(RE)RELEASED - S02E01 - Seven Warriors (V2.0)

RELEASE VERSION, now brought up to my more polished 2.0 standard.
Our first episode of season two.
Comprising the episode originally called Bounty Hunters.
Running 24 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.

This is the opening episode of my second season. I included ‘in memory of Akira Kurosawa’ from the original episode, and renamed the episode ‘Seven Warriors’, to emphasise the fact that this is an homage to his ‘Seven Samurai’ film.

This isn’t an incredible episode, but it’s perfectly decent and a good season opener, as it achieves a few things: Firstly, it reintroduces our core trio of Anakin, Ahsoka and Obi-Wan, and they all get their moment to shine. But more importantly, it sets the tone for this season, with its emphasis on the rise of scum and villainy, and the impact the war has on the ‘little guy’. We also get our first sighting of Hondo (at least for TCW:Refocused, in a far better episode than his original introduction), who’s a great villain and addition to the franchise. And it also gives us the first seeds of Rebellion, which’ll continue a few times through TCW.

The episode is largely untouched.

Noteworthy changes:

This episode is titled ‘Seven Warriors’, to emphasise the connection to Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, and because it sounds cool.
The opening crawl establishes the state of the galaxy now that the opening conflicts are over and battle lines have been redrawn, leaving many behind. It also emphasises the season’s themes, of bounty hunters and piracy. I chose to also make Felucia’s importance (but remoteness) explicit, because we see it a few times throughout the Clone Wars so I felt the context was valuable.
I removed the opening search for a medical station, instead just letting them check on Felucia by convenience when passing by on a more important mission. Highlighting that it was a diplomatic mission requiring an ambassadorial shuttle (which is what that shuttle canonically is) helps explain why three Jedi got shot down so easily.
I removed the large monster from the beginning, since it served no purpose to the story, but was able to preserve the nice familial bickering between our three leads (and fix a small continuity error from the original episode in so doing).
I trimmed a later reference to the medical station - Obi-Wan’s now resistant to help simply because of the time concern and because, knowing there was a light Separatist presence in the system, their prolonged presence may draw further Separatist attention to the planet. (I feel like this works better, since this episode is also about the main cast having the idea of local resistance, which will eventually grow into the Rebellion.)

Onwards to s02e02 Massacre. I’m going to try my more recent idea to have scenes from Lair of Grievous precede the Massacre portion (with the reasoning being that Mother Talzin leaked its location as revenge against Dooku/the Separatists in the Nightsisters arc), which’ll give us some cool additional scenes and make the Massacre far more personal for Grievous.