Friends, I’m about to suggest sacrilege, and you might need to pull me back from the edge.
I’ve been thinking about my approach to the Domino Squad arc. Domino Squad is one of the most popular arcs of the show. It has three episodes:
- Clone Cadets, where Domino Squad fail, then fail again, then succeed.
- Rookies, where some of them are killed on duty at a listening post.
- ARC Troopers, where Domino Squad and Anakin and Obi Wan defend Kamino from Grievous and Ventress.
Smudger’s approach has long been the master here, for very good reason. He trims I think just the second training session (of three) from Clone Cadets, and about half of Rookies, leaving ARC Troopers almost entirely intact. And he’s totally right to do that - those are the strongest parts of each episode and his movie (plus some Christophsis, and some extra scenes from another episode to show Grievous drawing the Jedi away from Kamino) works really well. It’s one of the most popular Clone Wars edits, if not the most popular.
BUT
Like, where is the heart of this arc? I just watched ARC Troopers first (because often it helps to contextualise the whole based on the conclusion, if the conclusion lands well), and I agree with Smudger that almost 100% of ARC Troopers has to stay. There’s some good Grievous versus Obi-Wan, some good Anakin versus Ventress, Echo gets a nice highlight, Fives gets a nice highlight, Kamino is a dramatic location, and of course Ninety-Nine is the real emotional punch in the gut that makes this whole arc memorable.
But what sets that up best? Arguably, a little of Clone Cadets. Showing Echo and Fives before the assault, for sure. And definitely highlighting Ninety-Nine before they’re sent away. But Hevy (who has the closest relationship with Ninety-Nine) dies in Rookies (in nice heroic form, certainly), but doesn’t serve the show much beyond that. He exists to highlight the heroism of Ninety-Nine, really.
Let’s also account for the fact that Echo is important in the Bad Batch, and Fives is important in the Order 66 arc, so we should know them by name.
And while Echo, Fives, and the rest of Domino Squad are good characters, they’re not exactly deep characters. They’re not emotionally rich. They’ve got a small number of traits which make them distinct from most clones, but their personalities only differ from ‘the template’ by a small amount. I think it’s right that we should highlight them enough to remember their names, buuuuut
Do we really need to see much of them? Like, what if we started with a cold open, ‘at the beginning of the clone war’, and saw Domino Squad simply win their final challenge in Clone Cadets - without facing/overcoming adversity first - and then have Hevy thank Ninety-Nine for his support. And then ‘present day’-it straight into ARC Troopers.
What I’m saying is - if we maintain the whole Ninety-Nine emotional core, and the main character emotional core of the finale, and if we at least highlight Echo and Fives, do we need to show the challenges and growth of Domino Squad?
Part of the reason I think this might be more additive than subtractive is because, to be frank, some of the elements in Clone Cadets are a bit weird. Brick the bounty hunter dislikes Domino Squad enough that he assaults a clone and tries to force a reaction. At least three of the five in Domino Squad actively try to leave the squad. And we see them begin in an extremely sloppy way, but improve over only a couple of days into what Shaak Ti calls “possibly the best clone squad I’ve ever seen”, just because they learned team work and creativity? Are their various eccentricities really some perfect venn diagram that results in a really optimal team? And isn’t that mooted by the fact that we never see Domino Squad act as a squad again after ARC Troopers?
I don’t know, am I going mad here? I know nobody thought Rookies was too amazing, but is it heretical to think that the best bits of Clone Cadets are about three minutes near the end to set up ARC Troopers?