Final thoughts on The Clone Wars
Aug. 27th, 2021 08:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jedi_of_urth posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
tori_reviewsFinal thoughts on The Clone Wars (for certain values of 'final')
Obviously I did a decent look at my final conclusions about the series in the post about the final arc. For a while I thought I would let that stand as my final word before moving straight on to Rebels (with an asterisk on that), but now that it comes to posting the last of this series, I think it deserves a little more summary. Or at least an update on how my thoughts on it have settled in the time since I did the reviews. It’s not much more, but I also wanted there to be a pause before I shifted gears into Rebels for posting, since there was one for me watching.
Yeah, we’ll blame that for me not posting this on Wednesday.
The asterisk I put on saying I was going straight into Rebels is that I had initially intended to watch the prequals before going on to the next show. Do the movies while TCW was fairly fresh in my mind, and see if my thoughts on those were affected by having seen the series. And maybe it would have, but I’ve been reviewing half-hour shows long enough that doing a movie seems like a lot to do. So I ended up just going on to Rebels after a small breather. And now, a lot of TCW has left my mind since I finished watching it, it just didn’t leave much impression. And as much as I’ve complained about the show and expressed that it rarely grabbed my attention, the fact that it only kept it for such a short time is probably more damning.
I don’t think it’s going to affect my view of the movies, because I don’t really see them as part of the same universe. I don’t know which I like better (in terms of the prequals), but I can’t see them as the same thing. Somewhere between the two there is a pretty good story that is a decent prequal to the OT, but the movies are deeply flawed while the show is so bland most of the time.
I’m not going to walk the bland comment back because over all it it, but…no, that’s not the main problem with the show. It’s that the show has flashes of brilliant ideas…and then decides to focus on the least interesting aspects of everything it does. And I get that some of that is that I’m not the target demographic for the show and it can’t be (for demographic and continuity reasons) the story I want it to be. But knowing that fact doesn’t overcome all the shortcomings I find with the show.
There are a few places where I am a fan of what the show might have been, or the version of it that happens in my head where the actually interesting things get explored. But those flashes only illuminate how much I’m not a fan of the actual show.
Even the few things I say that I like about this show, what I like most is the deeper version I’m not even sure the show hints toward. The show dumped a lot of scraps on the board, and just because I find the stuff to make something interesting, doesn’t give the show credit for what I made from it. Especially since half of that stuff already existed in the canon.
There were maybe half a dozen just good arcs in this show; but a lot more that were ‘well, it’s as good as it could be on this show.’ And really, probably even the good ones could have been a lot better on a better show. But at least within their limitations they did tell some decent-to-good stories. I’m just probably never going to watch very much of this show ever again.
Now, as I write this, I’m a good chunk of the way through s2 of Rebels. You’ll see how my opinion of that show unfolds; for now I’ll say that it takes a rather different course from TCW, and for now I’m not saying which I think is actually better or worse. It has different problems that are sometimes worse and sometimes easier to handle than the problems with TCW. I will say that there comes a point when I hate something about Rebels more than I ever got to with TCW, but in a way, at least hating something is a notable reaction. Even the worst of TCW was just so boring that I gave up on it instead caring enough to hate it.
Obviously I did a decent look at my final conclusions about the series in the post about the final arc. For a while I thought I would let that stand as my final word before moving straight on to Rebels (with an asterisk on that), but now that it comes to posting the last of this series, I think it deserves a little more summary. Or at least an update on how my thoughts on it have settled in the time since I did the reviews. It’s not much more, but I also wanted there to be a pause before I shifted gears into Rebels for posting, since there was one for me watching.
Yeah, we’ll blame that for me not posting this on Wednesday.
The asterisk I put on saying I was going straight into Rebels is that I had initially intended to watch the prequals before going on to the next show. Do the movies while TCW was fairly fresh in my mind, and see if my thoughts on those were affected by having seen the series. And maybe it would have, but I’ve been reviewing half-hour shows long enough that doing a movie seems like a lot to do. So I ended up just going on to Rebels after a small breather. And now, a lot of TCW has left my mind since I finished watching it, it just didn’t leave much impression. And as much as I’ve complained about the show and expressed that it rarely grabbed my attention, the fact that it only kept it for such a short time is probably more damning.
I don’t think it’s going to affect my view of the movies, because I don’t really see them as part of the same universe. I don’t know which I like better (in terms of the prequals), but I can’t see them as the same thing. Somewhere between the two there is a pretty good story that is a decent prequal to the OT, but the movies are deeply flawed while the show is so bland most of the time.
I’m not going to walk the bland comment back because over all it it, but…no, that’s not the main problem with the show. It’s that the show has flashes of brilliant ideas…and then decides to focus on the least interesting aspects of everything it does. And I get that some of that is that I’m not the target demographic for the show and it can’t be (for demographic and continuity reasons) the story I want it to be. But knowing that fact doesn’t overcome all the shortcomings I find with the show.
There are a few places where I am a fan of what the show might have been, or the version of it that happens in my head where the actually interesting things get explored. But those flashes only illuminate how much I’m not a fan of the actual show.
Even the few things I say that I like about this show, what I like most is the deeper version I’m not even sure the show hints toward. The show dumped a lot of scraps on the board, and just because I find the stuff to make something interesting, doesn’t give the show credit for what I made from it. Especially since half of that stuff already existed in the canon.
There were maybe half a dozen just good arcs in this show; but a lot more that were ‘well, it’s as good as it could be on this show.’ And really, probably even the good ones could have been a lot better on a better show. But at least within their limitations they did tell some decent-to-good stories. I’m just probably never going to watch very much of this show ever again.
Now, as I write this, I’m a good chunk of the way through s2 of Rebels. You’ll see how my opinion of that show unfolds; for now I’ll say that it takes a rather different course from TCW, and for now I’m not saying which I think is actually better or worse. It has different problems that are sometimes worse and sometimes easier to handle than the problems with TCW. I will say that there comes a point when I hate something about Rebels more than I ever got to with TCW, but in a way, at least hating something is a notable reaction. Even the worst of TCW was just so boring that I gave up on it instead caring enough to hate it.
