I haven’t seen the arch in a long time, but is there an angle you could take where say its only from Anakin’s perspective? (if you wanted to cut things down) It’ll paint Clovis in a much worse light I’d feel and although some of the political parts may be lost it could prove to help reduce the episode to it’s better parts
(not sure how viable this idea is, given I haven’t seen the arch in a while)
Just to address this directly, I did consider it. I looked into trimming most of the first episode and explaining Padmé’s investigation via the crawl, starting when Anakin breaks her out of prison. But I don’t think we can start with Padmé in prison without seeing the steps that take her there. We know she likes a caper, but I felt like we really needed to see it - plus to see Clovis’ introduction as the arc flows around him.