Siege of Mandalore
The Siege of Mandalore is the collective name used to refer to the four-part series finale of the American 3D animated science fiction television series Star Wars: The Clone Wars. The story arc is composed of the episodes "Old Friends Not Forgotten", "The Phantom Apprentice", "Shattered", and "Victory and Death", which are respectively the ninth, tenth, eleventh, and twelfth episodes of the seventh season of the series.
The series chronicles various events in the Clone Wars, a galactic conflict between the Galactic Republic and the Separatist Alliance that takes place during the Star Wars prequel trilogy. It primarily follows Jedi Knight Anakin Skywalker and his closest associates as they seek to help the Republic win the war. The arc takes place before and concurrently with the events of the film Revenge of the Sith, and follows Ahsoka Tano and Rex as they seek to liberate Mandalore from Maul, who had occupied it. After Maul's capture, Ahsoka and Rex are then forced to deal with the effects of Order 66.
All four episodes were released weekly on the streaming service Disney+ in April and May 2020. The arc received critical acclaim, with reviewers finding it emotionally resonant and a worthy conclusion to the series.
Plot
"Old Friends Not Forgotten"
and Bo-Katan Kryze contact Anakin Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi, asking them for help in apprehending Darth Maul in his new hideout on Mandalore. While Obi-Wan is apprehensive, Anakin and the 501st give Ahsoka a warm welcome until news arrives that General Grievous and the Separatists are attacking Coruscant. Upon Anakin's suggestion, Rex and part of the 501st accompanies Ahsoka to Mandalore, forcing Maul's loyalists under Gar Saxon into retreat. Bo-Katan apprehends Prime Minister Almec, while Ahsoka follows a trail into the city's tunnel network, only to walk right into Maul's trap."The Phantom Apprentice"
Ahsoka faces off against Maul, who mentions Darth Sidious before escaping. Ahsoka relays this to Obi-Wan, who says he had inferred from the recently killed Count Dooku that Sidious is the name of the Sith Lord who orchestrated the Clone Wars. Obi-Wan stresses that Maul must be taken alive as he may be their only chance to learn more about Darth Sidious. The captured Almec mentions that Maul had hoped to lure Anakin to Mandalore, but is assassinated by Gar before he can reveal why. As Bo-Katan's and Rex's forces lead a final assault against Maul's Mandalorians, Ahsoka confronts Maul again, who reveals that Sidious has engineered the destruction of both the Galactic Republic and the Jedi and asks Ahsoka to join him to stop Sidious. When she demands to know his intentions with Anakin, Maul claims that Sidious wants to make him his new apprentice, and that he had hoped to kill Anakin before this happens. Refusing to believe him, Ahsoka fights Maul above the city, where she rescues him from falling to his death. She then leaves Maul to be captured by clone troopers, despite his frantic warnings that everyone will soon die."Shattered"
With the siege of Mandalore over, Ahsoka and Rex prepare to take Maul before the Jedi Council on Coruscant. Mace Windu and Yoda contact Ahsoka via hologram and reveal that Obi-Wan has tracked Grievous down to Utapau, indicating that the war may soon be over. On their way to Coruscant, however, Ahsoka senses Anakin falling to the dark side and helping Darth Sidious to kill Windu, moments before Sidious executes Order 66, which brands all Jedi as traitors to the Republic and orders their deaths. As Ahsoka's clone troopers, including Rex, suddenly turn on her, she is forced to escape. Rex resists the order just long enough to mention the incident with Fives, allowing Ahsoka to learn about the inhibitor chips. She releases Maul to create a distraction, then subdues and captures Rex. With the help of three astromech droids, Ahsoka removes the inhibitor chip from his brain, restoring his free will."Victory and Death"
As Ahsoka and Rex try to escape from the cruiser, Maul destroys its hyperdrive, causing the vessel to drop out of hyperspace and into a nearby moon's gravitational field. Forced to fight their way through the clones, Ahsoka tries to prevent Maul from getting away in their shuttle but lets him get away after choosing to help Rex. Just barely clearing the doomed ship, Ahsoka and Rex escape to the moon, where they respectfully bury the clones and Ahsoka discards her lightsabers. Two years later, Anakin, now as Darth Vader, arrives on the moon and recovers Ahsoka's main lightsaber from the wrecked cruiser.Production
Development and writing
All four episodes that make up the story arc were written by Star Wars: The Clone Wars supervising director Dave Filoni. Following the purchase of Lucasfilm by The Walt Disney Company, the series was cancelled in March 2013 following the release of the fifth season on Cartoon Network, and midway through the production of the sixth of eight planned seasons. This left unreleased episodes in various stages of production, from completely finished episodes to episodes that were still in early development. The completed episodes were released onto Netflix on March 7, 2014, as a truncated thirteen-episode sixth season, subtitled The Lost Missions. Included in the unreleased episodes were plans of a series finale involving Ahsoka Tano and Rex fighting Darth Maul during the events of Revenge of the Sith, which had been written, originally by Matt Michnovetz, at the time of the series' cancellation. Despite the arc not having actually been released, Lucasfilm considered the events of the arc to have occurred within the Star Wars universe, affecting subsequent Star Wars media that was created during the following years.It was announced on July 19, 2018, at San Diego Comic-Con that The Clone Wars would return for a seventh, final season. The seventh season was made up of twelve episodes organized into three four-episode story arcs, all of which had been in development prior to the series' cancellation. The third arc, comprising the ninth, tenth, eleventh, and twelfth episodes of the seventh season, and the final four episodes of The Clone Wars, was the originally written series finale. George Lucas, the creator of The Clone Wars, was involved with the initial plans for the arc prior to the series' cancellation, but was uninvolved in work that was undertaken following the series' revival. Out of a desire to keep to Lucas's vision for the franchise, Filoni discussed series concepts and ideas with Lucas, and Lucas provided comments on the episodes of the final season as they were being produced. According to Maul voice actor Sam Witwer, the four episodes that compose the arc were designed as a four-part series finale that "is meant to be seen in its entirety together", as a movie. The arc was written to be able to be viewed completely standalone from any other episodes.
Substantial care was taken to ensure that the arc maintained continuity with existing works in the franchise. Despite the events of the Siege of Mandalore arc intersecting with Revenge of the Sith, Filoni avoided repeating the events of the film, and ensured that they were almost entirely offscreen, despite them deeply affecting the events of the arc. Instead, he chose to focus on characters that were not in the prequel trilogy, such as Ahsoka and Rex. This was to ensure that the characters and plotline of the film remained intact, as well as out of a lack "of desire to tell any of those scenes necessarily again". He described it as "a challenge not getting something chronologically out of order", particularly for managing character knowledge of the secret identity of Palpatine, who does not physically appear in the arc but is manipulating its events. During the process of writing the novel Ahsoka, author E. K. Johnston was instructed to avoid writing action sequences set during the siege of Mandalore in order to avoid contradicting plans for the story arc in the series, which had, unbeknownst to her, been renewed. Although the 2003 miniseries Star Wars: Clone Wars is no longer canon to the franchise, in keeping with the original intent of the newer series to not supersede the miniseries, reference is made to Shaak Ti's failure to protect Palpatine, an event which is depicted in the miniseries. Following the series' initial cancellation in 2013, Filoni co-created a new series called Star Wars Rebels, set years after the events of The Clone Wars, in which characters prominently featured in the arc appear. The integration of The Clone Wars characters in Rebels affected how they were utilized in the Siege of Mandalore arc. Filoni felt that it was unfortunate that the appearance of the characters in Rebels may have caused the arc to have reduced tension, as the audience would know that those characters would survive.
"Old Friends Not Forgotten" was directed by Saul Ruiz. Filoni stated that due to Anakin Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi prominently appearing in the prequel films, Ahsoka and Rex, the two principal original characters, were the main characters of the series, and that "there was a responsibility to tell the end of their story and then hand off Anakin and Obi-Wan to their proper conclusion, which is in the film Revenge of the Sith". He felt that an important part of the story was properly handling the emotional weight of the reunion and parting of Anakin and Ahsoka, who had been separated since the fifth-season episode "The Wrong Jedi", within the allotted time of the episode. He stated that as Ahsoka had gained experiences away from the Jedi Order, she had changed, while Anakin wished for things to return to how they were before. The cast and crew of the episode noted that key parts of the reunion included Ahsoka's reaction to the clones, who had painted their helmets to match her colors, and Anakin offering her her old lightsabers, which was not part of the original script for the arc and was added after the series' renewal.
"The Phantom Apprentice" was directed by Nathaniel Villanueva. The lighting in the initial confrontation between Maul and Ahsoka was designed so that Ahsoka was brightly lit and Maul walked out of the darkness, to create a sense of Ahsoka being trapped. The creators of the episode used a standard Star Wars trope, in which the villain asks the hero to join them, but modified it so that unlike in most instances of the trope, in this case the villain has the better plan. Sam Witwer, Maul's voice actor, stated that unlike most animation voice acting, in which he usually exaggerates due to not being able to act facially, he and other cast members were asked to do a more restrained "film read", which was an influence from Filoni's work on the live-action television series The Mandalorian. Several events from Revenge of the Sith were referenced throughout the episode to help ground the arc within the film's timeline. The title of the episode was designed to be applicable to both Maul and Ahsoka, as former apprentices of the Sith and Jedi, respectively, as well as Anakin, as the secret apprentice of Palpatine, unbeknownst to both himself and the other Jedi.
The creators of the episode felt that unlike the lightsaber duel between Obi-Wan Kenobi and Maul in the Rebels episode "Twin Suns", which was very brief, the duel between Ahsoka and Maul needed to be big, and that it was very important to make it among the best lightsaber fights in the series. To this end, Ray Park, Maul's physical actor for The Phantom Menace, was brought in to perform motion capture for the character. Park devised a new fighting style for Maul, rather than reuse the style he used in The Phantom Menace, to reflect Maul having aged and gained robotic legs in the interim period. Keith Kellogg, the animation supervisor for the episode, explained that many of Park's mannerisms were implemented in the animation for Maul, and that the motion capture data then had to be altered to match the animation style of the series. Park's fighting was sometimes so fast that he would break the motion capture tracking. Opposite Park, stunt performer Lauren Mary Kim performed motion capture for Ahsoka. According to Filoni, she "brought a lot of the speed and quickness that we needed to portray this character that had previously only been done by our animation team".
"Shattered" was directed by Saul Ruiz. According to Ashley Eckstein, the voice of Ahsoka, the episode's title reflects Ahsoka's worldview being shattered. The timeline of the episode coincides with Order 66, an event that occurs in the film Revenge of the Sith and affects events in the episode. Featuring Order 66 in the series was seen by the creators as an inevitable outcome, so they had been considering how to incorporate the event for a long time. Filoni described the problem of having to portray the event differently to its portrayal in Revenge of the Sith, as the audience of The Clone Wars saw the clone troopers as real characters. He stated that the key was "about understanding that they are in a situation where they don't have free will. tried through every method possible, visually, musically, color-wise to show that they became somebody else". Various elements of the scenes in which the clones are hunting Rex and Ahsoka are framed to evoke the Empire, including the lighting and use of helmets. The use of droids as allies for the main characters was also reflective of the role reversal of the Galactic Republic, as battle droids were the primary force of their enemy, the Separatists. Filoni used Ahsoka and Rex reciting the catchphrase "I am one with the Force and the Force is with me" from Rogue One to display the bond between the characters and provide an explanation of how Ahsoka is able to remove Rex's inhibitor chip for those that may not have seen a previous arc in The Clone Wars.
"Victory and Death" was directed by Nathaniel Villanueva. The original plan for Ahsoka's escape from the clone troopers involved the clones running into what appeared to be a forest, only for the "trees" they thought they were running past to be revealed to be the legs of huge wolves. Ahsoka would then escape on the back of a wolf, as a reference to the character San from Princess Mononoke, who was the inspiration for Ahsoka's original character design. This idea was eventually discarded for being self-indulgent. The more nuanced portrayal of the clone troopers in The Clone Wars informed the decision to have Ahsoka attempt to not kill the clones that she was fighting. During filming, the voice cast had to be reminded not to allow their emotion from filming the series finale to affect their portrayals of the characters.
The final scene of "Victory and Death" involved a time skip, jumping forward to Darth Vader finding the destroyed cruiser and seeing what Ahsoka and Rex left behind, including the memorial to the clones and Ahsoka's lightsaber. The conception of having the final scene involving Vader had always been around, according to Filoni. The scene was designed to emphasize Vader's humanity, as the character had been portrayed as a hero and one of the leads throughout almost the entirety of The Clone Wars. As such, his eyes are visible through the helmet, just as they were in the original Star Wars film, and Vader's picking up Ahsoka's lightsaber is meant to mirror Anakin giving it to her earlier in the arc. The ending was changed through the course of production to ensure that Ahsoka and Rex's story was centered, as Anakin's story had previously been told in the prequel trilogy. Multiple versions of the way the morai landed were tested before settling on the version in the final episode. The final scene was also designed to be devoid of color, to contrast the clone troopers, who often colorfully displayed individuality, and the all-white stormtroopers.
Various aspects of animation had changed between the series' original airing and the revival. The motion capture that was successfully used in the lightsaber duel in "The Phantom Apprentice" had previously been attempted for the third-season episode "Wookiee Hunt", but the process was too heavy and much of the footage went unused. The crew's experience utilizing previsualization on The Mandalorian, as well as technical advancements at Lucasfilm, particularly in its visual effects studio ILM, allowed the use of the technology. The cinematography for the final season was meant to emulate the cameras used for the original Star Wars film, which had previously been done for Rebels and Star Wars Resistance, but not previous seasons of The Clone Wars. An unexpectedly high percentage of assets from the first six seasons of the series had to be remade due to being substantially lower-quality than new assets. Overall, the technological improvements and additional crew experience did not make the animation work easier, but it did open up new animation possibilities.