I made it through the second half of the 1st season. For better or for worse, I have far less feedback. The last few episodes were simply tighter than the first few.
I won’t do another mammoth element-by-element analysis of this, but I really appreciate it and will do a full thought-pass of the season accounting for your feedback. I especially like your thoughts on structuring the season around the villains. We did collectively do a lot of thinking about the ordering of those first few episodes but your argument is compelling and warrants further consideration. Interestingly I did originally place Cloak and Death Watch as you suggested in order to explain Ahsoka’s absence - though I believe I ultimately dropped this because they end up being apart without explanation plenty. There is a scene of Ahsoka studying at the Jedi temple that I could use in any episode if I needed to explain her general absence in an early episode too.
Shorter collected thoughts:
- In terms of the characters just knowing each other, that’s fairly unavoidable. In the original, a lot of them simply knew each other by name. I mentally try to handwave it by believing that Jedi and military villains are known public figures or at least well researched within the militaries, and that they’ve talked about each other a few times (like Anakin must have described Ventress to Ahsoka). But there’re few good options here. Sometimes I’ve had to settle for characters saying “We’ve met before!” and leave it at that, though it is unsatisfactory. Ventress is a tough one though, because originally we only got her backstory in one of her last appearances, and people did just end up knowing exactly who she was before that. What I can confirm though is that she’s only in one cut episode, and it’s a really worthless/cheapening Ventress appearance. The rest of her appearances are preserved, with Cloak of Darkness being the first time she meets Ahsoka onscreen.
- I did have an option to cut Children of Night into two, and it remains my longest episode. Having it early and unsplit currently is mainly because I’d like to get to that Maul tease as early as possible, because Maul is one of the strongest elements of TCW and one I wanted to introduce far earlier in TCW:R to allow him to become an ever-present wildcard threat.
- I’m dismayed that you felt like Ahsoka’s lightsaber scene didn’t quite land at the end of the Holocron crisis two-parter! That was a scene from another episode that I thought really worked here, so it’s a shame to hear that it wasn’t well received. My original justification was that it begins to set up Ahsoka’s character as it appears in Rebels and Mandalorian where she seems particularly invested in future generations, and placed here it would work as a direct reaction to her realising that, as the Sith Lord is investing in force sensitive younglings, that there’s potentially some multi-generational threat that she’s beginning to work to counter. I thought it also played well given that Anakin just lost his own lightsaber, so the lesson she chose to teach first was one she’d just learned secondhand, adding to her wisdom.