And so we begin Season 5 of Clone Wars with Revival. The episode starts where the previous season left off, Darth Maul is back and totally pissed off. He and his brother/apprentice Savage are going around wrecking people's shit on the run from the Jedi. Maul realizes they can't run forever and if they want to survive, they're going to need a plan. Meanwhile, Obi-Wan Kenobi and fellow Jedi Adi Gallia are hunting down the two rogue Sith. They arrive at the space station Maul and Savage were fucking up and find out they fled to the Planet Florrum, homebase of Hondo Ohnaka and his pirates.
More after the break,
Hondo is one of my favorite Clone Wars characters. Being a pirate, he brings some welcome moral ambiguity to the usually black & white Star Wars universe and you never know whether he'll play friend or foe in any of his episode. You can tell voice actor Jim Cummings is having a blast playing this wacky bastard of a pirate captain.
This time around, Hondo is a friend to our Jedi heroes. Maul and Savage show up at Florrum and encounter some of Hondo's goons. They bribe the pirates into working for them with some gold they stole from the space station and tell them to recruit some more goons to their cause. By the time Obi-Wan and Adi get to Florrum, Maul has over half of Hondo's pirates working for him and is going to kill the ones who won't. Obi-Wan promises to help out Hondo if Hondo agrees to let him handle Maul. He does and both parties land on the planet.
A battle breaks out between Maul's goons and Hondo's goons and Obi-Wan takes on Maul directly. Adi Gallian fights Savage but he kills her with a horned head-butt to the abdomen. With Obi-Wan outnumbered, he and Hondo retreat into Hondo's compund. Obi-Wan distracts Maul and Savage, and Hondo manages to persuade his traitorous goons back to his side. Maul and Savage have Obi-Wan on the ropes but he turns the tables by chopping Savage's arm off. With the pirates now attacking as well, Maul and Savage retreat to their ship. Hondo blows their ship up with a rocket launcher, but they manage to escape in their lifeboat. Obi-Wan returns to Coruscant and tells Palpatine and Yoda it looks like Maul is dead. Palpatine says case closed, but the Jedi aren't so sure. They think Maul will be back, and that he may find support in the underworld which has gotten out of control while they've focused on the war. And our episode ends on Palpatine with an evil grin on his face.
Overall, Revival was a pretty good episode. It re-establishes the threat of Darth Maul and sets up some future plot development with him and Savage building up an army. It lacked the size of last season's opener which focused more on the actual war, but this was more of a setup episode so I'll forgive it. Performace-wise, all the cast does well but the real standouts are Cummings as Hondo, who's always fun, and Sam Witwer as Maul. Witwer is able to convey so much of Maul in his voice, giving the character a real sense of intelligence, menace, and barely-contained rage. Good stuff. The lightsaber duel between Obi-Wan, Maul, and Savage was also great.
Really, I only have two major complaints for this episode. First, it's really unclear what Maul's plan is exactly. I didn't understand what he was doing until Obi-Wan spelled it out in the epilogue. Maul keeps going on about his plan but the audience never really get what his long-term plan is. My other complaint has to do Adi Gallia's death. It seemed she was only here to get killed by Savage to re-establish his threat and doesn't serve any other purpose in the plot. And that's veering into Women in Refrigerators my friends. It's never a good idea to pointlessly kill off characters, even minor ones just to make the villain seem more evil. It's just wasting a character you could do more with.
All in all, not great but a pretty good episode to start the season. Can't wait to see Maul return.
See you next week.
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