Tuesday, January 30, 2024

The Clone Wars - S6E3 - "Fugitive"

Throughout "Fugitive," AZ-3's mouth lights up when he's speaking, so in other words, a lit mouth is an open mouth.


After Fives becomes convinced that, like Tup, there's a chip inside his own head, he tells AZ, "You have to take it out."  AZ is hesitant and tells Fives that it's a "dangerous surgery" and "you may die," but Fives replies, "It's a chance I have to take.  I trust you."  Before finally agreeing, AZ's mouth lights up without his saying anything and stays lit for a few seconds.  This is the droid equivalent of his mouth hanging open in surprise.

Tuesday, January 23, 2024

The Clone Wars - S5E19 - "To Catch a Jedi"

Near the end of "To Catch a Jedi," Barriss Offee (whose identity isn't revealed until the next episode) steals Asajj Ventress's mask and lightsabers and, disguised as Ventress, attacks Ahsoka Tano.  During the fight, she slashes a pipe so that the resulting exhaust temporarily stuns Ahsoka.

While this is somewhat similar to an event in The Empire Strikes Back, where Luke directs exhaust from a cut hose in the carbon freezing chamber at Vader, creating enough of a distraction so that he can retrieve his fallen lightsaber, it actually has a closer analogue in an earlier episode of The Clone Wars, and this holds greater significance.

In "Cloak of Darkness" (S1E9), there's a lightsaber duel between Luminara Unduli and Asajj Ventress in which Ventress does the same thing:  she cuts a pipe in the Jedi cruiser so that the steam compromises Luminara's vision.  Ahsoka was present at the duel (albeit the later stages), and since Barriss is Luminara's padawan, it's likely that she's familiar with it, too.  In "To Catch a Jedi," she adopts this move as an-other facet of her disguise and an-other way to make Ahsoka believe that she is Ventress.

Tuesday, January 16, 2024

The Clone Wars - S5E16 - "The Lawless"

During Obi-Wan Kenobi's escape from Mandalore in "The Lawless," he and a group of Mandalorians encounter a giant, closed door.  As it opens, the camera angle tilts.  At first, the camera is level with the ground:


But as the shot goes on, the camera shifts so that everything is at an angle:


The shot as a whole illustrates the civil war that has beset Mandalore.  Previously, there had been stability, but now there is confusion.  Along with this shifting camera angle, the chaos is illustrated in the background, where Mandalorians are fighting each other and there are various blaster shots and explosions.

Tuesday, January 9, 2024

The Clone Wars - S4E15 - "Deception"

In "Deception," after Moralo Eval, Cad Bane, and Rako Hardeen (Obi-Wan Kenobi in disguise) have escaped from prison, they steal a police speeder to get to the docks to steal a ship and leave Coruscant.  Moralo Eval and Cad Bane take the front seats, leaving the back seat for Rako Hardeen:



Since this is a police speeder and the back seat is where criminals are detained, there are bars in the interior and on the canopy.  Visually, this represents Kenobi's situation.  His goal is to investigate a kidnapping threat against Chancellor Palpatine that Eval is allegedly involved with, and for the moment, he simply has to go along with Eval's plans in order to discover more information.  In the same way that he experiences this temporary lack of agency, he's confined in the prisoner's seat of the police speeder.

Tuesday, January 2, 2024

The Clone Wars - S3E1 - "Clone Cadets"

"Clone Cadets" follows a particular squad of clone troopers (Domino Squad) who are having trouble working together.  While watching the squad perform poorly in a training session, Shaak Ti remarks, "The one they call Echo never adapts to the situation," and the bounty hunter El-Les, who is helping the Jedi train the clones, comments, "CT-782 seems to follow his own path.  He can't do it all alone."  Two other clones argue with each other too much and are shot down by training droids, and the last clone surrenders when he's surrounded.  Shaak Ti then summarizes the squad's problem:  "If these cadets can't get past their short-sighted selfishness, they will never come together.  Unity wins war, gentlemen."

Later in the episode, Commander Colt comes to watch a few squads perform their final tests.  The squads meet him in a hangar, and after Bravo Squad is chosen as the first squad to run the simulation, the clones file out of the hangar.  As each squad turns in formation, the clones stomp their feet, but while the clones in the other squads all stomp their feet simultaneously, the clones of Domino Squad stomp their feet at different times.  In the shot, they're shown from the waist up, so it's easier to hear the various footfalls than see them.


This detail shows that the clones are still a bit too independent and aren't yet working together.