Back to the Clone Wars: Storm Over Ryloth

[krpalmer]

When I started rewatching the first episode of the "Ryloth trilogy" towards the end of the first season set of Clone Wars, I was contemplating I might even be able to sum all three episodes up in one single post, easing myself out of commenting on every one of them. That thought sort of fell by the wayside, though, when I got to the little documentary about "Storm Over Ryloth" and Dave Filoni (his stubble not quite so heavy as in some of the documentaries just before) explained that one particular tactical trick (rolling the Republic ship so the launching Y-wings and bridge have cover) came straight from Timothy Zahn's "Heir to the Empire." After having worked my way through ambiguous feelings about lengths seeming to be taken to draw links between Clone Wars and the old movies, seeing a connection made with the piece of the "Expanded Universe" I remember most of all as the piece everyone online wanted everything else to live up, and have an impression that it at last became the piece everything else was being modelled on, was somehow ambiguous all over again.

I do have to be honest and admit it might have been just a matter of thinking there wasn't such a gulf between the "Zahn trilogy" and the books that began to multiply afterwards as people online seemed to be insisting. Over the years, my thoughts may even have become a little more clear on the subject; I've wondered if that first trilogy had such a good handle on the characters from the movies as everyone seemed to believe, if its own characters appealed to me quite as much as they seemed to everyone else. That leaves me wishing again I'd managed to see the critique I heard fernwithy had written after the message board she had posted it on had broken down. Still, in the context of the episode itself, the tactical trick seemed to have value in itself; it wasn't a springboard to showing how species seemed to have set reactions to particular situations, possibly downplaying the possibility of individualism in them even as it built Grand Admiral Thrawn up. (So far as that goes, I was interested in this particular episode's enemy commander.)

Comments

[lazypadawan.livejournal.com]

^^LOL!

Anyway, I never knew that was based off the first set of Thrawn books. Interesting.

[krpalmer.livejournal.com]

I must admit I had been thinking all day you had found the post itself somehow amusing, although now that I've deleted the incoherent spam comment above both these comments may be a little cryptic... Still, it kept me from worrying too much about the sudden thought that there might be more of a resemblance than I'd like to admit between having an uncertain reaction at something in Clone Wars being drawn from "Heir to the Empire" and those who foam over at the youthful Anakin appearing at the end of Return of the Jedi, which I guess is because they don't like their noses being rubbed in "the new Star Wars movies exist."