The Original Star Wars Trilogies

Here are some more general comments about the original Star Wars trilogies; in the coming weeks, I'll have posts about each movie individually (with the exception of A New Hope, for which I don't have any significant comments yet).

In "The Beginning: Making Star Wars: Episode I The Phantom Menace" (at ~3:08), George Lucas comments on the parallelism between The Phantom Menace and A New Hope:  "with Anakin, you know, kind of duplicating the Luke Skywalker role, but you see the echo of where it all's gonna go:  instead of destroying the Death Star, he destroys the ship that controls the robots.  Again, it's like poetry, sort of; they rhyme.  Every stanza kind of rhymes with the last one."  This parallelism extends even to the grammatical structure of the titles.  The Phantom Menace parallels A New Hope ([article][adjective][noun]), and Revenge of the Sith parellels Return of the Jedi ([noun][preposition][article][noun]).  Attack of the Clones and The Empire Strikes Back are the exception here, but both titles describe a military conflict, so they're similar in a more general way.  There's also an echo between Attack of the Clones and The Empire Strikes Back in that both feature a scene where R2-D2 reconstructs C-3PO.

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Near the beginning of each movie in the original trilogy, there's a shot of a Star Destroyer overhead:

Visually, this illustrates the dominance that the Empire has over the galaxy.

The Clone Wars - S6E10 - "The Lost One"

In "The Lost One," when Yoda goes to see Chancellor Palpatine about a file on Sifo-Dyas that has been sealed by the office of the Supreme Chancellor, Palpatine's shadow falls on Yoda for most of their conversation:

That Palpatine's shadow falls where it does illustrates Palpatine's deception of Yoda and the Jedi in general.  He's obscuring the Jedi's vision so that they don't discover his other identity as Darth Sidious.

The Clone Wars - S6E7 - "Crisis at the Heart"

Near the end of "Crisis at the Heart," a droid starfighter shot down by a clone pilot crashes into the office where Clovis is desperately trying to convince Anakin and Padmé that it's Count Dooku who's deceiving them, not Clovis himself.  The office is at the top of a tower, which starts to tilt because of the damage it's sustained.  Anakin catches both Padmé and Clovis as they slide off the edge:

Significantly, he's holding Padmé with his remaining human arm (his left arm) and Clovis with his artificial arm (his right arm):

The arms with which he's holding these two characters illustrate the different type of connection he has with each.  He has a very close relationship with Padmé, so he's holding her with his remaining human arm.  On the other hand (literally), he hasn't trusted Clovis throughout this arc of episodes (thinking he's too involved with the Separatists), so while he's holding him too, it's with his artificial arm, which symbolizes that distance between them.

The Clone Wars - S6E6 - "The Rise of Clovis"

In "The Rise of Clovis," after Clovis repeatedly asks about the relationship between Padmé and Anakin, Padmé asserts that "there is nothing romantic between he and I."  The pronouns "he" and "I" are in the wrong grammatical case here; they should be "him" and "me."  Presumably, as a senator, Padmé has a quality education and wouldn't normally make such a mistake, but her misuse of these pronouns indicates that she's flustered because of Clovis's suspicion - or perhaps even discernment - of the romantic relationship that does indeed exist between the two.  It's also significant that Padmé separates herself from Anakin here; she says, "he and I" and not "us."