I’ve continued reviewing and planning like a madman, working my way through the conclusion of the show. Thoughts and challenges:

Thinking about the very finale, the Siege of Mandalore quadrilogy splits neatly into two episodes of 45 mins each. That’s all well and good, but I think I should consider that really Revenge of the Sith is a necessary part of the Clone Wars journey as well. So really, at the end of your TCW:R journey, you’re watching both RotS and SoM (for four hours of content, or about five episodes in terms of me balancing the seasons) to conclude the show.
I don’t know how to present that finale. You could go RotS then SoM to best preserve SoM’s intensity. That’s the easy path. If you wanted to intercut them it’d become a hassle. There’re a lot of edits which combine the two into one super movie, of which I’ve only watched Delpheas’, but I think my preferred option would be to take a chronological intercutting of both and then turn them into ~5 individual episodes. Interested in ideas.
I wonder what’s the right balance between breaking this show by balanced seasons versus the overall flow. I’m also really torn on a few episodes I’ve always been unhappy with:
- I think I have season one really tight now. There’s a potentional Ryloth follow-up episode focusing on Cham and Orn, with Obi-Wan, but I really don’t want to break the flow of season one for it.
- Season two has a long period without the Anakin/Ahsoka relationship, though all of the episodes in that lull are strong and follow our established main plots. The only other place the Cham/Orn Ryloth episode could go is season two due to the Ahsoka model, but I think it’d push that lull too far.
- Season three is tight and well balanced. I do not love the Citadel arc, which balances out the season, though I could potentially put the Kadavo arc there instead. There’s a chance I could use the Echo’s death audio here, and refer to the Kadavo palace as ‘The Citadel’, if we really wanted to have Echo die onscreen. Bear in mind that his death is already super throwaway in the Citadel arc. (I’ll check references to Echo’s death.)
- Seasons four and five are both loose. The big plots are Ahsoka’s fall (and absence) and all of the mysteries. The mysteries do a lot of heavy lifting, but there’s not much of a throughline now. If Kadavo shifts, and if I drop the Ventress/Boba episode and the Younglings/Hondo episode, which I’d really like to do, we’ve got 12 episodes excluding the finale (in whatever form that takes). 12 feels OK for a season, whereas 17 (including the finale bits) feels like a lot. Then again, it is a finale, maybe we don’t give a shit, since shows can have variable seasons.
- We also need to contend with the fact that this period of time has a lot more mixed media, with the ‘Anakin/Obi-Wan fireside chat’ (from the unfinished episode, so either as audio or using that HD youtube render with permission), then the audio comic for the Darth Maul episode, then the finale incorporating the live-action movie. So there may be a feeling of brokenness that I’d like to avoid as much as possible.
- I feel like we’d get more value out of a tighter 12-episode season four (+ big finale), than two seasons of ~10. Treating the finale as its own thing probably makes some good sense too, since there’re a few options.
I did also think about breaking the show from 5 seasons of 10 episodes into 4x12 or 3x16. There were benefits to both, but ultimately I think the tightness of the first three seasons, where the show needs momentum and focus the most, remains sensible.

Thoughts, as always, very welcome.

(Oh, and sorry for being such a tease about returning to editing! I promise I’ll be actually producing actual content soon…)