Star Wars fans are still buzzing about the huge events that went down in the most recent story arc on the show, focused on Darth Maul and Death Watch’s plan to take over Mandalore – which culminated in an incredible three-way lightsaber battle between Maul, Savage Opress and Darth Sidious in the episode "The Lawless" and included several big deaths before the arc was over.

Star Wars: The Clone Wars – “The Lawless” Review

In the wake of all of this occurring, I spoke to The Clone Wars ’ supervising director, Dave Filoni, about all of these plot twists and how they came about. Suffice to say, if you haven't seen all of this arc, major spoilers follow!

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That’s a really good question. It just seemed to evolve by the episode. There was a sensibility by this point, oddly, that we needed to deal with some of these characters that we’d put in motion that don’t show up later in the films. For George [Lucas], that’s where Satine really came into play, because she was kind of a loose end, and I had thrown around to George trying to do other things with Satine and maybe telling different types of stories. But he felt very strongly that the character development between she and Obi-Wan, when they resolved that they love each other but they are not going to commit to anything beyond that, shows you that Obi-Wan is different than Anakin and that he has conquered that realm of his selflessness and personal needs. They’ve kind of let each other go, and what I really like as a nice moment is even down to the last minute with Satine, you see that it doesn’t affect the way she feels about him. And he doesn’t let what happened to her consume him and turn into rage and anger like Anakin would. She still says that she loves him. Let’s face it, everything that happens to her in this arc happens to her because of her connection to Obi-Wan and because that gets exploited, and she becomes a tool for Darth Maul. But she doesn’t hold that against him, and he doesn’t react to it.At the end of the day, you need a powerful kind of parallel and opposite to what Anakin goes through with Padme. Maul and Anakin would have gotten into a major conflict over that, which is exactly what Maul would have wanted. It’s kind of Obi-Wan’s passiveness and inward dealing of emotions that separates him from Anakin. I thought it was important that when you see Obi-Wan at his biggest breaking point as far as emotional reaction, it’s actually around his investment of Anakin. That’s where you see it in Revenge of the Sith, so you still have that high moment for Obi-Wan and his emotions.That’s more what it’s about. Yeah, you’re nailing it. That’ll be a hard thing for the audience to accept, because they will want to react, and they’ll want Obi-Wan to react with them. I know James Arnold Taylor wanted to react more, and I was like, “No, this is not where that’s going to happen.” I kept telling James, “We’re going to sell his emotion in the animation. You’re going to feel it when you see his expression, but I don’t want him to say anything. This is not his moment for that.”I think one of the things I really liked about these series of episodes was we were able to take Bo and make her a significantly more interesting character. You start to wonder as this progresses, “Wow, I see that she wouldn’t join Maul… She’s helping Satine, and before I didn’t see that coming.” To have the idea behind it being that that’s her sister really kind of drives home this personal connection, which when you look back at all the choices she’s made, I think her character and the course of events make more sense. To give you a kind of interesting tidbit to all that, Bo-Katan being Satine’s sister was never in the original script. It was something I had planned in my mind, but I knew that selling it to script phase or something of this [sort of] personal relationship can be a challenge sometimes with George, because I know he didn’t necessarily see it that way. I wanted him to experience it visually, with the full-on emotion of the characters’ connection. So I shot everything and then I added all this dialogue later, almost in the way that you see Mark Hamill saying, “No, that’s not true, that’s impossible” and Vader saying, “No, I am your father,” you know, almost taking a page from that book to keep this secret. Even on the book that came out, which actually tells you this story -- there was a book published that’s already out -- that tidbit about Bo-Katan won’t appear in that story. I had it removed from there to try and maintain this level of secrecy as much as possible.At this point, I think she’s a vastly more interesting character, you understand her motivations for things, and I have a rather lengthy backstory that even explains how she became a Death Watch soldier that goes all the way back to the time she and Satine are six. Because to figure out how she got to that point, and yet Satine is a duchess… I have a whole story about who their father was and what their relationships were and everything with Vizsla, going back for a very long time and how that intersects with Obi-Wan Kenobi. I’d give you more detail except I’d like to tell that story at some point in some form of Star Wars media in the future. I’ve discussed it with a couple people, and we’ve started to architect it into the timeline of Star Wars somewhat, just to see where these things fit.[Laughs] Right? And that’s very sibling-like, I find. Having a brother myself -- not like my brother’s a big time pacifist and I’m some war monger -- you know, brothers and sisters all go through different paths and jealousies, and they’re challenged by things. I think it’s something that’s strong in the original Star Wars, where you have a story about a brother and a sister, these twins. When you look at this arc, you have the two Sith calling themselves brothers in Maul and Savage, and that relationship is very important. Then you find out that there were actually sisters in this story arc that are very different. It’s interesting how these things evolve as you’re telling your story in the Star Wars universe.