Star Wars: The Clone Wars is back for its final season on Disney+! In Clone Wars Declassified, StarWars.com looks at each episode’s biggest moments and surprises. Fall in, soldier.
If you thought the penultimate episode, “Shattered,” was the most intense storytelling in all of Star Wars: The Clone Wars, it still couldn’t prepare you for the series finale. In “Victory and Death,” the final episode in the final season of the series, Ahsoka and the newly-altered Commander Rex make their last, desperate attempt to elude the clone troopers now on the hunt to execute Ahsoka and anyone who gets in their way. The episode, now available to stream on Disney+, is exactly the kind of epic and thrilling conclusion one would expect, and it makes my heart hurt. Here are five highlights from the episode.
1. Maul destroying the hyperdrives.
Leave it to Maul to create a diversion by ripping the hyperdrive out of a vessel that’s hurtling through space, sending it directly into the gravitational pull of a nearby moon. By the time anyone else realizes what he’s done, it’s too late.
2. “I don’t want to hurt them.”
Beneath the stoic expression on his clone helmet, Rex is crying. Ahsoka is no longer a Jedi, but faced with annihilating Jesse and the rest of the clones standing between her and the shuttle, she chooses to find another way off the ship. It’s a heartbreaking moment that shows that Ahsoka still exemplifies all the Jedi’s greatest values, including compassion.
3. Ahsoka letting go of the shuttle to help her friend.
For a moment it seems like Ahsoka might be able to stop Maul in his tracks, and bring back their means of escape. But standing there alone, summoning every last bit of strength and connection to the Force, she fails. She literally must let go and return to the battle, scrambling to find another way and allowing Maul to slip through her fingers. Utter defeat in an instant, but a choice she makes courageously in order to help her dear friend, Rex.
4. Falling, falling, falling.
Even though we know that Ahsoka lives, surviving to fight with the Rebel Alliance in the galaxy’s seemingly interminable wars, the suspense of her plummeting through the air toward the moon, nearly getting a hold of the lip of the hatch, and finally -- FINALLY -- getting inside the ship Rex is piloting is still an incredible and terrifying sequence.
5. The graveyard.
To be fair, we could find five highlights in the last few minutes, but if we choose the graveyard, it encompasses both watching Ahsoka mourn the dead, their helmets propped up in one final stand of attention to their former commander, and that epilogue. That epilogue!
