Episode 03: Children Of The Force
This week's episode picks up exactly where last week's story ended. Anakin and Ahsoka have returned to their big ship after believing that Cade Bane has been killed and the Holocron they were after has been destroyed. In just a matter of seconds though, they realize that one of the clone troopers that has disembarked from their ship isn't who he says he is. In what is a suprise to only the extremely dim witted, Cad Bane turns out to be alive. If it wasn't obvious before, he must have killed that clone trooper we saw "shooting him" last week, switched their clothes and hidden aboard Anakin's ship as just another clone.
With his cover blown, Bane takes Ahsoka down with a stiff knee to the gut, steals a ship and flies out of the hanger before Anakin can stop him. Anakin makes a quick call up to the bridge and tells the admiral to shut down all of the garbage smashers on the detention area. Wait, no, that's wrong. Sorry. He does tell him to shut down all of the hyperdrive rings though so Bane can't steal one and jump to lightspeed. The admiral spins around and yells down to his command crew, "No, shut them all down. Hurry!", but unlike in the original Star Wars film, there's no R2-D2 here on the bridge to carry out this order fast enough and bane is able to attach to a ring and jump away before they can all be shut down.
The chase . . . once again . . . is on.
Once he's safe, Bane contacts Darth Sidious and gets further instructions from him. Oh, and he also gets his hat back. Fashion, afterall, is very important to the hired mercenaries of the Star Wars universe. It turns out I was wrong too. As opposed to my original belief last week that the data from the holocron about all of the force-sensitive children in the galaxy only being used by Sidious after the fall of the Jedi order, it turns out he wants to use the data right away. Sidious orders Bane to pick four names off of the list at random, kidnap them and then bring them to Mustafar.
Mustafar? Really? The Planet where Anakin will get the crap kicked out of him by Obi-wan at the end of Episode 3? Ok, I guess that makes sense as that's obviously where Sidious has had a secret base hidden for quite some time. I'm ok with the kids going there. But why does he want them in the first place?
Meanwhile, back at the Jedi Temple, our heroes realize that they're royally hosed. They don't have Bane or the holocron, they have no idea where he may have gone, and now they're seriously worried about what will happen to all of the kids on that list. I guess Bane must have taken the only copy of the list too, because they don't seem to have the kids' information on hand at the temple. So it is that in typical Jedi fashion, when realizing that they're a good ways up bantha poodoo creek without a paddle, they do the only thing they can do at this point. They sit down and meditate on the force and hope to god for a clue.
Obi-wan, Anakin, Mace and Yoda all sit down and meditate and in a few minutes time they start getting visions of the future that tells them where Bane is going. Funny how those visions of the future never warn them of Anakin's turn to the darkside or the fall of the Jedi Temple, isn't it? Anyways, they successfully deduce who the four children are that Bane is going after. One of them is already gone, so Obi-wan is sent to Rodia to save a child there while Anakin and Ahsoka are sent to Naboo to save a Gungan child there.
Gungans. Why is it always fucking Gungans?
On Rodia, we see Cad Bane pretending to be an agent of the Jedi as he tries to convince the mother to hand over her baby. She refuses, so he uses his super swanky decoder ring with swirly lights on it to hypnotize her. He grabs the kid just as Obi-wan shows up, who chases him up to the landing platform. Obi-wan is too slow once again though and must watch in frustration as Bane flies away. He even shakes his fist at him. It's sort of funny. I was half expecting him to yell out something like, "Curses!" as Bane flew off, but sadly such amusement was not to be had.
Onto Naboo, where Anakin and Ahsoka pull into the exact same hanger from Episode One (does Naboo really only have the one hanger bay?) and meet up with some of the local officials who have been warned of Bane and his intentions. The baby is safe, and they're waiting for him to show up. Ahsoka asks Anakin if it's ok if she leads the search for Bane as she "has a score to settle with him". I'd definitely say she's got a score to settle with him. At this point he's kicked her ass at least twice, tried to eject her out of an airlock and even tortured her just for the hell of it. She sounds positively angry as she mentions this score she has to settle. She'd best be careful there, vengence leads to the darkside and she's walking a fine line lately. Anakin tells her to go ahead as he has some other stuff to do first (i.e. Padme).
A little while later, Bane shows up and suprises me with a sudden burst of stupidity as he walks into what is so completely obviously a trap. The Kid's not there, but Anakin and Ahsoka are, and for once they actually get the better of Bane and he's actually captured by them. Wow, that only took the entire Jedi order about 4 episodes to accomplish. Seriously, what took so long?
Bane is brought back to the Jedi Temple where he is questioned, but he doesn't talk. Impatient as always, Anakin suggests they try to use the force to manipulate his mind. Mace Windu says that Bane is too strong for that, so Anakin suggests that a bunch of Jedi all work together on it to overpower his brain. Mace warns that such an action could destroy Bane's mind, to which Anakin basically says, "Yeah, so?" and Mace rather suprisingly agrees to try it. This scene is a little unsettling as it pretty much breaks down to something equivalent of a group mind fuck on Bane. Sure, it's not as dark as when Bane tortured that Jedi Master to deat in the last episode, but these are the good guys doing the evil deed here. The Jedi are very obviously torturing him here, and Anakin, Ahsoka and Mace all look like dark Jedi while this is going on. So much for high minded ideals and never doing harm.
As a credit to Bane's mental strength, he manages to successfully fend off the first wave of the group mind probe, but it was pretty painful and he agrees to take them to the holocron and the kids if they promise not to try that again. The Jedi agree and Bane is then led out to a ship. On the way, Anakin and Obi-wan argue as to whether Chancellor Palpatine should be notified of their recent progress. Obi-wan says hell no, this is Jedi business and the Chancellor has no part in it. Anakin retorts that since they are the appointed leaders of the Republic army, they should inform the Republic's leader what they're up to. Obi-wan Agrees but tells Anakin that he and Ahsoka hav to be the ones to talk to Palpatine while Obi-wan himself and Mace Windu follow where Bane tells them to go. Anakin's annoyed by this, but can't get out of it so he and his Padawan head to Corscuant.
Bane leads Mace and Obi-wan to a remote space station tucked way out in the outter rim where he of course walks them straight into a trap. The moment Mace Steps foot on the station, security guns pop out of everywhere and start firing at the two Jedi. In the following scuffle, Bane once again escapes the Jedi's custody, makes it to a ship and blasts off from the station. As he's flying away he triggers a self destruct device on the station and Obi-wan and Mace just barely make it back to their own ship and take off before the station is blown to bits. On the plus side though, Mace was able to snag the holocron from the station before it got blown to hell, so even though Cad Bane is still free, at least they got the data back.
Back on Corscuant, Anakin meets with Palpatine who very politely tells Ahsoka to get lost while the grown ups talk. They don't really talk about anything important, and soon enough Anakin and Ashoka are back together trying to figure out where Bane could have taken the kids. They have access to Bane's ship from when they had captured him, and although Bane had wiped the ships astronavigation charts, he hadn't erased his fuel history which appearently keeps track of every planet you've ever been to. Through this they figure out that Bane must have stopped at Mustafar and head there to find the kids.
On Mustafar, we see a hologram of Darth Sidious talking to some medical droids who are prepping the stolen babies for some sort of procedure. We learn that Sidious' plan all along has been to kidnap a bunch of force-sensitive children and turn them into spies in the service of the dark side of the force. He wants a whole army of dark soldier/spies at his command. Not a bad goal for a super villain really. I'm ok with that.
What I'm not ok with though is Anakin and Ahsoka showing up on Mustafar. When they get there, Sidious orders that his base be evacuated and then destroyed. The two Jedi move quicky though and are able to save the kids before the droids can make a getaway, and before the station breaks apart and falls into the lava (just barely). The kids are safe, but I'm left wondering, "WTF?" So Anakin's been to Mustafar before when he arrives there in Episode 3? The Jedi know that there was a n evil base built on the planet, but they never think to check back there again? Sidious decides to build another base there after he destroys this one, even though he knows full well that his little hidden planet has been made fully known to the Jedi? That makes no sense at all.
If Sidious had gotten away with his plans, I would have understood the kids going to Mustafar, but if you're going to have Jedi show up and destroy the base and save the kids, why the hell would you do that on a planet that is supposed to be secretive and is so important to the story later? At the end of the episode I'm left feeling annoyed that they just tried to reuse a known location to make the series feel like it fits in with the movies, but all they really did was distract from the story and sort of mess up the logic of the films entirely. Why would the Emperor rebuild a secret base on a planet that has already had one base there lost to the Jedi? That's just stupid.
Ugh. Other than that, the episode was pretty solid. It wasn't as epic as the last episodes, but it was fun and enjoyable and it only made me want to bang my head against the wall during the last five minutes. Oh, and there was one really annoying scene where we had to see what a baby Gungan looks like. As it turns out, baby Gungan's are even more annoying than adult ones. Like 100 times more annoying too.
Final Grade: B-
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