So, for the last month I’ve been binge-watching all 7 seasons (minus 6 or 8 boring episodes) of The Clone Wars after The Mandalorian‘s second season came to an end. The initial plan was to watch The Clone Wars to occupy my days leading to WandaVision but what started as a mere pastime as I waited for the next original Disney+ series I was super excited to see became somewhat a personal mission.
Over the last thirteen years thanks in huge part to Dave Filoni, LucasFilm has been giving us top-notch storytelling via its television shows. Yeah, everyone thought us Star Wars enthusiasts were lame for watching the Star Wars cartoons but it turned out the cartoons were giving us some of the best Star Wars content ever made. A fact proved every time something pivotal happened that helped connect the dots or expand upon the characters in the movies.
Binge-watching all 7 seasons of The Clone Wars for the first time has been a real joy for me, as I have had the privilege of carefully following the evolution of the characters which all lead to a rather tragic (and tear-inducing conclusion) in the final episodes of the series.
Ahsoka’s growth from Season 1-7 is, in my opinion, the best evolution of any character in Star Wars. We see her grow from young and arrogant to become someone wise, powerful, and more knowledgeable of the true ways of the Jedi than the actual Jedi who were willing to cast her out of the Order based on a lie.
What I found most fascinating was her slow evolution with Anakin and how she began to notice his overly aggressive ways. A lot of times, she had to tell him to back down from doing anything too rash or she would simply give him the side eye when she thought he was behaving too harshly during an interrogation. It was those subtle moments that give us, the viewer, a hint that she, like us, is seeing Anakin slowly become someone dangerous, unhinged, and unknowingly dark. Oh, it’s fascinating stuff.
Now that The Clone Wars has come to an end, I’m moving on to Revenge of the Sith which is undoubtedly going to leave me sobbing quite a bit towards the end of the film. And then after that, I hit Star Wars: Rebels, my personal favorite Star Wars television show so far (The Mandalorian will have to have a killer third season for me to finally rank it as my favorite Star Wars show) which is going to be so fun. I love that Ahsoka plays a part in it.
And then, of course, once I’m done with Star Wars: Rebels, it’s onto The Mandalorian, the show that gave us Ahsoka frickin’ Tano in live-action! Just…wow!
I thank you for reading and I hope you have a spectacular day. May the Force be with you, always!
Annlyel Online 
I haven’t done this yet, although it’s on my short list of things to think about in the near future. There’s no way I’m going to be able to do it in a few weeks like you just did, most likely, but it’s really quite interesting how Clone Wars captured these little hints. It’s almost like George was much better able to help capture this together with Filoni when he had an episodic show that lasted seven years than he did when he only had a handful of movies and Jake Lloyd and Hayden Christensen to work with. That said… it’s not rare that any creative endeavor doesn’t get better when you get a chance to take a second pass at it after you’ve already laid down a first effort, and fill in all the details you had to squeeze out of three two hour installments.
That said, I still think that the prequels are underrated, just because yeah… there’s a lot of pieces hidden in there that you just don’t see if you’re watching it at face value. I’m going to write a deep dive semi soon going into all the ways the prequels were not what they seemed, and the character explorations in them were actually a bit more subtle than we thought. You and I have had a few private discussions that inform what I’ll write, but there’s quite a bit to unpack in that, IMO.
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