Hello everyone and welcome to another double dose of Clone Wars catchup, looking at 4×11 and 4×12. Kicking things off with episode 11 Kidnapped they kicked off the arc with Ashoka’s home planet being invaded by the Separatists in as peaceful and quiet a way as the villains could manage. A character who is anything but quiet about their feelings is not Ashoka whose people are being targeted but her master Anakin Skywalker.

Having been sold into slavery with his mother when he was young, Obi Wan reveals that Anakin still hold a deep seated hatred towards those involved in the slave trade. It made sense as you don’t expect anybody to be particularly sympathetic towards those who used to sell slaves not being allowed to do it any more, but they didn’t take the story in the way that I expected. I thought that they were going to say that the cat species was responsible for selling Anakin alongside the Hutts and Anakin wanted retribution against them. He would let his rage consume him and realise right at the last second that this individual was not actually the one to commit the act. They didn’t do that and instead had you really side with him against this wholly evil man who had no redeeming qualities. You ended up annoyed at Ashoka for not letting Anakin kill him!

We also learnt that Obi Wan wasn’t all that great in hand to hand combat. I personally enjoy Obi Wan’s snarky attitude but you can imagine it winds up those who he is targeting. If he stopped talking trash so much then maybe he wouldn’t have been beaten so bad…but I guess the point was to drag it out as he was using himself as a distraction.

The next episode continued the story and took us to Zygerria where Obi Wan, Anakin, Ashoka and Rex all went in disguise. I was glad that they addressed the team wearing the local armour despite not being their species as I would have called it into question if it wasn’t mentioned. It just made the story move clearer without you keep wondering if this was something they were just going to ignore. Anakin went on a full on charm offensive to woo the queen and I couldn’t help but see some irony. This was purposefully over the top and cringy where as it almost mirrored some of his movie speeches to Padme which were meant to be serious and romantic.

The story looks to be continuing further as Obi Wan’s bad run of luck continued as he was enslaved himself and taken for “re-education”. The leader new Obi Wan’s sort too well as straight away he informed him that any descent from him would not lead to his own punishment…it would lead to others dying (which he wasted no time in demonstrating). Between this and the slave girl throwing herself willingly off the top of a building made this quite a dark episode tackling some pretty tough themes. I am interested to where they take the story next.

DD Rating: (11) 6.5/10 (12) 8.5/10