Star Wars The Clone Wars Cad Bane Views

General Goods

“The Ziro episodes seem like a multi-room extension of the original Star Wars cantina scenes – an eccentrically comedic undercurrent to break from the steadier drumbeat of galactic conflict, but with enough sinister gravity to tug at the direction of the entire storyline,” says Burton. “Itg’s a sort of ‘Bizarro World’ funhouse mirror dimension, a wrong turn down a strange alley running along the mainstream militaristic highway. It’s a colorful flight of fancy and insanity, to lend a contrasting air of ‘normalcy’ to the central story construct. Zirot’s the ultimate spoiled brat, a bitterly resentful and unreasonably demanding megalomaniac – made even more threatening and duplicitous by his inability to inspire fearful obedience like his rival, Jabba.”

Image Credit: TM 2010 Lucasfilm Ltd. All Rights Reserved.Star Wars: The Clone Wars’ third season keeps taking us to some pretty unexpected places. I, for one, never imagined that an episode would hinge upon Anakin and Padmé’s party-planning skills. But that’s what “Evil Plans” offered up. Don’t worry, it was a lot cooler than that description would make out. Actually, “Evil Plans” worked for me because of three key factors—it saw the return of Cad Bane, it beautifully realized the “used future” concept of the original film, and it centered around C-3PO and R2-D2, the Laurel & Hardy of that Galaxy Far, Far Away. That C-3PO finally had his moment to shine—and believe me, he does shine with that gold plating—on The Clone Wars was particularly satisfying to me.

Oh, Bane, how you’ve been missed. Supervising Director Dave Filoni has compared our new favorite Duro bounty hunter to Angel Eyes from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (right down to an ingenious fake movie poster he included with the season 2 DVD set that has Bane striking a badass pose worthy of Lee Van Cleef), and I’m inclined to agree. On The Clone Wars, we’ve actually seen Bane do all the things we only imagined Boba Fett could do in the original trilogy.

As far as the animation goes, this may have actually been the most impressive episode of the season thus far, mostly because it reverted back to the “used future” aesthetic that distinguished Star Wars in the first place—the idea that this is a lived-in universe with dirt, grime, and rot, with little of the sterile, white-on-white décor that usually accompanies cinematic representations of “the future.” Was that a panhandler we glimpsed briefly in one shot of that Coruscant market?