After I finished the Last Season of The clone Wars yesterday I couldn't get it out of my mind; I mulled on it far into the night. Yes, the show actually kept me up. It continues to stay with me. That is not something I really expected. The tone was always weird to me, but Filoni has finally managed to take something I found middling and cement it as truly worthy.
My feelings for The Clone Wars has always been rather mixed. For every Mortis arc there was always some silly filler arc that just drove me up the wall. I get that the excuse for that is that the show is for kids, but children need to be challenged not pandered to. I get wanting to give them a break and whatnot, but man some of the filler here really challenged my patience. There was this light and cheery nonsense going on that seemed to completely miss the point of what the prequels were about. And honestly I resented that. I resented "happy" Anakin. He wasn't happy, nor did I find him particularly noble. You are only as noble as you are at your worst, and I knew he wasn't a noble guy. And, while I enjoyed the lost episodes that Netflix put up I found my problem wasn't addressed.
What I didn't realize was that I was being played for a long con. A very, very long con, which snapped shut on my soul. I did not anticipate this, at all, because Filoni was very careful to continue it right up until the last four episodes. The Bad Batch arc is very clearly a plug for the new show and, while enjoyable, certainly reads like one of the higher pieces of fluff The Clone Wars has produced. The Ahsoka Tano episodes are amongst the highest quality this show has ever produced, but I still found myself yearning for the more focused days of Rebels, where Filoni really hit his stride. I will reiterate my point: up until the last four episodes I did not see the point in making the season, and that annoyed me.
And then this happened:
This is the point. This is the point of Clone Wars. You've got all these helmets, and you know who these clones were! You spent seven freaking seasons with them! They painted their faces (I was going to change it to helmets but I'm keeping it) to show solidarity with Ahsoka and they're dead after being forced to betray their role model and there's Ahsoka, staring down at her lightsabers, the ones that Anakin made for her as a welcome back present...
And she drops them.
That hurt.
Seven seasons worth of memories, related and not, are in her thoughts. And in mine. Like, I never thought I'd be doing a trip down memory lane with this show, but I am now! All of these little moments of light which I originally found very corny are rendered bitter by all of this. There is no silver lining here. They fought and bled and sweated for a lie, a lie that they were prevented from seeing by the very institutions they stood upon. In the end, the very weaknesses of the show were turned into strengths. This isn't a meandering show, but one about the memories that were ruined because they were never real to begin with. If Anakin cared so much about Ahsoka why didn't he tell her the truth? She suspected it, along with the rest of the Jedi Order. It wasn't like everyone didn't know something was going on between Anakin and Padme! And he still continued to lie about it! He never confided his weaknesses, but built up a false image that completely betrays Ahsoka when she needs it the most. That look of confusion when she finds out that Count Dooku dies off screen just cements just how out of the loop Ahsoka and the Jedi truly were. Anakin always felt hollow to me in this show. Now I know that was on purpose. This last arc drops the awful truth of everything on Ahsoka, and she just crumbles in the face of it. At the end of the day she looks at everything she came from... and rejects it.
That leaves us with Anakin. There's a poignancy in that one of the first things he did was to check on Ahsoka. He holds up the lightsaber she left and looks at it. All the show went through my mind, again, with this scene. I found myself remembering different things than before. And that was more of the show that all of a sudden was beyond bitter to me. Here was the man himself, staring down at what may have been one of the most genuine moments in The Clone Wars. Anakin is a mechanic. He loves to build things, to fix them, to set them right. Holding that lightsaber he knows he has been rejected. Let the reader consider that later, when Sidious tells Vader he needs to find a khyber crystal to corrupt into a red blade, that Vader does not use the lightsaber Ahsoka left him. There's a whole arc about this in the comics, about him going to find someone else to murder and corrupt that crystal. But he leaves the one that Ahsoka abandoned unscathed. I don't know what he did with it. We may never know. But this is the solitary point of light of the whole show, at least for me. Anakin did not abandon Ahsoka, even when she did the same to him. To Anakin it was all real, even if he didn't quite understand the monstrosity of what he'd done to his friends. And that's the image that kept me thinking, far into the night. In a horrible dark way the below is an image of hope. Even here, at the beginning of his trek into darkness, Anakin couldn't give up, not fully.
No one is ever really gone.
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