On
episode 60 of Star Wars: The Clone Wars, just when Anakin thinks he’s out, they pull him back in. The Son appears to him in a vision, trying to convince him to join the Dark Side (the guy grumbles about how it’s not that simple and that he’s restoring balance or something, but let’s be real here, it’s the Dark Side.) Anakin refuses, so the Son appears on their ship, kidnaps Ahsoka, and flies away as the crazy bat monster. The boys give chase. Anakin nearly crashes the ship into a big glowing tower before crashing it for real in the middle of Mordor, where Obi-Wan muses that the Son must have taken Ahsoka to the Green Eye of Sauron. Anakin wants to charge in lightsabers-blazing because that’s how a Skywalker takes care of business, but Obi-Wan thinks they should consult the Father first. Tensions run high, and Anakin storms off to the Eye. Ahsoka, in her cell, meets Gollum here, who acts friendly at first but then bites her and says she belongs to him.
Obi-Wan is at a loss for how to locate the Father until the mountaintop monastery spontaneously appears right behind him. Inside, the Father chastises the Son for giving into his desires. The Son does not take kindly to this and says that he’s tired of waiting for the old man to kick the bucket. Then Force Lightning, because that’s what the Dark Side does. Somehow Obi-Wan has managed to climb the mountain during all of this, and the Father is launched out of the monastery right at his feet, to the horror of Palutena. Obi-Wan convinces her to take matters into her own hands. She takes him to a cave in the green part of the planet, where an altar is located that spits out a convenient magic dagger.
Back in Mordor, Anakin is still climbing the tower. Yes, somehow Obi-Wan has managed to visit the monastery at the top of a mountain and travel to another part of a planet in the time Anakin has climbed this tower. To the base of this tower. Not the top, just the base. Anyways, he finds Ahsoka, who has grown yellow-eyed and veiny after her encounter with Gollum. She complains about how Anakin has treated her, which comes across as obnoxious rather than creepy, and tries to get him to join the Son before trying to cut him up with her lightsaber in a very sluggishly choreographed fight. Meanwhile, Palutena and Obi-Wan arrive to meet the Son. That’s right, Obi-Wan has now managed to come back to the tower from God-knows-where in the same span of time that Anakin has been climbing! The Son (whose voice actor is doing an impressively creepy job, by the way), informs Obi-Wan that Anakin is fighting Ahsoka, and he rushes out to assist.
Ahsoka says, “And now the student will kill the master” in a line that makes some of Anakin’s howlers last episode look decent. Then she whines about how Anakin calls her “Snips” (which I totally agree with her about, to be fair) before Obi-Wan shows up to help kick her ass. Inside the Tower, the Son reveals that the conflict is helping him grow in power for some reason. Palutena engages him in pretty much the most boring fight ever; the Son shoots little spurts of Force Lightning at her, and she just kinda lifts stuff (there’s a reason Jedi use lightsabers to fight each other, it’s so much more fun than just the Force.) The Father arrives to break up the squabble and launches them through the window into the courtyard, where the Jedi are fighting. This doesn’t quite go as planned, as the Son quickly overpowers the Father and Ahsoka steals the magic dagger to present to the Son. He kills (?) Ahsoka by tapping her on the forehead and then says to the Father, “The Jedi have brought the dagger, and you have brought yourself” because this arc hasn’t yet met its quota of terrible lines. But as he tries to kill the Father, Palutena gets in the middle and is stabbed. The Son screams and flies away.
Palutena and her Father have a little pre-death chat as the show attempts to make you care about these characters. The Father goes on about how evil has been unleashed and the balance is broken. As he mopes, Anakin shouts that there’s always hope, which spurs Palutena to motion toward Ahsoka’s corpse. Anakin kneels between them and places his fingers on their foreheads, serving as a conduit that revives Ahsoka because apparently this is a thing that can happen. After a brief fake out because of course, Ahsoka wakes up. The Father warns that the Sith have gained strength with Palutena’s death, and that the Jedi must leave so that the Son has no means of escape.
You can't take something that has so far served as nothing more than walking, talking symbolism and expect the audience to care about it as a character. And that's where this episode fails. This power struggle is given an epic sense of weight, but it's impossible to get invested due to indifference toward these characters. The execution doesn't help, either, as the fights kind of suck, the story makes little sense, and it hinges on so many things that are never introduced until a method to progress the plot (or reverse it, in the case of Ahsoka's revival) is needed. Ahsoka's heel turn is not great, either; she stopped being annoying a while ago, but she hasn't nearly reached the point where I care all that much if she lives or dies. The only purpose it serves is to drag up the times when she used to annoy me. The episode looks nice and the concept is still ok, but that's about all you can say about it.
C
