What a piece of garbage

The phrase "worst piece of shit ever made" is bandied about all too often these days, but the TV show Star Wars: The Clone Wars is beyond the pale. I finally got around to getting it off my DVR tonight, and it's just awful. It's cliche to criticize George Lucas' godawful abortions these days, but this is horrible even for him. This is sort of like the George W. Bush presidency: Every single decision made in the production of this is about 180° wrong from what I would have made; so many that I can't even begin to address them all. I know the show is aimed more towards children, but it must've been profoundly stupid children in this case.

The technology is stupid--why would you send robot astronauts to cut open escape pods manually, one at a time, when you've just shown you can blow up entire ships with your new superweapon? The tactics are even more retarded--why do they send in inept, unshielded, cannon-fodder droids and hold squads of shielded, advanced rollers in reserve? Fuck, they've even got ninja droids that show up a few episodes in. And General Grievous is supposed to be the most bad-ass general in the galaxy--but this dimbulb is incompetent in every conceivable way. The animation would have looked cheesy on Saturday-morning cartoons ten years ago. The physics are arbitrary-- The writing is insultingly vapid--the comic-relief droid dialog is cringe-inducing. They appear to be following the Jar-Jar-Binks-just-stepped-in-poop-oh-look-that-animal-just-farted school of comedy. Holy shit: I just wrote that, and literally five minutes later there was an actual fart joke. High brow.

Droid one: "I've never seen such bad aim!"

Droid two: "Sorry . . . It's my programing!"

Wah wah. Jesus.

It also faces the same problem that Star Trek has had for years--in Star Trek it manifests in its serial nature, where no technological advances carry from episode to episode. There are literally dozens of episodes where medical or transporter advances, or alien encounters, introduce knowledge or abilities that should effectively create human immortality thenceforth. Yet, those technologies or abilities are never referenced in the future when they could come in handy. Similarly, the god-like Jedi powers in Star Wars only seem to show up in dire straights, and are just strong enough to accomplish whatever is necessary. If you can flick your hand and send dozens or hundreds of droids flying at a moments notice, where's the dramatic tension when facing four? And why do you have to carefully meditate this time? It leads to a kind of arms race of ever-increasing dramatic requirements. You can sustain that for a couple of movies, but after 30 years it wears kind of thing--why does no one ever remember that they've got superpowers and JUST FUCKING USE THEM?! This is the kind of thing that you usually suspend your disbelief for, but if the writing sucks, and the animation sucks, and the characters suck, and the science sucks, and the entire thing is a generally insulting travesty, just what would one be suspending it for?

Finally, 30 years later, Lucas-co is still trying to win the "we meant to use parsecs!" battle. There are multiple very wooden, transparently deliberate uses of "parsec" dropped into conversation

Also, they have once again taken an incredibly cool character and made it thoroughly mediocre. First they gave Darth Maul, the most intreguing character to date, only three lines in Episode I before killing him off. Now they've taken the creepy, silent female Sith from the original Clone Wars shorts and made her some kind of whining, incompetent boob.

Garbage, garbage, garbage.

The one good point that the series has is that it fleshes out Anakin's character a bit. It's not much, but the whole sense of potential, rise, fall, and betrayal of Anakin in the new trilogy is largely self-imposed interpolation, benefit of the doubt, and wishful thinking. The actual offering is about 20 minutes in the second movie where he's heroic, I guess, and 20 more in the finale, where he falls. But most of the actual character development has happened off screen. Here we at least see him acting like a human being, showing compassion, etc., which at least makes us care a little that he falls in a few years. Also, characters like Grievous and Dukoo that were shoehorned into the movies with no development are more fully fleshed out here; of course, if any of it was any good, it should have been included in the movies.