Star Wars: Clone Wars Season 7 Episode 12 - 4 Ups & 3 Downs From "Victory And Death"
Twelve years later, Clone Wars has finally ended, but how does the finale stack up?
Throughout its final story arc, Star Wars: The Clone Wars kept raising the bar. Each episode seemed impossible to top, with the stakes skyrocketing, the plot twisting, and the characters' stories culminating.
Could the series finale, Victory and Death, live up to the impossible expectations?
Sort of.
Until its final scene, Victory and Death feels more like just another episode of Clone Wars rather than its final outing. The self-contained adventure follows the cliffhanger ending of the previous episode, Shattered, as Ahsoka Tano and Captain Rex fight to survive Order 66 on their transport. Not only do they have to deal with their former clone allies, now hellbent on following Palpatine's nefarious order to kill all the Jedi, but Ahsoka has released Maul from his prison, and the ever untrustworthy ex-Darth has a few final tricks up his sleeve.
While Victory and Death is a much better series finale than the Skywalker Sagas, it still lacks the punch that made the previous three episodes great. Clone Wars ends on a high note, but a slight step down.
Here are four ups and three downs from Star Wars: The Clone Wars, Victory and Defeat.
7. Down - A Self-Contained Story
Part of the joy of Star Wars, both the main series films as well as Clone Wars, is getting to explore new and exciting worlds, literally. In almost every episode of Clone Wars, they visit a new planet and discover new natives, landscapes, and traditions.
So naturally, the final episode of Clone Wars takes place...entirely on a transport ship?
This is not inherently a flaw, since Ahsoka and Rex's escape from the ship drives the entire plot, but the episode seems to forget about the bigger world. At no point do they mention any other location or event in the Star Wars universe, making it feel like the Ahsoka's transport-ship universe.
Obviously, the episode needs to be somewhat self-contained so as not to coincide with the simultaneous plot of Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith, but the previous episodes worked well when they explicitly set themselves around the third prequel. This episode still feels parallel with Revenge of the Sith, but it never intersects with it.