Damn, this sounds good Eddie. You’ve really put some thought into this. I’ve loved all your episodes so far, but these are the kind of episodes I really love to see come out of your project!
It’s definitely satisfying when it comes together like this. Since I know that the idea was spawned in a writers’ room and THEN made to fit into some multiple of 22-minute episodes (at which point all of the ideas may have been both fleshed out and watered down), I feel like sometimes I’m trying to uncover/imagine what those original ideas were initially, then recompiling them from the component parts in front of me. For this one it was realising that ‘the black market is government corruption’ was the ‘plot’ (or, I suppose, the setting, almost) of this duology, and the ‘character arc’ (really the plot) was Ahsoka demonstrating the patience we’ve recently seen her learn successfully.
I find that often you find the answer when looking at where a plot ends up, and thinking back to front instead of front to back, because it’s in the execution that you find the writer’s intention, not the initial setup. That’s also why I think that making the whole show set up and reinforce the Mauldalore finale is sensible.