Star Wars: The Clone Wars CGI Season 2

[Mike DiCenso]

Seriously, did you or anyone really expect George Lucas to actually give a crap about the EU? This is why all these contradictions are occuring in a canon hierarchy second only to the movies themselves.
-Mike

[2046]

"Death Trap"

1. The stun ring effect is seen for the first time since ANH. It seems as if the helmet of a clone has to be removed for the stun effect to work, given that the boy went to the trouble of beating the clone's helmet off with the gun before shooting him.

The effect is basically the same as ANH, though it seems to cause either throwing a clone backward or else the whole stomach muscular contraction thing that results in the same effect. Leia, of course, just sort of fell down all pretty.

2. A boy with a DC-15a blaster rifle can shoot up the engine room, causing all sorts of electrical arc sparkiness, then soon an explosion, and the ship will then be crippled, having great big chunks blown out of it.

(This seems a bit more damage than we might expect given "Cloak of Darkness"[TCW1], in which a number of small explosives in that room collapse/burn the area without such effect, but presumably the Ventress explosives were placed with specific effect in mind. Boba just shot the things up, resulting in a surrounding electric-sparky effect and later explosions.)

3. Clone teacher asks student:

"Cadet 327: What reaction propels the main engines of this Jedi cruiser?"

"Poles combine sparking off the reactor core rods, sir."

(or "post combined sparking off the reactor coil rods, sir"
or "posts combine sparking off the reactor core rods, sir."
or "{something} combine sparking off the reactor {whatever}, sir")

"Excellent."

Sadly, it's not well enunciated, and it seems like there's probably a comma between "combine" and "sparking" but there's no way to be sure, 'cause the line is just too quick. But in any case, provided we can tell what the devil he's said, he has at least said {something}.

The general sense I'm getting is that there are rods in the reactor and these somehow attain some electrical charge, and the engine electrical needs are met with some high-tech equivalent of jumper cables hooked to the rod ends.

[Mike DiCenso]

"Death Trap"
2. A boy with a DC-15a blaster rifle can shoot up the engine room, causing all sorts of electrical arc sparkiness, then soon an explosion, and the ship will then be crippled, having great big chunks blown out of it.

(This seems a bit more damage than we might expect given "Cloak of Darkness"[TCW1], in which a number of small explosives in that room collapse/burn the area without such effect, but presumably the Ventress explosives were placed with specific effect in mind. Boba just shot the things up, resulting in a surrounding electric-sparky effect and later explosions.)

This should deal a huge blow to the Warsie claims that SW ships have more rugged power sources as a single kid shooting up the reactor can cause a near catastrophic failure. Oh yeah, I'll be interested in hearing Wong's explanation as to where the "dead man's" switch on this ship went to as well. On top of that, where's that vaunted SW security we've been hearing so much about from them all these years?
-Mike

[2046]

This should deal a huge blow to the Warsie claims that SW ships have more rugged power sources as a single kid shooting up the reactor can cause a near catastrophic failure.

Oh, I'd say it was a bit more than a "near" catastrophic failure. Indications are that the next episode will involve the Venator crash-landing on the surface of Vanqor (previously seen as a rocky planet). The ship was already engaged in an inadvertent de-orbit at the end of this episode.

But in fairness, the ship had previously lost navigational abilities due to a very small bomb in Mace Windu's quarters. The explosion, impressive for a bomb of that size but not huge by any means, wrecked the small quarters, with walls all dented and mangled, but the corridor around it was intact, and Windu who was just a couple of steps down the hall was unharmed. Nevertheless, the nearby navigation system was disabled.

Oh yeah, I'll be interested in hearing Wong's explanation as to where the "dead man's" switch on this ship went to as well.

There shall be no explanation from Wong and his associates. They are only interested in the Lucas canon selectively.

For instance, the large (almost-nuclear-scale) fireball of the mega-droid-popper bomb from the first Zillo beast episode caused a page and a half of discussion (following a page and a half on the cloaking ship episode, virtually ignoring the ones in between), but most of the time their level of interest in it is akin to the chirping of crickets.

Put simply, they are only interested if it is something they can use to further their Star Wars tech inflationism, becoming tellingly silent when TCW fails to support it. Meanwhile, I try to deliver all the highs and lows.

On top of that, where's that vaunted SW security we've been hearing so much about from them all these years?
-Mike

Not sure. This is the second instance where an intruder alert has involved the engine room being virtually free of security. The first time was "Cloak of Darkness", in which a little droid (327-T) was left to watch the whole place. This time, Boba entered the room without incident but had reached the central control area before being caught by a single trooper walking in from elsewhere.

Mind you, in "Cloak" the ship had been boarded far forward, so perhaps we could say the main force of troops was up that way fighting. But in this case, after the bombing of Windu's quarters the entire ship is supposed to be on lockdown. And yet, Boba is able to effortlessly gain access to the Venator equivalent of main engineering.

[2046]

For what it's worth, a subtitles website online has updated, and its subtitle file for Death Trap suggests that the line is the following:

"Post-combined sparking off the reactor core rods, sir."

But I don't know how official that is.

[Mike DiCenso]

What about Closed Captioning for the hearing impaired? Aren't those supposed to be taken off the scripts?
-Mike

[2046]

What about Closed Captioning for the hearing impaired? Aren't those supposed to be taken off the scripts?
-Mike

Well, considering the episode doesn't air in the US until Friday, maybe someone will catch it.

[l33telboi]

Oh, I'd say it was a bit more than a "near" catastrophic failure. Indications are that the next episode will involve the Venator crash-landing on the surface of Vanqor (previously seen as a rocky planet). The ship was already engaged in an inadvertent de-orbit at the end of this episode.

Yes, it will crash and be destroyed in the next episode. You can see snippets of it in the trailer for the season two finale (the next episodes will apparently all be part of one larger story).

[Mith]

"Death Trap"
2. A boy with a DC-15a blaster rifle can shoot up the engine room, causing all sorts of electrical arc sparkiness, then soon an explosion, and the ship will then be crippled, having great big chunks blown out of it.

(This seems a bit more damage than we might expect given "Cloak of Darkness"[TCW1], in which a number of small explosives in that room collapse/burn the area without such effect, but presumably the Ventress explosives were placed with specific effect in mind. Boba just shot the things up, resulting in a surrounding electric-sparky effect and later explosions.)

This should deal a huge blow to the Warsie claims that SW ships have more rugged power sources as a single kid shooting up the reactor can cause a near catastrophic failure. Oh yeah, I'll be interested in hearing Wong's explanation as to where the "dead man's" switch on this ship went to as well. On top of that, where's that vaunted SW security we've been hearing so much about from them all these years?
-Mike

Didn't you see him? He was to the right, sleeping off the seriously laughable ass whooping that a child dealt him. You know, the one who handed the rather pissed off looking child clearly holding a grudge an armed weapon while he looked away and called for someone to escort him out of one of the most sensative areas of the ship?

Kid: Hey, is that a loaded gun?
Guard: Sure, want to play with it while I look over here and get someone to escort you out?
Kid: Cool! Did they catch that assassin yet?
Guard: Nope. Gee, I wonder who it could be. I sure hope it's not another traitor clone. God that would--ZAP!

[2046]

"R2 Come Home" is a fantastic episode. The R2-centric ones are some of the best, really.

Yes, that's the crash . . . and given the ship's size, it performs quite well.

There's massive internal and external damage, but the central structure remains intact despite the ship augering in at a 20-30 degree angle with parts flying off pre-impact and the rear of the ship in flames due to both the prior episode reactor breach and presumably re-entry damage. The ship appears to strike the ground at at least one-half ship length per second, or about 600 meters per second. That's like Mach 2.

(For reference, the Enterprise-D saucer crash was much slower. The Voyager crash onto the ice planet was at about the same speed but a slightly shallower angle, inexplicably resulting in a bounce of the nose rather than a nose-dive as in the Venator's case. In any event the Venator, being freakin' massive by comparison, thus performed exceptionally well.)

Despite the crash velocity and angle, the bridge tower holds on to the ship and the main bridge remains partially intact, though the innards are trashed and the entire outer hull is a complete wreck. At least one large section of the vessel fell off (I believe it's the starboard aft, seen in flames in the last episode due to the reactor breach well before the crash). One of the engines is seen all torn up on the surface but recognizably cylindrical. It also appears that the nose of the ship, as well as the portside aft (seen in flames as the ship approached planetary contact) might've been obliterated.

But again, recalling the impact angle, as well as the massive landing bay interior that cuts out much of the ship's volume, the actual central spaceframe held up extraordinarily well.

Perhaps most impressively, the remaining skeleton crew apparently all survived. The ship had been evacuated, but of those who remained some survivors were kidnapped and all the other corpses seen featured blaster marks, indicating they were shot, and presumably they were alive to necessitate such treatment. Ergo, all survived the crash.

Elsewhere in the episode, we saw short weapons ranges used as a very exciting plot point, as one Jedi fighter approaching two hyperspace rings were out of range of Boba's blasters, but both would be within range for a split second before the Jedi fighter attached to one and hypered away. Thus Boba had to choose which one to destroy as they entered weapons range (and his gunnery skills were seen in the last episode to impress even Republic clone gunners).

As actual Star Wars fans might expect, the weapons range in question was well within visual range. We see Slave I through a hyperspace ring with the fighter ahead of it, and Slave I takes up a small portion of the frame but is quite identifiably large in the frame. Eyeballing it, I'd say it's about two kilometers, though I'm a little vague right now on the height of Slave I. Certainly I would doubt the range was higher than 5-6 kilometers.

Also, before that there was a replay of sorts, in that Slave I was firing rapid-fire against a Jedi fighter it was pursuing . . . shades of AotC. And the effects were the same, both against the Venator's hull / local rock and in space, as the ship was simply unable to hit the fighter. Oh, but one thing . . . this time the weapon was the lower tail gun, and not the central guns from AotC.

One odd thing. With communications first jammed and then shot off of the fighter, the hyperspace ring is used to get the ship to Coruscant. Apparently, then, the ring contains no comm gear, and worse even R2 is unable to communicate without actually going into the Jedi Temple and plugging into a dataport.

So, wherever this Vanqor is, it was close enough for R2 to decide that Coruscant was where to go. And yet, indications from "Dooku Captured" would place it deep in the Outer Rim.

I would consider that either evidence that the Outer Rim isn't always that far, or else an internal continuity problem . . . after all, unless hyperdrive gets you there in the same amount of time no matter the distance (which has never been suggested), then going all the way to Coruscant rather than any of the observed Outer Rim bases would be nuts.

[2046]

Regarding the last episode, I have one thing I just noticed and one thing I forgot to mention.

1. I just noticed that the clones have their little ascension guns which easily poke into the hull material surrounding the bridge windows of the crashed Venator, without even a surrounding dent.

As much as the SDN folks have tried to claim that Trek hulls aren't bulletproof, this is a rather damning event, albeit consistent with the dents from Grievous's feet in RotS.

2. I forgot to mention that the forward bridge structure falling to the outer hull below and exploding created a series of blasts along the ship going forward, similar to what we saw of the Munificent in "Cat and Mouse"[TCW2] and on other occasions.

I saw folks at SDN get all excited over the firepower of torpedoes based on the Munificent's secondary explosions. Specifically, "they were clearly really powerful - four torpedoes practically cracked the entire dorsal side of Trench's ship wide open."

Yet here, a simple falling piece of ship caused the same sort of blasts. We'll see if they keep claiming really powerful torpedoes or if they simply ignore this incident altogether, or both.

[2046]

Just watched "Lethal Trackdown", the season finale.

1. Coruscant has Utapau-esque tubes to underground areas well away from the skyscrapers. It's not clear how extensive these are, but basically it takes us to never-before-seen underworld areas (literally). The areas are big enough to require some floating taxis and look to be kilometers in width at least. And this is all constructed or at least walled, mind you . . . there are no exposed rock faces that I saw.

It seems like they wanted to present it as being worse than the seedy surface of Coruscant beneath the skyscrapers, but if anything I'd say this was just dirty and not as well-lit.

The access tubes were maybe a kilometer wide (just guessing) and extremely deep . . . I'd guess 20 kilometers, minimum. There's a shot of the speeder descending and the hole up top is just a dim moon of light way up there.

Suffice it to say that even the existence of this one tube is enough to significantly impress regarding the industrial capacity of the Republic . . . after all, before it was simply a planet with construction all over it, but now there's the possibility of significant subsurface activity.

2. Slave I, while attempting to take off, has a wing cut off by a precise lightsaber strike to the cylindrical pylon holding it on, and a lightsaber is poked through the pilot's window glass. A blaster is then fired from within through the glass repeatedly (about 9 shots), cracking more and more with each shot. As the lightsaber-wielder jumps away, the glass shatters, leaving a big gaping hole in the cockpit glass.

The two events cause Slave I's pilot to lose control with numerous alarm beeps from the console, and the ship soon crashes, seemingly destroyed.

In short, despite the massive size of the Slave I cockpit window, the material is terribly fragile. Some sort of shielding or navigational deflector assembly must be in use most of the time, otherwise I for one wouldn't feel comfortable with such an expansive bit of fragile glass as the only thing between me and asteroidal debris (to use the AotC example) or even birds in atmosphere.

[Enterprise E]

One thing that I noticed when Boba Fett encountered Mace Windu on Coruscant after his capture was that Mace could have handled his encounter with the son of the person he killed a lot better. Unless I missed something, he just told Boba to get over it, or it had that feeling. At least tell him of the circumstances and that his father was trying to murder an innocent and one of the few non-corrupt senators left in the Republic. Tell him that it was a war and that they were on different sides, and that his father was on the side of injustice and that it was a kill or be killed situation. It may not have made Boba forgive him, or even understand, but at least it would have been an attempt to explain what happened and the situation surrounding Jango's death. Maybe Boba would remember it later and think about it when he grew up. That guy at that bar on the planet said that Jango Fett had honor. The Jango Fett we saw in AOTC didn't seem to have all that much honor with him trying to murder an innocent, working with a known Sith Lord, and everything else. I think that telling Boba the entire story surrounding what happened to his father would have done a lot more good than simply telling him to get over it.

[Mith]

The entire bullshit over Jango having honor nearly made me hurl.

Keep in mind folks, that this is a kid's show. Those same kids who saw Jango try to murder a senator, kill his teammate rather than try and rescue her, sold out his bloodline to mercenary cloners, tried to kill a legitmet authorative figure in apprehending him, taught a ten year the ways of a hardened lifestyle enough so that he would willingly fire upon a Jedi Knight, and worked with people who've been potrayed as greedy, selfish, and downright evil through the movies and the TV series.

Yes, I know it was a dishonest pirate who said this, but still. You shouldn't even try to pass of something like that in this show.

[Mike DiCenso]

Regarding the last episode, I have one thing I just noticed and one thing I forgot to mention.

1. I just noticed that the clones have their little ascension guns which easily poke into the hull material surrounding the bridge windows of the crashed Venator, without even a surrounding dent.

As much as the SDN folks have tried to claim that Trek hulls aren't bulletproof, this is a rather damning event, albeit consistent with the dents from Grievous's feet in RotS.

Ah, don't you know anything!? You see those were neutronium guns, Robert!

2. I forgot to mention that the forward bridge structure falling to the outer hull below and exploding created a series of blasts along the ship going forward, similar to what we saw of the Munificent in "Cat and Mouse"[TCW2] and on other occasions.

Interesting series of structural failures here. Part of the ship is literally falling into itself in a way that cannot be explained by the force and the direction of the initial explosion alone. Also fairly odd to see such a remarkable structural weakness in the subsequent tower-related splitting of the hull like that as the KE from the impacting tower alone cannot account be that great, a few tens of meters per second at most. This implies a huge flaw in most of the Seperatist ships, perhaps a necessary evil in order to crank out so many of them in such a short span of time. A possible indicator of how many ships the Empire has built since ISD hulls are not only much larger, but also apparently much tougher than that.

I saw folks at SDN get all excited over the firepower of torpedoes based on the Munificent's secondary explosions. Specifically, "they were clearly really powerful - four torpedoes practically cracked the entire dorsal side of Trench's ship wide open."

Yet here, a simple falling piece of ship caused the same sort of blasts. We'll see if they keep claiming really powerful torpedoes or if they simply ignore this incident altogether, or both.

The hypocrisy is really evident. You know what they would say if this were a Trek ship; that photon torpedoes are really weak and look at how that piece of the ship caused massive secondary explosions that demonstrate how fragile their hulls are and how poorly designed their systems are to allow such a catastrophic chain of failures to occur!
-Mike