Nerdist’s Amy Ratcliffe spoke to Star Wars: The Clone Wars showrunner Dave Filoni on the end of The Clone Wars.
Nerdist: Obviously you came into this last season with a lot of fan expectations and things you wanted to wrap up. How did you finalize which arcs would be told in this final season of The Clone Wars?
Dave Filoni: It was tricky. It’s really a combination of several things at play there. One of them was definitely that some of the episodes you saw were very far along in the pipeline. So, for example, the Bad Batch pipeline was just about ready to go into animation. It wasn’t animated when we shut down before, but it was right there. So it seemed natural to do those episodes. Also, I felt very strongly that we needed to have a clone-centric arc to remind the audience or to bring a new audience in that maybe hadn’t watched The Clone Wars before. Since we were going to be on Disney+, [I wanted] to familiarize them with these characters and who they are and what they’re like. That was an important arc to do.
The second arc was also one that was in production at various levels, but I hadn’t felt that we’d actually nailed the story yet. It went through a lot of different revisions to reach its final form with Trace and Rafa. And that story arc was important because you have to frame Ahsoka’s story and her ultimate ending with what the world is like outside the one she knows. How is this Clone War affecting regular people? What’s the impact on that? And she needs that perspective in order to even consider going back into the world of the Jedi and the combat and the fighting because she has to understand what she’s fighting for and what she represents. She needs a point of view that’s not her own.
It helps frame what was underlying all the things that, frankly Barriss Offee was bringing up, and all the things that episode arc was bringing up. If you look at the episode arc where she leaves, there are protesters outside the Jedi Temple. Letta Turmond is saying that the Jedi aren’t what you think they are anymore. And so you’re actually getting that point of view shored up more.
Then of course, really the whole exercise for me was about getting to do the Siege of Mandalore and the ending. But I think people wonder, and it is hard to pick 12 episodes. We have many episodes, a lot of which probably weren’t, I would argue, as important to those specific arcs of getting to the Siege of Mandalore.
The one other arc I’d considered doing was explaining how Darth Maul got away from Sidious. I felt that that was going to be important, but I couldn’t fit it into the arcs and I didn’t want to jam it in there. And we had done it as a comic book release, and I was really appreciative of Dark Horse for doing that. So I thought, ‘Well, the information is out there for people that want to do that deep dive.’ I just have to tell the story in a way that explains who he is and that he’s loose. And I actually added him to the Trace and Rafa arc. He was not a part of that in its original inception. In its original version neither Bo-Katan nor Maul appeared in that arc, which I think people would find a little surprising.
But again stories evolve, and they change, and you figure out what their form is. And the thing that I can definitely say is that because some time went by, because I learned a lot more and my team learned a lot more—we learned so much making Star Wars Rebels, making Star Wars Resistance and my additional knowledge gained on The Mandalorian—The Clone Wars benefited from all of that and was a much better show at the end for it. And I do see the Siege of Mandalore as my final statement with the team on our work for the past 15 years.
I want to go back to the clones for a moment because the final scene really paid homage to them. They existed and died because of Palpatine. It felt tragic, and this last moment kind of emphasized the pointless nature of the war. So why was it important to you to show that kind of tragedy of their existence at the end?
For me, the scene is actually one about—it is a tragedy, but you have two characters showing a tremendous amount of respect to them. And I had a very different situation to deal with than Revenge of the Sith because I had a generation of kids that grew up watching the clones as heroes, that love Rex, Cody, Gree, Fives, Echo, Tech, you go on down the list. They have a real relationship with those characters as their friends and heroes. The idea that Ahsoka could be very blunt about things and say, ‘Well now they’re trying to kill me so I should cut them down,’ doesn’t really work for me. I thought it wouldn’t work for her. It’s about not compromising her value of who she is.
For these clones, it’s about understanding that they are in a situation where they don’t have free will. I tried through every method possible, visually, musically, color-wise to show that they became somebody else. The going sentiment in the Republic is that they ended up at war and their civilization was threatened because they were weak, because Valorum was weak, because they didn’t have a standing army. The Jedi get framed, of course, for starting an army. But one thing that the people largely come out of it thinking is that the Republic needs to work from strength. That’s why democracy dies to thunderous applause and they elect an emperor who they think will keep them safe.
So the clones are seen as people that are putting down an uprising by many people in the Republic. The Jedi are basically accused of staging a coup. To the clones, that’s believable to a degree because the evidence is there. I mean, what was Mace Windu going to do when he walked into the Chancellor’s office? At first, he goes to arrest him and then he decides he’s going to kill him. So they’re in a really compromised situation.
Luckily that part of the story was told by George. I also have to consider when writing those episodes what George did—that’s the truth of it all, and I’m not trying to change anything of that. I am trying to highlight certain things and bring, not a different light, but show things from the point of view of different characters while maintaining the film, which I love very much obviously. And I had to tell the personal story of these clones. It was one of the editors who brought up that Rex and Jesse know each other really well. They’ve been in this series the whole time. And that’s why we added that line where Rex makes a personal plea and says, ‘Look, we’ve known each other a long time. If we do this, we’ll be the ones that are traitors, not her.’
And so you have to get all these points of view across and people still do what they do, but the idea that Ahsoka and Rex, to a degree, can be selfless. They can still go and honor these people who are friends, even though they tried to kill them. You’ve got to reach a point of: do they forgive them? I think on some level they do. It doesn’t justify their actions. They wish it was otherwise. Rex is torn up. He knows what’s going on. He’s trying to be direct with Ahsoka when he says, ‘They don’t really care, they’re going to kill us.’ You see that he’s really torn because he doesn’t want to do it.
There are very complex issues by the end of it, because it is a tragic situation and the heroes do largely lose, but the one thing that they can’t lose is their integrity and their morality and who they both were. That needs to survive and stay intact because then there is actually a possible future. If they’ve compromised themselves and prove to be no better, then they’ve really lost. It’s tough stuff, but it’s all these things that we were taught in the show and George believed to be important.
We got to see Anakin and Ahsoka come together again. And that was special because that doesn’t happen again until Rebels, as far as we know. Anakin seemed so happy to see her, and Ahsoka was very focused on taking care of business. We know Anakin struggles with attachment. Do you view how he interacted with Ahsoka here as him being a little bit better about that? Like this is the time he actually did let go.
[Laughs] No, not at all. No. The way I wrote that, and I didn’t know how people would feel about it, but a lot of when I write Star Wars, I’ve tried to relate it to everyday life and experiences you have growing up. Taking away all the big politics and things going on in the Clone War, and the Jedi, and the Sith, and the dark side, and light side, it’s just simply to me that Ahsoka’s a person that had a big falling out with her friends before she left school for summer. And her best friend, her older brother is like, ‘Well I get why you’re angry at the group, but I’m still part of the group. It’s not difficult for me.’ And she’s like, ‘That’s fine, I’m just doing my own thing.’ And so she goes off all summer. She’s got different job, and she runs with a different crowd, and she learns a lot of different things across the tracks that she maybe wasn’t aware of where she was living.
It was always amazing to me growing up how much things would change in one summer. In your adult life, that’s a very short amount of time. But [when you’re younger] it’s actually—that perspective, it feels like a looong time, the summer. People, you come back and you see them at school, and they’re very different and they’ve had experiences that you don’t know about. I used that as a lot of my reference point for writing the scenes where she comes back and she’s a little bit more standoffish. She’s actually trying to signal to him: things are different, like I respect you, but things just aren’t going to be the same. Where Anakin is just driven that things are going to be the same. [He thinks] with any luck, this will all be over, and everything will be back.
Read the interview in full here.
