(RE)RELEASED - S02E08 - Shadow of Geonosis (V2.0)

RELEASE VERSION, now brought up to my more polished 2.0 standard.
Our eighth episode of season two, the first of the three-part Geonosis finale.
Comprising the original episode Senate Spy.
Running 23 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 Senate Spy only lightly touched up. It’s one of the less strong episodes, a little clunky and ham-fisted, but it helps set up the remaining two parts of the Geonosis arc (which is excellent) and it’s also got some good Anakin/Padmé tension which’ll pay off in a few places later.

As I was putting this season together (based on the best episodes for this chunk of time, narrative flow, and character balance), it naturally cohered into a season focused on ‘chaos and instability’ (bounty hunters, corruption, rising third parties, and the impact of the war on the ‘little guy’ in the galaxy). There were very few plots about Republic/Separatist conflict in this chunk of time - which is absolutely fine, since the war isn’t our focus (nor our source of enjoyment) so much as the characters within it, and they get good development this season. But the absence of major on-screen conflict worked nicely with the decision to conclude this season with the Geonosis arc (a strong finale), because it gave me the opportunity to present the Geonosis reveal as something a bit more material to the plot. Now there’s a bit more tangible ebb and flow to the war - the Separatists failed to get a swift victory due to the Republic defense of Kamino, so have turned to long-term strategy and investment in a new droid factory so they can come back stronger, and that’ll lead nicely into season three’s political conflict over the creation of more clones, and thus more escalation. That all serves to emphasise Padmé’s role in the war, as well as make it less of a case of “what fight we’re not invested in the outcome of are we watching this week?”

Anyway, my main point here is that, while this is a slightly weaker episode, I’ve polished it a little and emphasised its role within the larger plot, to help squeeze a few more drops of quality out of it.

Noteworthy changes as follows:

The episode is titled ‘Shadow of Geonosis’ to emphasise the ties to what’s to come.
The opening crawl highlights the relative quiet and plays up the intrigue.
Rush doesn’t objectify Padmé in quite as slimy a way, and Anakin’s still jealous but isn’t as overt about his jealousy, so we drop some slapstick.
Instead of Padmé being poisoned by her drink, which is super obvious, I just had her poisoned by the meal instead.
Padmé isn’t Clovis’ password (I’ve always hated ‘guess the password’ scenes where the password is an obvious thing that person likes), instead, his holoprojector was just unlocked.
I slightly reordered the finale to let Clovis being in trouble come first, so we can end on Anakin and Padmé returning.

Onwards to the second battle of Geonosis…