Aaand that’s the main cut of my Worms of Geonosis episode put together. It’ll be about 36:30 plus credits. Like the previous couple, I still need to finalise it with credits etc before upload, but I want to spend my edit-brain on the meat of the episodes this long weekend, and polish after.
For this episode, I heavily borrowed from Smudger’s excellent interleaving of Legacy of Terror and Brain Invaders, and I used his ideas for audio changes in a couple of places. I still cut it myself from the original sources though, because it forces me to think each element through afresh rather than being lazy. I have some light differences from Smudger’s first half - we don’t need to see Poggle flee, I reckon, and it’s OK if we see the worm-clone carrying eggs early (because we don’t know yet that they contain worms) - but I’ve restructured the second half further.
With mine, we now continue to intercut between the episodes for longer, breaking up the long scene of Anakin and Obi-Wan in the Queen’s throne room with a couple more shots of Ahsoka and Luminara struggling against the zombie clones. This way, we keep them in mind more as we learn of the terror of the parasites, and we put them into more jeopardy sooner. I also did a little more to make the Legacy of Terror finale more ominous, using music and a transition to change “let’s hope the secret [of the worms] is buried with them” from being a hopeful episode ending to an ironic emphasis that Ahsoka is in serious danger - which is followed up immediately by the reveal that Barriss has been zombiefied, and attacks her.
I also removed the “coming in too fast” subplot, because it’s not interesting. We don’t care about the clone medical station so there’s no jeopardy there, and what’re they going to do? Bump into it? It’s not very exciting. It’s cool that Ahsoka wants to prevent the spread of the worms, but that intention enough is valuable for her character - we’re not invested in the outcome beyond Ahsoka caring about it. Instead, we keep the focus on the drama inside the medical ship as Ahsoka defends against Barriss, cutting away only to the odd shot of Kit Fisto responding to their arrival in the system. Once Ahsoka has saved Barriss, the plot is ready to conclude.
Interestingly, once I’ve completed this (and thus my second season), my edits will have covered all of the main arcs covered by Smudger’s five TCW TV-to-movie edits. I’ve always really admired Smudger’s work and for a long time had eagerly anticipated his future plans for TCW, so it’s cool to feel like I’ll have reached parity with his original work and be able to take The Clone Wars forward from that point onwards - albeit in a different format to the one that he chose.
By chance, all of my episodes up to the end of my season two add up in time to almost exactly the same length as Smudger’s five movies - about eleven hours total - which feels like a neat match.