Also, for some reason I welled up when Jimmy Smits was talking with Mon Mothma about “recruiting the jedi that served you in the Clone Wars”. Something just clicked for me right there. Like I could finally accept that the original six films, while half terrible, may really have taken place in the same universe after all.
I feel exactly the same way. This film and Rebels work so well as connective tissue that the PT feels much more relevant than it ever has for me. Vader in the tank was another moment where I got a really strong feeling that this is all one story. It occurred to me that if you were to watch these in chronological order, Anakin getting hacked to hell was pretty much the last thing you saw before this one. That one little scene did more to reconcile the Vader of the OT with the Anakin of the PT more than anything else I’ve seen.