The Clone Wars - S7E6: Deal No Deal
THE CLONE WARS - DISNEY +
After the second episode of Ahsoka’s arc in Season 7 of The Clone Wars, it still isn’t entirely clear what her storyline will be or where it will take her. Thus far, all viewers have gotten are two fighting sisters, in the form of Trace and Rafa, and some routine Star Wars nefarious dealings. This time, it’s the Kessel Run and that isn’t the only bit of nostalgia that feels forced. Earlier on, a Force encounter between Anakin and Ahsoka somewhat manipulatively echoes Darth Vader’s Force connection to Luke Skywalker in The Return of the Jedi.
In addition to the nostalgia, this episode – Deal No Deal – features a boneheaded decision by Trace that forces a plan to be made, that then turns out to be that the plan is really no plan at all in an anticlimactic reveal. The generation of conflict and the childish arguments between characters all reek of contrivance and cartoonishness. This episode and the arc so far – as condescending as it may sound – doesn’t feel important yet. And not in the sense that it’s too small of a story – after all, many of The Clone Wars’ best stories are small-scale – but the characters don’t feel lived in and their actions don’t feel earned.
Most episodes of the show that belong to arcs contain a cliffhanger at the end that make viewers keen to push play on the next episode, but the cliffhanger here only elicits a mere sigh. It doesn’t make one eager to find out what happens next – even though it should. That issue mostly stems from the bad choice that Trace makes. Everything that happens afterward is almost discounted because that one decision is so contrived. No person in their right mind would have seen that as a logical conclusion to the conflict at hand. It would have made the episode a lot more interesting to see the characters forced to make a decision one way or the other, not have the decision taken out of their hands entirely.
The childishness that embodies that choice also plagues the rest of the episode, as in a scene where Trace continually promotes the speed of her ship at inappropriate times. One could say that her character is naive and childish herself, but that shouldn’t mean that she is constantly used as an excuse for conflict and comedy by the writers.
Deal No Deal revels in all of the wrong aspects of Star Wars and is as ham-fisted as it is irrelevant.
