this has been validated, i don't remember, that R2 just never gets his memory erased. No one thought to erase his memory and at all, ever.
Speaker: And so when R2 is going through all of ah a New Hope and Empire, like he absolutely knows who Yoda is, and Yoda knows who R2 m And they're both looking at at each other like, I thought you were fucking dead.
Speaker: I love that. Oh my god. i hoped you were fucking dead. Good fucking god. Who is this dude who that we're with?
Speaker: he yoda and r2 are having this little like back and forth eye conversation of like who the fuck is this luke kid and r2's like well let me tell you yeah Yeah, when he meets Obi-Wan in A New Hope, the two of them absolutely know who each other are.
Speaker: And meanwhile, Threepio does get his memory erased. And so Threepio's like, oh yes, I am on in my new little adventure. And R2's like, I have to save my dumbass amnesiac husband from himself.
Speaker: Oh, I love that. I love them so much. Oh. I did also love the bit because they land on you know a secret listen another secret listening post, but this time it's a separatist secret listening post.
Speaker: And Ahsoka faces off against Grievous. o And Grievous has a has a line, they sent a child to destroy my station. The Republic must be running out of Jedi.
Speaker: Which, when we meet Nadar in a couple of episodes, and looking at Anakin, like, we know that the Republic did in fact rush a bunch of Padawans through the end of their training to knight them early and send them off to war.
Speaker: So yeah, they are running out of Jedi. And multiple people arguing that Ahsoka is too young to be a Padawan. It's like, yeah, they did the same thing on the other end. They're pushing younglings into Padawan positions earlier and they're pushing Padawans into knight positions earlier.
Speaker: isn And speaking of Jedi, why does Grievous have two lightsabers? Are they from Jedi that he killed? i think based on... Grievous' lair, the answer is probably yes. yeah But when I saw him with two lightsabers, went, oh no, that's bad.
Speaker: Yeah, like his origins are not explained here. And the introduction of both Grievous and Ventress is not given in Clone Wars, although we'll get backstory for the both of them over time. But there is there's like an introduction of the both of them in the Genndy Tartakovsky Clone Wars. Mm-hmm.
Speaker: I don't know whether that's still considered canon or not. And again, we'll talk a little bit more about Grievous in like two episodes. On to the last arc.
Speaker: Starting with the lowest ranked episode of the season, Bombad Jedi. If you couldn't guess from the title, Jar Jar Binks pretends to be a Jedi and winds up saving the day with a major strategic victory for the Republic somehow.
Speaker: The only thing that I really had to say about this is there are multiple points where we think that Jar Jar is dead. And there's a point where C-3PO thinks Jar Jar is dead. And he goes in the most deadpan voice, oh no, Jar Jar's been killed.
Speaker: i knew something like this would happen. He was so brave. Now he's gone. Forever? He sounds relieved. And I do not blame him.
Speaker: He's in the most polite British way going, oh, he's gone forever. All right. But other than that, I don't have shit to say about this episode. I have a couple of things, which is one, 3PO obviously knows about Anakin and Padme.
Speaker: Because they find the the Jedi robe and Jar Jar's like, who's could this be? And 3PO is like, who knows? We'll never know. No idea how it got here. Let's go. I feel so stupid. I didn't realize that there was...
Speaker: But that's why the robe was in there. I didn't question it. I just thought, okay, this is silly cartoon hijinks. Sure, this Jedi. No, Anakin fucking left his hoodie in Padme's ship.
Speaker: Padme definitely stole it. if we're If we're calling that it the the Jedi hoodie, yeah, she stole the Jedi robe. oh my god, that's the ultimate god-tier stealable hoodie. Can you imagine how comfy a Jedi robe must be? Yeah, yeah, get it, Padme. Steal all the robes. I would. well are But are they scratchy? Because comfort is to be eschewed.
Speaker: i don't know, Buddhism studies scholar, what's... Well, if it's the only garment that you own, so if we're doing like a Buddhist monk thing and these are your only clothes, they shouldn't be extravagant. You know, they're not going to be made out of silk and finely embroidered, but they can be comfortable. It's because you're not trying to cause more suffering. You don't, this isn't Christianity. We're not doing penitents. Hair shirts. Yeah, there's no hair shirts. There's no self-flagellation. this is not, you know, there's certain ways to remove yourself from material comforts to get closer to enlightenment. But the goal is not to make yourself as uncomfortable as possible at all times. it's You can be comfortable. It's fine. So I think the Jedi robes are probably pretty comfy.
Speaker: Sure. Okay. One thing with the Jedi robe. Sometimes we see Jedi putting on robes and ponchos and there they become fucking invisible. They just fade into the background even if nobody else is wearing a robe.
Speaker: isn Jar Jar puts on a robe and everyone's like, oh shit, a Jedi. Yeah. It's like the Jedi robe of anti-disguise when worn by a non-Jedi. The magic of the robe is rejecting Jar Jar.
Speaker: When Padme is in the prison cell and she's like got her hands chained above her head, she clearly has a ridiculously strong core and she's super flexible because with just her wrists...
Speaker: chained above her head nothing to grab onto with her hands like wrists and i presume like pressing her shoulders back she bends completely in half to get her lock pick from her boot yeah Anakin is a lucky man and does not even fucking know it.
Speaker: Can you imagine between her flexibility and the fact that she's like absolutely fucking yoked and the force, the wild acrobatic shit that they get up to? and And you know Anakin doesn't give head.
Speaker: You know he doesn't. Oh my god. So he has to be skilled in other areas if Padme keeps sleeping with him. Who knows, you know, can the force do the like psychic thing from the Katie Robert book where you just- and maybe form a form a dildo of pure force energy one way to find out who's that jedi from the other one kit fisto hit me up Other question was, do you think he makes her call him Master Jedi in bed?
Speaker: oh God, he probably does. Doesn't he? Oh, no he totally does. ah ah Maybe not every time, but he definitely does.
Speaker: like guilt trip her about it or be kind of whiny and she'll do it just to get him to shut up. But oh my, he absolutely loves hearing it. Yeah. I'm sure she did it once as a joke.
Speaker: Yep. And now she's like, oh, wait, god damn it. Now I have to do this every time. Yeah. Oh, my God. i hate that i hate that I know this now.
Speaker: This is an objective truth that we've uncovered. She's very Lara Croft in her outfit and, like, movement. Oh, I was going to say in her triangular breasts. Also of that, too. that.
Speaker: her Her boobs that are just nipple. is Jar Jar exists here clearly as like a chaos agent trickster god of the Force. isn This episode and some others led fans to believe that Jar Jar was the Phantom Menace and that he was Force-sensitive Dark Lord of the Sith.
Speaker: I don't hate it. Sure. yeah the Darth Jar Jar theory. I don't have much more on that, but that is a running theory that some fans won't let go.
Speaker: I'll entertain that. And I don't recall whether Ahmad Best has addressed it and been like, m this is not confirmed nor denied.
Speaker: Moving on. So during this episode, they capture Newt Gunray. h And so the next episode, we are transporting him to prison. Ahsoka is traveling with Master Luminara Unduli.
Speaker: And nobody has taught the baby to not say the words boring or quiet. Because Ahsoka immediately is like, it's such a boring trip.
Speaker: Oh, you don't say that. And also I knew that Argaius was evil the moment I saw his fucking hair. Yeah, he has a weird, he's also got kind of a Mare of Whoville thing going on. i know he was a little bit too lovingly rendered and his design was a little bit too interesting for him to be just a generic soldier. i knew something was going to be up with him.
Speaker: Yeah. couple of other notes that I have from this episode. We have the droid that Ventress sneaks around at one point is 327T. yeah Is that named after CT-327, who was the clone deck officer in Rookies that got killed? I couldn't find any like Star Wars significance to the digits.
Speaker: Yeah. Yeah. I don't know, is Dee Bradley Baker's birthday, three twenty seven March 27th? I don't fully know. I found that the three hundred and twenty seven Star Corps was the group that followed Jedi Master Isla Secura.
Speaker: I'll do some more digging, particularly if like if we start seeing repeated numbers. It's a question of, like was this just the number on somebody's mind? Or is this a reference to something? It's like when when whenever we see like 1138, that's the reference to THX 1138, George Lucas's other sci-fi movie um from before Star Wars.
Speaker: So because of those little pieces, I'm always like watching for, are we having repeated little names or themes or number series? Are these references to other things that I'm not getting?
Speaker: I think it's also possible that some combinations of numbers just sound really good and just have a better flow. So 327, that's nice. That's snappy.
Speaker: Yeah. So I don't know if it is if it's a reference or if people independently just went, yeah, these numbers sound good together. Let's put them in a thing. Yeah, that was the that's the other thought. This is again where Ahsoka really shows that Anakin is just... Anakin's personality is just ramping hers up to 11.
Speaker: Ventress comes in Ahsoka goes, if it isn't the hairless harpy and Ventress, who banters with anybody she meets, if it's Obi-Wan, they're flirting.
Speaker: But if it's Anakin or Ahsoka, it's trading insults. And Ventress responds... If it isn't Skywalker's filthy, obnoxious little pet.
Speaker: How nice of you. I wrote in my notes, diplomacy and subtlety are not her strong suits. No, no, no, no. She'll get there. But again, I don't know how Yoda thought this would work.
Speaker: Like, yeah, this has the vibes of like, have a child to save your marriage. Mm hmm. Right? Except that doesn't work. This just ends up with we make each other worse.
Speaker: Yeah. This was one of the episodes I noticed. It's like everything feels very, very painted. listen I feel like they're trying out different animation styles to sort of figure out what works.
Speaker: Yeah. There were a couple of things from this episode that stuck out to me. The first being that Ahsoka gets to interact with a woman for once. So that's nice. I don't know how many of those she sees in her day to day. Not a lot.
Speaker: So glad she gets to hang out with Master Unduli. That's good. And fight Ventress. And fight Ventress. Oh, so that's two. That's two. Three whole women in this episode. Yay. What great role models.
Speaker: I do have to admire the guts to just fight Ventress by herself, which she does. And for all of the chastising that she gets and making some rash decisions, she does force slam Ventress into a pipe at one point, which I don't know if that was just because she had the element of surprise or if Ahsoka's maybe incredibly strong and we haven't really...
Speaker: We haven't really seen the sort of power scaling that we're dealing with with her. But I think that's a pretty big deal that she was able to do that. And I went, oh, shit, maybe I should be taking her a lot more seriously. Not that I wasn't, but going, oh, maybe she's like kind of chosen one level freaky force shit.
Speaker: No, I think I think canonically Obi-Wan is one of the best lightsaber fighters in the order. hmm. Anakin is the chosen one.
Speaker: So obviously he's super fucking powerful in the force and he's being trained by one of the best sword masters in the order. So then, you know, I guess that is a piece of why you'd hand Ahsoka to Anakin of like, wow, she is so far ahead of all of the rest of her classmates. Like we need to hand her to somebody who can handle this.
Speaker: isn Okay, who can handle this? Well, Anakin and Obi-Wan and Mace Windu and like a couple of other people, maybe.
Speaker: And so, and you know, maybe that's where Yoda's like, hmm, this experiment we shall try. assisted But yeah, no she she is freakishly powerful, both in the Force and just as a saber fighter.
Speaker: We do see her training a whole lot. And obviously, Anakin's improvisational style of planning. That's very generous.
Speaker: Yeah, she has to learn on her feet, or she will die. h just imagining... Anakin is like the dad at swim lessons just chucking Ahsoka into the pool uh-huh it's kind of a little bit of it yeah very lots of experiential learning also in this episode there are traitors everywhere this is messy we can't really trust anybody Ventress is clearly very successful at making inroads with people and that is concerning to me mm-hmm
Speaker: Just in general, that it's all a very uneasy sort of... i don't think people are outright mistrustful of each other yet in general. But I think this could very easily devolve into a situation where nobody trusts anybody and there's just even more backstabbing out in the open and it just gets out of hand.
Speaker: Yeah. Finally, we have season one, episode 10, The Lair of Grievous, which is the highest rated episode in season one.
Speaker: It's really good. It's solid. My summary for it is We take a side quest with Kit Fisto into Grievous' lair, and Dooku plays everyone against each other. listen So this is where all I guess the backstory that I'm working from for Grievous, which may be a combination of expanded universe and actual will canon things, and I don't think more of it gets revealed later on in the Clone Wars, but here's what I'm working with.
Speaker: General Grievous is a Khaleesh warlord. He had a different name. Grievous was a name that he adopted during his warlord days to strike fear into the hearts of his enemies. And Grievous is a word, obviously, that I'm sure many of our listeners have heard.
Speaker: It means causing grief, pain, or anguish. serious or dire, or causing grief or sorrow, painful, afflictive, hard to bear, offensive, harmful.
Speaker: So in the backstory that I'm thinking about, whether or not all of this is canon or not, He came to the attention of the wider galaxy for his tactics in wars in the Kali system, his home world.
Speaker: There is another planet in the world that and or in the system that also has intelligent life, and there was... like long-running battles between the two worlds.
Speaker: And I believe he basically committed genocide on the other planet. like The species had mostly subjugated his species and he beat them back. And I'm pretty sure, again, don't necessarily quote me on all of this, I'm pretty sure he killed almost all of them.
Speaker: I would guess maybe that's one of the heads that he's holding in one of the many statues of himself that he has in his lair. Yeah, that is not the species, supposedly, the species that they fought hard against in, according to the history canon or otherwise, was like vaguely insectoid.
Speaker: But yeah, he he has been involved in a number of fights around sort of his home system and elsewhere. He came to the attention of the Jedi because of this, who stopped him from something, causing him some sort of injury.
Speaker: And so he hates the Jedi. He has an incredible hatred for the Jedi and also desires their powers. deeply wants to have the force he started giving himself more and more cybernetics and we see when we're seeing like all of the statues he has of himself we see each statue he gains more and more cybernetics yeah so he started like giving himself more cybernetics like particularly in his his limbs and
Speaker: to give himself more abilities. This is another example of people in the galaxy using technology to counter the Jedi.
Speaker: The Mandalorians do it. They've got their armor and their gauntlets specifically to fight Force users. He's doing the same thing. To recruit Grievous, Dooku organized a accident crashed his ship blamed it on the jedi like as the jedi trying to assassinate him where he was mortally wounded and the majority of his body save like his some of his internal organs his brain his eyes and like his central nervous system had to all then be replaced by cybernetics mm-hmm
Speaker: Because Star Wars morality, we have him losing pieces of his humanity along the way. Not that he was ever human, but yeah. So, you know, now he's loyal to Dooku because Dooku supposedly saved his life and made him stronger and trained him in the Jedi arts and hates the Jedi because supposedly they tried to kill him.
Speaker: isn Which, of course, becomes a sort of self-perpetuating cycle as he hunts down more and more Jedi, more and more Jedi are going to try and kill him. Yeah. Again, I don't know if some of that is from the expanded universe, some of that's canon, what have you.
Speaker: Point is, that is how I am thinking about Grievous' backstory as we're going into this layer of Grievous. And going into this, I feel like there's like visual references I'm not getting.
Speaker: This feels very Saw or Alien or like or just a D&D dungeon. I was thinking Dark Souls with his fucking pet that he unleashes on them. I forget what it's called.
Speaker: Gore. Gore. I knew it was a G name. This is giving video game, Dark Souls, boss fight, increasing... Just waves and waves of power and then the boss regenerating.
Speaker: it was also kind of giving and MMO fight a little bit. This is i could see playing this in Final Fantasy with a bunch of other people. hmm. But yeah, it definitely does seem to be calling on some specific reference, but I also don't know what that would be. Or if it's just more of a general aesthetic gaming sort of thing. But I was having the D&D thought of, oh no, they're challenging him in his lair. He's got lair actions. Don't do it.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, and he those lair actions. And uses the lair actions. Uh-huh. And frankly, grant granted, that like they don't know it's his lair at first, but it's like once you discovered that you were in the lich's lair, you should have left.
Speaker: Mm-hmm. And Kit Fisto the whole time is like advising caution, but his former Padawan, Nadar, Nadar Vebb, is very, very headstrong and very, very convinced of his own skill and power.
Speaker: And this is, again, when we look at Nadar Vebb versus Fisto, Anakin and Obi-Wan. And even Anakin and Ahsoka were seeing this change in the Jedi Order.
Speaker: This change from like these older, more restrained Jedi Masters to these new, younger Jedi who are starting out their Jedi careers...
Speaker: as warriors, not as the peacekeepers that the Jedi claim to be. And it's almost like if you force them into that role much earlier than they were supposed to be, they don't have the maturity or the life experience or the perspective of an older, more restrained Jedi who had a more normal training. And they're going to think, well, I must be I'm 14. I'm a commander. I must be hot shit.
Speaker: Yeah, I would think that too. Yeah, 21. I graduated early and I've now been given command of my own military force. I know what I'm doing. I can take on the Grand General who was known for hunting down Jedi and ultimately it gets Nadar killed.
Speaker: And Fisto leaves in honestly the hottest way that he could Yeah, the literal, this is a real tone shift. But the first thing I thought, because the first shot of this episode is Fisto in his ship. And then we hear him talk immediately.
Speaker: it sucks that he has a stupid name because that is a beautiful green alien with a beautiful voice. I was like, oh, this is a hot alien. Okay. I know we're in the middle of nowhere, R6, but that's the Republic beacon we're looking for. Contact the Outer Rim Command.
Speaker: that bigger Voiced by Phil Lamar. I feel like I should know who that is, but I don't know celebrities. He is a very, very prolific voice actor.
Speaker: Let's see. He has been in also in in some live action, too, including in Pulp Fiction. Who did he play in Futurama for 173 episodes?
Speaker: hermes conrad Oh, he was Hermes. Okay. have seen, i think, every episode of Futurama. i would not recommend that people watch If you haven't seen it, don't watch it. But yeah, okay, he was Hermes.
Speaker: He was in the 2019 Lion King. Also been in Family Guy, in Justice League. He is Green Lantern.
Speaker: Invader Zim. Samurai Jack in Samurai Jack. Okay. Yeah, i'm I'm like scrolling through his credits right now. There's hundreds of them.
Speaker: He's been in everything. He's also Bail Organa. Oh, okay. And Orn Frita. And other her two other characters we've heard from in this bunch of episodes. And others.
Speaker: Yeah, he is all over the place. He is the judge in BoJack Horseman, Admiral Alonzo Freeman in Star Trek Lower Decks.
Speaker: But we got distracted. So what was the hot way that he left the situation? Because that is a hot alien. he was surrounded by all of the Magna Guards and like he was looking to leave and then Grievous crawls up the cliff out of the fog at him and he leaps out of this you know circle of enemies onto his ship which his droid is flying and then like kneels there watching them as the ship flies off
Speaker: Good stuff. Oh, he's C.O. Bacar in Old Republic. Interesting. Okay. Yeah, he's been in everything. um Point is, the the big piece of this is that Dooku set this whole thing up as a way to potentially get rid of Grievous e or get rid of a couple of Jedi.
Speaker: Yeah, either way, he comes out on top. Right. And I think ultimately he lost kind of the only way that he could, which was one of the Jedi got away, the older, more experienced, more powerful Jedi, and Grievous survived.
Speaker: isn Yeah, I don't really have too much more on this, but like in general, these batch of episodes, we're seeing a few overarching story elements emerge. We have Jedi compassion for the clones and Jedi attachment to the clones. Yeah.
Speaker: We're seeing Anakin's unhealthy attachment or willingness to risk anything and anyone for the people he's attached to.
Speaker: We're seeing ah the incompetence of evil and the repeated failures of Grievous and of Ventress.
Speaker: And it's kind of up in the air as to whether or not those failures are orchestrated by Sidious. Sometimes it's a question of Sidious setting up Dooku to fail or is Sidious wielding Dooku as a weapon?
Speaker: And I think it's kind of both. It's Sidious is playing all of this on a much larger scale. Sidious is doing exactly what Dooku's doing with Grievous and Kit Fisto on a larger scale. He is sending all of his cards into one place and whoever comes out on top, it doesn't matter because he'll still win.
Speaker: Yeah, that's a level of connivingness that I am just not smart enough to execute myself. That just stresses me out to think about being in charge of a plan that complicated.
Speaker: And, you know, he's got he's pulling just the right strings at just the right times and making things happen. And he's got all of these sort of self-perpetuating systems that he's working with. But just having the ability to plan and execute something on that scale in and of itself is terrifying to me.
Speaker: And then just add also to the fact that he's just evil. Yeah. Any other thoughts on these episodes? Because it's getting very warm in my room because my air conditioner is off and we have run very long again.
Speaker: I don't think anything in particular. This was a real variety, a smorgasbord of stuff, and it moved very quickly. And now at least I think I'm starting to be able to tell clones apart.
Speaker: So that's good. Even though they just get ripped out from under me because they fucking die. but And and they'll they're making it with every passing episode, they make it more and more clear.
Speaker: Yeah. like More and more of them grow facial hair. Rex has not yet done the blonde dyed buzz cut, but that will be a thing that he does.
Speaker: Some of them have facial tattoos. I want to know which clone got a tattoo gun and is given the other one's tattoos. I think that's fun. But I enjoyed them.
Speaker: I feel like I'm starting to get used to the pace and get used to the characters. It's a big adjustment from the movies. But overall, they were good, except for the parts with Jar Jar. And I think the emotional damage is working. It's happening. So congratulations.
Speaker: I hope that my suffering is entertaining to you. It is. And ah quite frankly, having you know now gone through so much of this, this is some of the weakest storytelling that we're going to see in Clone Wars.
Speaker: Great. Awesome. So next time we will be covering the rest of season one of the Clone Wars.
Speaker: Season one, episodes 11 and 12, Dooku captured and gunning in general. 13 and 14, which is the Jedi crash defenders of peace duology. Season one, episode 15 trespass. We'll skip season one, episode 16. Cause we already did that.
Speaker: And then season one, 17 and 18, the Blue Shadow Virus arc. And season one episodes 19 through 21, the first Ryloth arc, other than supply lines.
Speaker: So if you would like to watch along, you can sort of now... that you have a sense of what we're going to be talking about, how we're going through these episodes, and how we're going to be discussing them.
Speaker: Feel free to watch along with us and come back in two weeks to listen to us discuss that batch of episodes. In the meantime, if you would like to hear more from us, you can always follow us on our social media at FanAppPod on any social media site we're on. That's F-A-N-A-P-P-P-O-D.
Speaker: If you would like to chat with us, you can always comment on our social media. You can comment on our episodes, depending on the platform you're listening on. You can leave us a review, preferably a five-star review.
Speaker: You can also send us an email at thefandomapprentice at gmail.com. If you do that, you are guaranteed a response within three business days, unless you get caught in the spam filter, which it might take a little longer, but you'll still get a response.
Speaker: You can subscribe to our podcast to get the ah new episodes as soon as they drop. You can also listen to our pretty extensive backlog at this point. Again, Like we said at the top of the episode, we've gone through the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy and all of the Murderbot series except for the most recent book. And we will record an episode about that at some point soon.
Speaker: isn it For a given value of soon. In clone years. In clone years. So until next time, thank you so much for listening and may the force be with you.
Speaker: See you next time. bye The Phantom Apprentice is produced and edited by Rin and Sam. Our music is composed and performed by James. You can find more of his work on Spotify and Bandcamp under Bayruz, B-A-E-R-U-Z.
Speaker: Our art is by Casey Turgeon. You can find more of her work at KCT Designs on Instagram. The content discussed is the property of the original copyright holders and is used here under fair use.
