OK, so I had some extra time today so decided to plan the Nightsisters arc.
This was always going to be a straightforward one, because it’s just totally great and has a nice linear structure.
I thought about splitting the episode between the end of Monster (where Savage has just killed two Jedi and is now thoroughly ‘at large’) and the beginning of Witches (where the Jedi Council recover the two Jedi bodies and put Anakin and Obi-Wan on the case), and maybe putting another couple of episodes in between the two. But ultimately Witches brings the emotional arcs (Ventress’ and Savage’s) to a conclusion, plus I do want the Maul hint ASAP, so I think it is worth whipping through this one as a whole, just with a wipe between those two episodes that maybe represents a couple of days. But no “X DAYS LATER” text, I don’t think. Let’s just power through.
Nightsisters is basically fine as-is. I might trim a line where Dooku’s droid commander clarifies that shooting a ship will result in killing those on board rather than just obeying right away, and I might trim a very little of when Ventress is recovered by the scrapper crew (necessary since she then uses that ship). I’ll use the opening fight between Ventress, Anakin and Obi-Wan as the cold open.
Monster is a little slow in the middle when it’s just the selection process, so I might trim that down to just highlight Savage’s relationship with Feral (worthwhile since he kills him later) and just get through the combats quickly. I might also trim the line where Dooku thinks that he and Savage will overthrow Sidious, I know that’s a whole Sith thing but it’s a bit early to talk about overthrowing I reckon.
Witches of the Mist is also super, I’m going to trim Anakin saying he’s “popular with the ladies”. It’s OK when clones joke about it since they’ve been isolated and are entirely male, so it’s OK if women are something of a fascination for them, but I don’t think Anakin joking about being a hit with the girls quite lands right. I’m also going to cut most of Savage on Toydaria killing King Katunko, and having Obi-Wan and Anakin there. Now, he’ll be sent there by Dooku (and Anakin and Obi-Wan sent there by Talzin) but we’ll cut straight to Dooku throwing Katunko’s body on the floor of Dooku’s ship, and then have Obi-Wan and Anakin arrive afterwards but notice the ship in orbit so head there first. That won’t explain why they have a Toydarian style ship (not that it’s too obviously Toydarian), but they have resources behind them so if we have to I think we can assume they stopped off with a fleet to get something more appropriate. The gain here being that the less we can see Toydarians, the better.
Interestingly, this storyline almost needs no intro crawl, because it covers everything off within the episode itself, so this is actually a cool opportunity to fill that text with context for Nightsisters and some state of the galaxy stuff. Since this episode opens on Sullust, which has shipyards, we’ve now had a first season where the Separatists have struck at Christophsis (unknown purpose), medical stations (heal clones), Kamino (create clones), and Sullust (build ships). This all reads as the Separatists spending the first few battles of the war attempting to cripple the Republic before it can properly mobilise. So I may go through some past crawls and make that clearer. Having failed to do any of these things, we can then establish that the Republic now have a foothold from which they can grow their military forces, whereas the Separatists still have the overwhelming numbers.
In this scenario, I might like to recontextualise Christophsis as something equally strategic. Right now in canon it has no known purpose. Since it’s a crystalline planet I might have it as a munitions producer (you could imagine that the crystals become part of blasters, perhaps), or since a shield is part of the Christophsis episode’s plot, maybe it produces force shields for the republic, which implicitly the Separatists acquire after Ventress’ fleet suprises the gang. Interested in people’s thoughts here.
We’ve now had two (long) episodes in a row without Ahsoka, so I might reorder these six episodes as follows:
Christophsis > Mandalore > Malevolence > Domino Squad > Cloak of Darkness > Nightsisters. That balances Ahsoka versus no Ahsoka, and also balances our best episodes this season against our worst. We can then explain that, in the latter half of this season where shit is really kicking off in key Republic areas, Ahsoka’s off with Luminara for a bit. This unbalances Ventress a bit but I think it’s more important to balance Ahsoka.