sade1212 said:
I think my vote would be for option 2. I’ve obviously already made my case for Malevolence coming before Cloak, but I also think that your edit of Malevolence is a little stronger than Cloak, so it has that going for it too. I’m still totally onboard with the very early Death Watch stuff though, especially since that’s a quality episode to hook people in.
totally agree, here
EddieDean said:
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.
The problem i’ve with this is: they’re already a sidekick (the squad as a whole) in this show, if we jump right into there final exam, we wouldn’t be able to connect to the squad emotionally as we do if we see them fail twice (and kind of rooting for them) and therefore to the single members of it, later (fives, ninety-nine).
Although i can partially agree with that:
EddieDean said:
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?
Maybe you could cut something of it (perhaps brick the bounty hunter, „possibly the best clone squad…“) . I think especially beside their training and them in their quarters, we get some nice scenes were they’re more humanized (e.g. - forget the name of the disabled clone - if i’m not mistaken fives stood up for him?).
So a suggestion, if possible, would be to cut around the squad members that do appear again.