(RE)RELEASED - S01E08 - Children of Night (V2.0)

RELEASE VERSION, now brought up to my more polished 2.0 standard.
Our eighth episode of the first season (Be aware I’ve shifted the first season around a little.)
Comprising the entire original Nightsisters arc.
Running 52 minutes.
DOWNLOAD LINK is in the tracker spreadsheet, PM me for access.
Note: It’s recommended that you download this before watching, rather than streaming it directly from Google Drive.

The Nightsisters arc is a popular arc with good reason. It focuses on the internal politicking of the Sith and the Nightsister/Nightbrother darkside cults, has some great development for Ventress and a little development for Dooku, and gets the ball rolling on the Maul plotline which is very important to the show. I placed it here in the chronology because the Maul(/Mandalore) content is so good that I wanted to make it the ‘spine’ of my show, an ever-present threat that throws the idea of the Clone Wars just being a predictable two-party conflict into doubt, that adds threats and characters that we don’t know the outcome of even if we’ve seen the movies.

Ahsoka is absent from this episode, but since our last episode put her on archive guard duty, that’s explained well enough (well, better than the original episode, which didn’t explain it at all, at least).

Noteworthy changes:

The episode is titled ‘Children of Night’ to highlight the various self-styled ‘children’ of Dathomir - Ventress, Talzin, the nightsisters and nightbrothers, and Savage.
The opening text lightly reminds the viewer of the current state of the war: After all of the opening strikes against key targets, both sides have now bedded in for what they realise is going to be a longer war than they anticipated. The Jedi are meditating on the future, which I think works thematically, but I also use here to lightly explain why Anakin and Obi-Wan are in their Jedi robes rather than their more military garb (a costume change which originally happened for season three of the original show).
It’s pretty much the entire trilogy of episodes stitched together, with only minor trims, other than-
I removed the scene of the Nightsisters trying to assassinate Dooku directly using invisibility spells. It was a fun combat, but it returned us to the status quo, and I’m not a huge fan of adding too many new force abilities. Instead now Talzin’s plan is always the subterfuge of sending Savage as a sleeper agent.
I trimmed the recruitment of Savage heavily. Now, there’s only one trial, and Ventress only selects Savage and Feral to fight - implicitly because she can see that Savage is the strongest, and she needs to use his feelings for Feral to break him.
I cut the references to Iridonian versus Dathomiri Zabrak. It’s not something relevant to the plot, and it’s the kind of thing that, if you cared about it, you’d have already looked it up on Wookieepedia.
I also cut the scene of Anakin and Obi-Wan at the Nightbrother village. All they learn there is to visit Talzin, which they should have done first anyway (other dialogue refers to Dathomir as the ‘planet of the witches’, and Obi-Wan later shows he knows that ‘women are dominant on this planet’), and the Nightbrothers aren’t as important to this story or to the Clone Wars as a whole, beyond Savage. Instead they just fly directly to the witches.

Onward now to the Holocron arc, the two parter which concludes this season, which shouldn’t take too long to polish.