Star Wars: The Clone Wars has come to an end, with the thirteen-episode final season making its debut on Netflix recently. With the show over, I spoke to the show’s supervising director, Dave Filoni, for an in-depth, lengthy conversation about the storylines in Season 6, the big revelations that occurred and yes, a bit on the things that were never completed, when the decision was made to end the series.

Filoni spoke about the thought-process behind what we saw in the final season, how certain key moments came to be and much more, and also touched upon the upcoming series, Star Wars Rebels.Suffice to say, hugefollow for The Clone Wars: Season 6.

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Sure, of course. [Laughs] I wonder why!Again, all of these stories originated with George [Lucas], and he wanted to tell the story of Order 66. He seemed very interested in getting into the details of that story and what drives it. So we had a lot of dangerous ground to tread there because how can you tell a story about that? You'd have to try not to give away to the main characters, the Jedi, "Oh, this is all going to fall apart around you!” So the sad thing about it all was the minute we told the story, the minute we had someone start to understand it and explain it to the audience, that character was going to die. Like, there was no way out of it for Fives. There's that sense of sadly impending doom for him. From my earliest conversations with George coming onto Clone Wars, as far back as 2005 when I put to him "What was Order 66, and how did it work?”, he was always connected to the idea that it was somewhat of a Manchurian Candidate concept. When the order goes down, it's not like the clones have a real way to say, "No, I'm not going to do this.”I think the unanticipated thing for Palpatine… because I like showing that not everything goes according to plan for Palpatine. It seems if you watch it from the movie side that he had his machine and it just ran perfectly, but I like the idea that there were mere misses and calamities that he had to recover from. One of them was the idea that this almost got discovered and that it might backfire and that the programming wasn't perfect and that the Jedi had affected the clones in a way that he had not anticipated, which is with their loyalty and individuality. For some of them, like Fives, that became a driving thing behind him wanting to figure out not just his loyalty to the Jedi but his loyalty to his friends. "What is going on here?" He asks more questions. So that was one side of that dilemma, that the Kamioans say that they have been genetically engineered and that they have inhibitors placed in them.The funny part of it is, the Kaminoans, this is all true for them, you see? The Kaminoans, and this is a critical thing to understand about them. they don't think they're evil at all. They don't see it that way. They are coming at it from a business position. What's fascinating about them is that when something's wrong with their product, they don't call the people that bought the product. They just want to cover their contract, so that's why they call Tyranus up, and they're like, "You said if there's a problem, we should contact you. There's a problem." He's like, "Well, what's the problem?" "We have a defective piece of merchandise." Rather than recall all the products, they just want to decide what's best to do with that one product -- and that was very much the conversation that Shaak Ti had with Nala Se about who owns these clones. You know, Shaak Ti is kind of forced into a conversation about the clones as property as opposed to people. So you kind of get a gamut of the different viewpoints on these soldiers and what they're all about and who sees them as property and who sees them as people. It's all wound up in how Order 66 worked in the end; not just that they're genetically encoded, not just that they're bred to, unfortunately for the Jedi, betray, but that it's this emotional, philosophical difference between the way the Jedi see things and the way that the Kaminoans see things and the way that Palpatine and Dooku are using them. I hope that makes sense -- that was kind of long and windy, but it's probably filling in gaps for you, what I'm saying!Yeah, you got it exactly. That's what they're told, right? The Kaminoans, I don't think they care much. Even if they said, "We're going to eliminate all the Jedi," they'd be like, "[sarcastically] Oh, that's fascinating. How much are you paying us?" Why would they be invested in the Jedi being successful versus another group?I think that's also the one thing that's hard for the fans at large to understand. If you went to the Senate and told them -- I've held this since I got on the show -- "Oh, hey, Palpatine's a Sith" when he gets elected, most of the Senate would say, "Oh, uh huh. Okay. What does that mean for us?" They'd be like, "Well, the Sith are the enemy of the Jedi." They'd be like, "Yeah, but... wasn't that, like, a thousand years ago? He seems to be doing a good job. The trains are running on time." You know, so the average citizen of the Republic has never even met a Jedi and is vaguely aware of their existence in some ways. They're not as wrapped up in this good versus evil conflict as they're wrapped up in trying to survive every day. I think for a lot of them that's why, when you look at it in the big picture, at the end of Revenge of the Sith, Padme says, "So this is how democracy dies: with thunderous applause." Well, they all think this is a good thing, the Empire coming in. It's not like they took over and instantly enslaved tons of people and caused terror in the galaxy. Sure, that's going to happen in the Outer Rim territories, but it doesn't happen immediately at the end of the Clone Wars. It's all pieces of a bigger puzzle that we're putting together.