Clone Wars Third Season Closing Thoughts
Apr. 7th, 2011 08:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerAfter managing to put some thoughts together at the close of the second season of Clone Wars, the thought of doing that again has been something I've been thinking about for a while. I suppose that if I was to try and sum up the third season in just a few words, they would be "changes of pace." Along with the different kinds of stories that each new "plot arc" seemed to bring, the series kept up its experiments in "non-linear" episode order, but in such a way that it seemed more interesting than "too clever" to me. Partway through the season, though, in addition to the new looks for Padme turned out on what seemed a regular basis, the designs for Anakin, Ahsoka, and Obi-Wan were updated to give a sense of moving closer to Revenge of the Sith; that does make me wonder a bit about whether we'll see as many flashbacks for a while so long as they're going to be "obvious" that way.
Along with my own positive feelings, though, I stayed aware of how fast series seem to wear out their welcome these days. The crucial problem for many seemed to be casual contradictions of the previous novels and comics. To me, that's very much a moot point, but then I was starting to skip spinoff works in the 1990s, before I made a nervous drawing back from Star Wars as a whole and then came back to the movies in a way that didn't seem to require picking up on any comics and novels as well. I can wonder I would like repeated suggestions to go on to other works to really understand what I'm seeing, but I can still at least feel sorry for those caught like this. So far as the opinions of other people that I actually follow go, though, I suppose the "political" episodes concerned me a little because I knew some would find fault. There, though, things seem to go even deeper to the problem that one person's motherhood issue does not compute with another. At the same time, though, on thinking back to the second season and my impression that a certain number of episodes seemed to depend on "one-of-a-kind" new discoveries ("Geonosian queens!" "Nose worm zombies!" "Cloaking devices!" "Horror from the depths!"), in a fashion similar to my impression of "the easy way out" to keep a "science-fictional" story going, I still have the feeling that I prefer all the different kinds of stories in the third season.
I do wonder where things might go from here so long as the ratings keep up. Every once in a while, I did wonder if the third season was beginning to set up a potential split between master and apprentice, but this was far from the only way Anakin and Ahsoka were presented. At the same time, I continue to appreciate how this Clone Wars doesn't oppress us with attempts to demonstrate ahead of time what we do know will happen in the end, and that there's space for heroes to be complex rather than just "worthy" and "unworthy."
Along with my own positive feelings, though, I stayed aware of how fast series seem to wear out their welcome these days. The crucial problem for many seemed to be casual contradictions of the previous novels and comics. To me, that's very much a moot point, but then I was starting to skip spinoff works in the 1990s, before I made a nervous drawing back from Star Wars as a whole and then came back to the movies in a way that didn't seem to require picking up on any comics and novels as well. I can wonder I would like repeated suggestions to go on to other works to really understand what I'm seeing, but I can still at least feel sorry for those caught like this. So far as the opinions of other people that I actually follow go, though, I suppose the "political" episodes concerned me a little because I knew some would find fault. There, though, things seem to go even deeper to the problem that one person's motherhood issue does not compute with another. At the same time, though, on thinking back to the second season and my impression that a certain number of episodes seemed to depend on "one-of-a-kind" new discoveries ("Geonosian queens!" "Nose worm zombies!" "Cloaking devices!" "Horror from the depths!"), in a fashion similar to my impression of "the easy way out" to keep a "science-fictional" story going, I still have the feeling that I prefer all the different kinds of stories in the third season.
I do wonder where things might go from here so long as the ratings keep up. Every once in a while, I did wonder if the third season was beginning to set up a potential split between master and apprentice, but this was far from the only way Anakin and Ahsoka were presented. At the same time, I continue to appreciate how this Clone Wars doesn't oppress us with attempts to demonstrate ahead of time what we do know will happen in the end, and that there's space for heroes to be complex rather than just "worthy" and "unworthy."