“Star Wars: The Clone Wars” (8:30 a.m. Central Saturdays, Cartoon Network), which has switched from Friday nights to Saturday mornings with little fanfare for its fifth season, isn’t content to ease into a new batch of episodes. Picking up from the Season 4 finale, it jumps right back into showing Darth Maul and Savage Opress terrorizing the Outer Rim, with Obi-Wan and Adi Gallia in pursuit.
“Revival” is much more of an action episode than an informational episode, so while Maul — slightly more sane than the last time we saw him, although he still lacks the measured viciousness of “The Phantom Menace” — mutters about a plan, we don’t know exactly what he has in mind beyond training his brother and ruling the galaxy together (the usual Sith scheme). Composer Kevin Kiner does a nice job in the four-way fight scene between the two Jedi and two Sith, using a choir to call to mind John Williams’ “Duel of the Fates.”
The entertaining pirate Hondo Ohnaka pops up again, and although he’s mostly an opportunist (in fact, he even admires that quality in his men who betray him and join Maul), he opts to put up a fight rather than be assimilated onto Maul’s team. This makes him an unlikely ally of Obi-Wan’s, and I like the banter and begrudging respect between pirate and Jedi.
Interestingly, “The Clone Wars” introduces a continuity error here (technically, it completes a continuity error) that’s the opposite of the infamous Even Piell timeline rewrite. While Piell was killed off on “The Clone Wars” prior to his death in the Expanded Universe, Adi Gallia is killed in this episode after she was killed off in the EU. Having been offed (unofficially) by General Grievous and now (officially) by Savage Opress, you can at least say she didn’t go out like a chump.
While we don’t know exactly what Maul is up to, the entire Jedi Council is at least aware that he’s out there. In “Revival’s” final scene, Palpatine casually dismisses the whole thing as being Obi-Wan’s personal obsession. But then we see him smirking in his office. It makes a viewer wonder what Palpatine thinks of all this. My guess is that Maul’s return is not part of his grand plan, but he’s OK with it as it’ll be one more thing to distract and wear down the Jedi.
Although I don’t mind the return of Maul or the introduction of Opress, one bothersome element is that they were both formed by Nightsister magic. Opress got his strength through magic and Maul got his mechanical legs through magic. I like that when each of them loses a limb in this episode (which is no less violent than we’re used to, despite the show’s switch to mornings), green mist emerges from their wounds. The writers may have cheated a bit in ratcheting up these Sith’s powers, but at least they didn’t forget how they got there.
Next week, it looks like we’ll take a break from the rampaging Sith brothers for a while as we follow Obi-Wan, Anakin and Ahsoka on another mission to help some not-too-military-savvy villagers against a Separatist uprising — a standard “Clone Wars” plot, but I expect some twists. And as the season goes forward, I’ve heard we’ll get a little more Ahsoka-and-Lux, plus more Sidious. It should be the usual fun ride.
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