Monday, October 29, 2012

Review of the Jedi: Tipping Points

Join the Serial Wordsmith every Monday as he recaps and reviews the new season of Star Wars: The Clone Wars


Well that was better than it had any right to be. Like I said last week, the Onderon story arc has been wearing me out and I was looking forward to it ending this week. So imagine my surprise when we got the ending and it actually turned out to be pretty awesome. But we'll get to that, we start off with where we left off last week (duh). After rescuing King Dendup (still a stupid name), the rebels fled into the mountains. Dendup gives a giant holographic message to the people of Onderon supporting the rebels and they finally start rioting in the streets against the Separatists. King Rash is at his last limit because his entire reign has gone to shit thanks to the rebels. Kalani decides the only way to turn things around is crush the rebels once and for all. And now that there outside the city, he's free to bring out the big guns. Kalani orders a squadron of droid gunships to follow the droid army and exterminate the rebels with extreme prejudice. They respond with a Battlestar Galactica reference.

More after the break,




Meanwhile, our heroes are prepping for the battle. Their plan is working perfectly, drawing the droids out of the city to avoid civilian casualties. Steela will command the forces while Saw and General Moustache fight the droids head on. Things go pretty well at first, our heroes even get some good action in riding the cool bat-monkey things from part 1, but they weren't expecting the gunships to show up. The gunships just blow through the rebels and they have shields so nothing the rebels have can take them. Steela orders a retreat and Ahsoka calls Obi-Wan and Anakin for help. But it's bad news. Obi-Wan says the Republic can't openly intervene, there'd be too many negative political reactions. Even though their involvement was revealed in the last episode. Okay.

Anakin isn't happy about this decision and offers an alternative. What if a third party intervened? That can mean only one thing. Anakin visits Hondo. Yeah, a Hondo appearance bumps up any episode. Anakin pays Hondo to deliver some rocket launchers to the rebels and after some fun pirate banter, he agrees. The rebels have found some safe ground for now when Hondo arrives with the rocket launchers. Unfortunately his arrival lets the droids find them. But the rebels aren't worried, with the new rocket launchers they make quick work of the droid gunships. One of the gunships goes after King Dendup and Steela takes her bat-monkey to rescue him. After a precarious chase, she does and they end up on the side of a cliff. While that's happening Saw shoots down the last gunship. And causes it to crash into the mountain Steela's standing on the edge of. Oops.

Steela ends up hanging over the cliff and when Lux tries to save her, Ahsoka ends up having to force lift them both up. Unfortunately the gunship Saw shot down isn't completely dead and it shoots Ahsoka at the worst possible moment. Lux destroys it but it's too late. Steela has plummeted to her death. Back in the capitol, Rash is bitching to Dooku about needing more droids to beat the rebels. Dooku asks Kalani if it'll do any good and he says it will take time to defeat them completely. Dooku decides to cut their losses and get the hell out of there, so Kalani shoots Rash and beats it off Onderon. Our episode ends at Steela's funeral, which is a huge public event. Our heroes all mourn her loss and Lux tells Ahsoka he's finally over his neutrality. Dendup has appointed him Onderon's new senator and they'll be joining the Republic. 


Overall, a nice action-packed finale to this story arc. While I still think this story was dragged out and re-covered a lot of old territory, I can't deny this was a good episode. The action was exciting and involving, plus it was nice to see the droid gunships again. Continuity from the movies is always a bonus. I'm also surprised how the characters grew on me. I was actually a little sad when Steela died. Over the course of these four episodes, she made me care about her and her cause more than Saw or Lux did. And Kalani really turned around this week. In The Soft War, he just seemed generically evil. This week, he displayed an interesting sense of cold pragmatism like when he sent the gunships to blow the rebels apart or when he shot Rash in cold blood. That set him apart from other villains and I wouldn't mind seeing him again. 

As for the whole arc, it was just all right. It feels like this would have been better if it was shorter and more focused. Like if the middle two episodes were combined into one and had fewer characters. King Rash, for instance, didn't really have a purpose on his own. If he had been combined with Kalani, would it have made a difference to the overall story? But as it is, it's okay. Not special on its own, but serviceable. I'm dissapointed this is the end of Lux's character arc though. He had more narrative potential as a wild card and I think it's a waste the writers didn't more advantage of his wild card status. 

All in all, a great finale to a rather meh story arc. I enjoyed it but I'm not sad to see it go. But we're getting something different next week. Padme's back and she's tackling....banking restrictions? Yeah?

See you next week.

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