Do, why didn’t you decide to do one 60min episode out of 5x14,15 and 16? I mean, it’s a one straight story.
This was an option I could have chosen because they have at least small timeskips between each episode, rather than being explicitly back-to-back.
I did choose this option for the following reasons. I believe that one of the strongest parts of TCW was the Maul/Mandalore plotline (composed of brilliant episodes/arcs and paid of wonderfully by the season finale). It’s also something that I think would be most interesting to the new viewer of TCW, who may be familiar with The Mandalorian (and therefore be interested in additional content there) or to the viewer who only knows the prequels and expects that a TV series would simply take us from AOTC to ROTS in a straightforward way (in which case the introduction of these new wildcards and third parties not mentioned in the movies may show that there’s an unexpected, and therefore more interesting, story to be told here). Furthermore, originally the Mandalore plot was quite sparse, and especially the Maul plot only kicked off very late in the story - the last 40% of the series. So I wanted to turn the Maul/Mandalore plotline into more of the ‘spine’ of my show, having it begin earlier and develop progressively over time - kind of in the way that Moff Gideon doesn’t appear in EVERY episode of the Mandalorian, but in each appearance the threat of him grows and continues to hang over the show even in his absence. To achieve this kind of ‘maximum throughline’, that meant splitting the Maul/Mandalore content into more smaller chunks, rather than fewer larger chunks.
When it comes to Ahsokas trial, I’d leave 5x17 as a separate one, since it’s has a different, more chill csi spoof, vibe and then present the 3 other episode as one story
That sounds eminently sensible. If you’re familiar with my tracker spreadsheet you can see that some future (and previously some past) episodes have been listed as e.g. s03e08/09, indicating that I’m not sure if I’ll split an arc into one or two episodes. I ended up putting Umbara and Rako Hardeen as a single episode, whereas it looks like Onderon and Yoda’s Quest will become two. I expect to conduct the same review process for Ahsoka’s Fall, and will likely end up splitting it out as you suggest.