Thoughts on Resistance on Ryloth
This was another episode I was very curious to watch because you said that you had dramatically changed the story.
The opening is kind of disorienting. This is a general note for the whole series whenever you remove any exposition, but I think that it is important to not rely on the opening text to inform the viewer as to what is going on, and still have the episode itself properly explain everything. The vast majority of viewers just kind of zone out for the opening crawls of Star Wars movies, and they serve as context rather than important exposition. If you closed your eyes at the beginning of the ANH title crawl, you would still be able to easily follow the movie.
1:56 We cut from blobby watching Mace advancing on the city on foot to Mace standing inside discussing plans. This is confusing because without the context of seeing Mace being forced out of the AT-TE in an assault that we see in the original episode, the viewer is left wondering why he was just walking outside for seemingly no reason. Additionally, Mace’s “we’re going to need help to take the city” line feels very strange by itself without the rest of the conversation he is having with the trooper.
3:12 the “they won’t breach the blockade” dub is very noticeable. The audio mixing does not seem to include any of the distortion from the hologram that the other characters like Palpy seem to have. The conversation itself also seems very strange with its inclusion. Mace is clearly indicating that the way to win the fight is to recruit the resistance, but then the audience is implicitly told “actually no, that’s not what’s important right now. We’re going to focus the next 10 minutes on the blockade that was only briefly brought up as a secondary consideration.” There is a conflict as to what the driving force of the narrative is.
13:13 Mace’s line about postponing the invasion is very odd in the new chronology where he is already advancing on the city. In the previous zoom call, Mace had all but dismissed the reinforcements idea to focus entirely on the resistance fighters (because in the original episode it was made clear that reinforcements simply weren’t an option). To now have him say that they can’t do anything until the blockade is broken feels contradictory.
19:12 The cut from a gesture of good will to the ominous fleet feels very jarring. It almost feels intentionally ironic, which I don’t think is the case.
24:42 Mace’s urgent and specific order for Anakin to destroy the bombers is strange considering that he supposedly hasn’t even gotten close to getting past the blockade (it’d be like telling allied forces to start taking out artillery in Berlin when D-Day hasn’t even happened yet)
I’ve noticed this a few times, but it really stood out to me here: most Clone Wars episodes end on a celebratory note, so to have it go from that to the sad, melancholy music you use for the end credits (as opposed to the original episodes’ fanfare) feels very off.
Ultimately I think splicing the two episodes creates confusion more than anything else, and the conversations that the characters have don’t make much sense given the context of what is going on in the other plot line. The narrative driving force gets muddied and it feels unclear what the characters are working towards as what needs to happen to win.
I think a lot is lost by leaving out Innocents of Ryloth entirely. In the original Ryloth trilogy, it created a very clear bridge in the invasion progression of “reach the planet”->“establish a military presence”->“take the capital.” I feel that that structure creates more building action that feels that the heroes are getting tangibly close to their goal at every step. I definitely think that some of the babysitting plotline and droid hijinks can be pared down, but the episode also has some of the emotional highlights of the entire episode trilogy that are sorely missed by its total omission.