The cut itself only went a bit sticky after the sudden zoom into Dooku’s hidden base and the sudden introduction of the rest of the crew and Bane’s takeover of the mission with Eval not sulking about it despite his massive ego (still present in the cut).
Thanks Artan. Can you expand on this a little please? When you say ‘a bit sticky’, do you mean that those establishing shots don’t quite work? Or something graphical? Or are you referring to the story regarding the introduction of the full crew?
Do you think that excluding the introduction of the additional group members constituted a narrative hole, or do you think it was forgivable? If a hole, do you think it would be patched by mentioning Bane’s established ability to quickly pull together a crew in the opening text, or does it feel like more is needed?
The establishing shots work and it’s clear what’s going on any why. It’s the story that just feels a bit patchy. I think ‘The Box’ covers a lot of exposition as well as the team selection that’s just missing if you remove the whole thing.
Eval is set up as the valuable mastermind with Bane as a useful minion in the first part before ‘The Box’ shows that Dooku wanted Bane all along. There’s also no mention of needing to find help in the first part as all their focus is on running, that’s because ‘The Box’ has the switch form Eval to Bane and the focus on the team whereas the cut has the team appearing out of nowhere with no indication why Bane didn’t ask them for help in part 1.
I think if anything is added to the crawl it might have to be that there’s a crew waiting in secret on Naboo ready for the prison break but that might disrupt the flow and add unnecessary exposition.
ordinarily I might suggest adding some scenes from ‘The Box’ as a quick montage with dialogue playing over them but the problem is that the pacing of your cut is really good and would potentially slow down if any more was added.
I think it’s something I wouldn’t have noticed if this had been the original episode as things like this happen (like the Obi-Wan and Anakin are captured by Hondo episodes) but having seen the full arc it stood out to me. It might be worth seeing if anybody else notices it before considering changing anything as it may just be me that noticed it.