Star Wars Month 2 - The Mandalorian Season 1 Episodes 7-8

 

We’re back with Star Wars Month 2 and our last look at the Mandolorian, how will this season end?

Star Wars Month 2 - Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order

At the turn of the 2010s, there was a belief amongst game developers that single player games were a dying art. This in spite of games like Uncharted and the Batman: Arkham series doing great sales-wise despite being single player (Arkham Origins did have a multiplayer component, but we’re not mentioning that here) even my favourite franchise, Ratchet and Clank had a couple of multiplayer titles.

EA Games, a company that should immediately be followed by the Darth Vader theme, have held the license to Star Wars titles for a while, though at time of writing no longer exclusively. And whilst they’ve had success, the disaster that was the launch of Battlefront II in 2017 had to have an impact on the trend toward multiplayer. Follow that one with the critical and/or commercial successes of the Ratchet and Clank remake, God of War, Horizon Zero Dawn, Red Dead Redemption and, of course, Spider-man, all single-player games from the latter half of the 2010s.

Anyway, Star Wars Month

EA had shut down previous efforts to create a single player Star Wars title, focusing primarily on its two Battlefront games, yes EA’s Star Wars exclusivity period had 3 titles in total which is kinda pathetic from one of the largest video game developers out there with multiple studios at their beckon call.

OK, so Star Wars: Fallen order was released in 2019, an in-canon Star Wars story taking place between episodes 3 and 4 because that’s where every in-canon Star Wars story with original characters takes place, until the Mandalorian came along anyway.

First thing of note is the game’s utilisation of the Unreal Engine. I hear there had at a time been a push from EA for their games to utilise their internally developed Frostbite Engine, as had been used in the Battlefront titles. It was designed for FPS shooters and was a poor fit for a lot of games, Anthem suffered for this.

Unreal Engines have housed a wide variety of games from the Arkham Series to Gears of War and from Crash 4 to Kingdom Hearts. So, a cinematic game that utilises set-piece moments isn’t unfamiliar territory to them and they’d likely have a deal of support building their own framework.

But let’s get to brass taxes and dive into the game itself, I’ll start with the story.

Star Wars Month 2 - The Mandalorian Season 1 Episodes 5-6

We’re back with our 3^rd look at season 1 of the Mandalorian, it’s been a pretty strong show thusfar, can it continue?

Star Wars Month 2 - The Clone Wars Season 7 Arc 2 - Ahsoka

 It’s Star Wars Month

The rest of the 8 episodes of this series focus around the Journey of Ahsoka Tano after leaving the Jedi Order back in season 5. Her appearance as Fulcrum in Star Wars Rebels showed that she survived order 66, and has a new pair of lightsabres, white. The explanation for those came in the Ahsoka Novel, which stated that she’d won a battle with an inquisitor, unarmed, I might add.

The book also I believe introduced the concept that a sith lightsaber is red because the Khyber crystal undergoes a process known as bleeding, where you channel your hatred into it, I believe there may also be murder involved. This has made its way into the comics, in one of the recent Darth Vader runs, but I don’t think Japan got that memo in Visions. Now, the canonicity of the novel is not necessarily set in stone, as the final story arc will contradict its opening but I choose to believe until I hear otherwise that only the beginning isn’t canon and what happens from there lines up with the show.

They did this again, contradicting the original Caleb Dume origin from Greg Weisman’s Kanan comic when he shows up in the Bad Batch. But back on topic, one thing you could see from the Rebels s2 finale was that Ahsoka and Darth Maul had history. And novel implied that Ahsoka was on Mandalore at the time of Order-66 and had just beaten Maul. Now some of this has been retconned by the upcoming episodes but the core ideas are still there.

We also have some fallout on Maul’s side, after his ascension to the Throne of Mandalore, Bo-Katan and several other prominent members of Deathwatch abandoned him, forming a splinter cell of their own. This 4-parter begins the setup that will lead to the siege of Mandalore and the fallout there.

Star Wars Month 2 - The Mandalorian Season 1 Episodes 3-4

It’s Star Wars Month 2

We continue with the Mandalorian, what do the relics of the Empire want with a force-sensitive child? Let’s dig into episodes 3-4 and find out.

Star Wars Month 2 - The Clone Wars Season 7 Arc 1 - The Bad Batch

It’s Star Wars Month 2

One of my reviews from the original Star Wars Month was The Clone Wars. Whilst season 5 had a good ending and season 6 sewed a few seeds for Revenge of the Sith, there were definitely some loose ends that could be picked up on. There were a few more stories that were in production but not completed, but were released as lost stories online.

There were 2 main stories released as such, the Crisis on Utapau, featuring the location where Obi-Wan fought Grievous in revenge of the Sith, featuring the debut of Anakin’s revised hairstyle to match the aforementioned film and was the first time I’m aware of that they mentioned the plan to harvest Khyber Crystals, something that’s referenced repeatedly now. The other was the Bad Batch, which we’re going to cover as it was remastered for the Disney+ Season.

Other works related of note include Son of Dathomir which sees the revelation that Darth Maul is in fact the son of Mother Talzin and his capture at the end of the s5 episode Lawless was part of plan to finally end her, which unfortunately does happen. Something else that happens is Maul’s crime syndicate starts backing out after facing repeated separatist attacks, not sure if that part’s still canon given what happens in his story this season.

Another is Dark Disciple, which was released as a novel, probably would’ve been the show’s most ambitious storyline featuring another attempt to assassinate Count Dooku by Asajj Ventress, this time with Jedi Quilan Vos. Ventress dies in this storyline although there was some ambiguity there if they wanted to bring her back.

As for Mandalore, a lot of it was up in the air, but it was revealed in the Ahsoka novel, and hinted at during Rebels that Ahsoka was directly involved in a Siege of Mandalore by the Republic and we find out in Rebels that she saw Anakin not long before the events of the film. Ahsoka’s future in the Clone Wars was less certain, with one rough-cut animated scene of her crashing a speeder bike.

OK, but let’s get to business, I don’t know what the rights deal was with Cartoon Network, who originally hosted the show but evidently, it’s been resolved as all of The Clone Wars is available on Disney+, and, exclusive to that streaming service, a final season of 12 episodes to cap off the show’s run. 12 episodes is not massive so a few stories that were planned still didn’t make the cut. Cad Bane, a long-running antagonist of the show, wouldn’t show up again until The Bad Batch spinoff show. There was an episode planned with him and Boba Fett. Plus, we aren’t getting adaptations of Son of Dathomir or Dark Disciple. Crisis on Utapau will also remain in its current form, no upgrade for that one.

Were these episodes always planned out to be the way they were, I don’t know. Maul’s control over the underworld post the war was only ever established in Solo and I think that may have caused them to backpedal on Maul’s underworld crumbling like it was doing in Son on Dathomir. But one episode that was planned from the beginning was The Bad Batch, why did this episode get a remaster, well because it has rampant spinoff potential. As of writing this, The Bad Batch has had one season and has been renewed for a second. It’s actually occupying a fairly unique period in Star Wars history, the stage of transition between the Republic and the Empire. Most stories in this period begin with the Empire fully realised.

But I’ve just spent a whole page of my review with preamble and usually this bit is only a line or two, let’s take a look at the first of these stories and see how Star Wars bids farewell to the Clone Wars for the third time.

Star Wars Month 2 - The Mandalorian Season 1 Episodes 1-2

It’s Star Wars Month 2

With the launch of Disney Plus just shy of 2 years ago, there’s been a lot of Star Wars content dropped for the platform. We’ll be looking at 2 of the primary series they’ve done as well as one of the biggest Star Wars games that isn’t an MMO.

So let’s start with what’s arguably the most popular of the Star Wars series so far, the Mandalorian. 

Set between the times of the main and sequel trilogies, we get to explore a time not heavily covered by anything other than expansion comics. This gives them a lot of free reign and with Dave Filoni at the helm, you know that’ll be put to use, let’s take a look at episodes 1 and 2 of season 1 and see where it takes us.