Watching Clone Wars Season 4

I'm continuing to watch Clone Wars in small but regular drips, and wanted to write down some of my thoughts on season four after finishing it the other day and on how it relates to SWTOR.

You can tell that the show is coming into its own at this point, as like so many that start out with fairly shallow, mostly stand-alone episodes, it's slowly moving towards longer, more intricate multi-episode arcs.

Still, I thought the start of the season was fairly weak, as I didn't much care for the three-parter set on Mon Cala, which mostly seemed to be an exercise in showcasing some cool underwater visuals. (Though I thought the bad guy being a literal shark was kind of funny.) The episodes that followed weren't really much better either.

Things picked up with Darkness on Umbara, which is of course where the location for SWTOR's Crisis on Umbara flashpoint came from. What I didn't know was just how much visual inspiration the Bioware artists took from this season: For example there is a fight with some vehicles that look somewhat like giant flying centipedes, and after they're blown up and crash, the resulting wreckage looks eerily reminiscent of the sort of terrain that players have to navigate in the flashpoint. Also, while the plot on Umbara doesn't feature a train, another episode later in the season, Bounty, mostly takes place on one and again it looks quite similar to where players start out in the flashpoint in SWTOR. I just thought that was interesting.

Story-wise, the Umbaran arc was also the one I probably liked the most this season, though I was admittedly a little disappointed that the Jedi general just turned out to be evil, as I personally thought that it would have been more interesting if he'd really just been someone employing questionable methods and embodying a bad attitude on the Republic side, but I guess that would have been considered too morally complex for a kids' show.

One episode that really kind of shocked me was the one called Massacre, which lived up to its name as it's basically about the Separatists eradicating the Nightsisters. It's just one big battle episode, but both sides are nasty and you can't really root for either! I guess in the end Ventress is at least a slightly sympathetic character, but nonetheless I kept wondering to myself for most of the episode just what I was watching here...

Finally the end of the season brings the return of Darth Maul, something I'd wondered about ever since seeing the end of Solo, but I haven't been a huge fan so far. There isn't even any kind of explanation for why he's alive, he's just... there, insane and with weird mechanical spider legs as a replacement for his lower body. I don't know if it ever does get explained how he survived, but so far I haven't been too impressed.