Really good steady progress on RESISTANCE ON RYLOTH today.
I’ve done a lot of work on the opening scenes, reworking a lot of dialogue to tie the two plots together.
HERE’S A (ROUGH) CLIP OF THE INTRO (I know there’s one weird shot of Yoda in there, I’ll work around that.)
(This clip will follow from the final line of the opening text, something like “BUT A SEPARATIST SCOUT HAS JUST DETECTED WINDU…”)
We open with a scene of Tambor and his tactical droid, to emphasise that Windu is their primary threat, and to show the suffering Twi’leks very early so we sympathise early.
- Tambor says “The Jedi is progressing faster than expected” (rather than “The Republic”), because it’s only Mace’s small force on the planet as the blockade is not yet broken.
- He then says “target every inhabited village in range” as a means to stop Mace from gaining support locally. This’ll increase the threat against Cham Syndulla, paid off when we see the fire-bombing which ultimately catalyses the Twi’leks. (I’ll be establishing in the crawl that firebombing, from bombers operating out of the blockade - not the city - will be one of the major ways the Separatists are oppressing the resistance).
- Tambor then immediately drives the Twi’leks outside the city as a strategic ploy to delay any bombardment or aggressive attack on the city. I’ll move Tambor’s other dialogue from here - about withdrawing their troops into the city - to much later, to help justify my cutting of the bridge which’ll make the assault on the city easier later.
We then cut to the good guys discussing the same thing, to frame Syndulla as Mace’s solution to the problem on the ground, and set up the political situation early (since it has more importance to Bad Batch and Rebels).
- I cut all of Anakin’s good news, since it hasn’t happened yet.
- I changed Mace’s reports of Obi-Wan’s success into more reports of Tambor’s success, to keep the stakes tight, and make this much more of Mace and the Twi’leks’ final stand.
- Yoda now says “A plan you have to take the city?” (rather than “the bridge”), because I’m minimising that aspect.
- When Palpatine asks about reinforcements, Yularen now replies that he’s working to breach the blockade, rather than his original more pessimism. Mace re-emphasises Syndulla’s importance, but we now know there’ll be action in the ground and the skies.
We then cut to Wat Tambor talking to Mar Tuuk (the Neimoidian) aboard his starship, now showing that Tambor expects an attack and is prepared for it - he’s now a more competent strategist, and anything that happens in the skies is expected by the Separatists.
And finally we cut to the Republic and Yularen arriving guns blazing, in an attack that now has well-established stakes and has been discussed on the ground too, so everything’s neatly tied together.
Though all those scenes I’ve listed above have been chopping around a little, we’ll then spend a long time focusing just on the sky battle, before cutting only to Mace - there’s only two main narratives from here on and we’ll chop between them a lot less. The next scene after the (failed) space battle will be Mace finding the graves from the Twi’lek massacre whilst searching for Syndulla.
I think it works nicely! There’re some more opportunities later to keep the sky and ground plots related to each other too.
As an aside, this new version of Ryloth, focusing on Cham’s doubts about Republic occupation, will serve the following episode well too, where we’ll see more of Mandalore’s hesitance around Republic overreach.