Review of the Jedi: The Rise of Clovis

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

Happy Star Wars Day! What better time for a new Clone Wars review?

First, mea culpa. As SFDebris reminded me, Rush Clovis has appeared before and Padme did have good reason not to trust him. He was a spy for the Separatists, in the John Le Carre mold, and was funneling government secrets to them. Seems like he landed on his feet though, after being impeached as a senator he got a job as a bank lobbyist. Hey, he is a politician!

Jokes aside, the writers continue genre experiments this week and have gone about as far from rollicking space adventures as possible. See I would recap the plot, but there actually isn't much of one this episode. It's more an evolution of all the character set-up from last episode, making it feel like a part two that doesn't work as a self-contained story. Those are rare on this show, especially since the move to Netflix. Rise of Clovis is basically divided into halves, and where one of those halves is a continuation of all the political bank stuff the other is almost a straight-up domestic drama.


Seriously. The first half of this episode basically revolves around how Anakin & Padme's marriage really doesn't work. Palpatine tells Padme to work with Clovis on investigating the Banking Clan's corruption, which pisses off Anakin to no end and drives him to become a controlling jerk with even quicker temper. And because they have to keep their marriage secret Anakin has to stew in his pissy mood while Clovis is trying to get closer to Padme. Which she can't give him a good reason to stop him without incriminating herself and Anakin. This reaches a boiling point when Clovis tries to kiss her just as Anakin walks in on them, which makes him go all macho douchebag and beat the crap out of Clovis. Yeah, I can sum this half up as "Anakin is a controlling macho jerk and Padme is thinking about a divorce".

"Yeah Anakin. You're totally not married."

It makes for good drama but thinking on it, I'm not sure it works exactly. While I like the realism it injects into Anakin & Padme's relationship, it feels off. It doesn't come out of nowhere, Clovis' inclusion is an understandable catalyst for these pressures' release, but it comes on so fast and hard that you could almost get whiplash. I mean Anakin goes from reasonably jealous (from his point-of-view anyway) to nearly abusive with very little provocation. Padme's jump to divorce, okay she says time apart but we all know that means divorce, is similarly quick. I suppose you could argue that her feeling have been mounting for a while, but from what the episode presents it comes across awkward. So I'm onboard the marriage drama train for now, but let's see how it plays out.

Clovis, I should mention, is not knowingly trying to cause this. While he is trying to get close to Padme it's because he trusts her and is trying to connect with her, not because he's some kind of creepy pick-up artist. Contrary to what I thought last time, Clovis seems to be on the up & up. He lays out some backstory to Padme, about how he grew up on Scipio and wants to save the bank's reputation, to explain why he's ruining the people he works for. So instead of being an ambiguous spy, he's a political idealist. Not as interesting as I hoped, but he's still a good character for the moment.

You may think this important, but I couldn't possibly comment

Maybe it's because the second half is more political thriller, or because I just finished House of Cards, but I don't think Clovis is going to survive. Idealists in politics get used and destroyed, and it's clear that Palpatine is just using the guy to get control of the banks. Going back to House of Cards, Clovis is just like Peter Russo. He's a pawn more unscrupulous players are using to further their own schemes, and if you've watched Cards you know what happens to pawns.

Overall, this is probably the weakest episode of the season so far. Combining the political machinations with the Skywalker's marriage issues seemed like neither was strong enough to carry the episode alone. While usually I'm in favor of more episode-to-episode connections, here it just served to make the aforementioned problem worse. As though, the plot was light enough they needed to pad it. There was also a lack of action, except for Anakin's macho douchebag fistfight, and while that's not always a problem it did slow down this episode's pace.

Still, it's not boring and if you're invested in the Skywalker's marriage the drama should play well. I'm disappointed Clovis dropped his ambiguity and became a pawn. He had more potential as a wild card. And though it's unintentional, watching characters have to dance around the fact that they know Anakin & Padme are married is kind of funny. I hope this arc has some good payoff, because while it hasn't been bad so far it hasn't been great either. The potential is there, but they need to capitalize on it.

See you next week.