RELEASED - S05E01 - A NEW DAWN (v2.0)

RELEASE VERSION.
Our first episode of season five (the final season).
Comprising the original episodes Gone With a Trace, Deal No Deal, Dangerous Debt, and Together Again (the Martez Sisters arc).
Running 62 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 arc is the first one from the true ‘final’ season of the Clone Wars, released by Disney after the earlier cancellation. As such, it has far lovelier animation than before. The core of the story is fairly decent, focused as it is on Ahsoka finding herself after leaving the Jedi Order, but it’s marred by some pacing issues and filler which sap energy away from a viewing.

Some people have strong opinions on the Martez sisters - please keep them to yourself rather than sharing them in this thread. From an editing perspective, their most facepalm moment does need to stay as it drives the plot, though I have been able to tighten some of their behaviour (and a suprising amount of inconsistency which I noticed when putting their scenes back to back.) They’re now a little more consistent, and a little more believably competent survivors, though still ultimately the same characters.

As it stands, this is basically the same episode, just a lot tighter.

Noteworthy changes:

The episode is titled ‘A New Dawn’, to really sell that this is Ahsoka’s story as she turns a new chapter, and since it feels Star Warsy. It’s also a little hint at Crimson Dawn, who raise their head here.
The episode is placed here as this is the original chronological placing, and it works a little better here with Bad Batch padding the gap between this and the Siege of Mandalore. I’m running the whole arc as a single episode because it just naturally flows better that way.
The crawl just focuses on Ahsoka’s current situation.
The first episode plays out as it did originally, until we meet Rafa. We the cut the entirety of the droids plotline, as it was just unnecessary filler action that does little for the characters than their other appearances do. I retained Rafa talking about having a plan to get Bintu’s money, since-
The second episode (which features another, now the only, Rafa job), plays out in full, with no edits whatsoever. That means we transition from episode one’s laundromat to episode two’s working on the ship scene.
Bridging episodes two (which featured the gang getting captured on the Pyke landing platform) and three (which begins in Pyke prison), I used the later scene of the Mandalorians noticing them using binoculars, lightly trimmed so that the angle they’re spying from can be assumed to work.
I trimmed almost everything else from episode three, which was almost exclusively an action scene escape, revealing nothing new about the characters and ending with them captured again.
The prison scenes are now merged and trimmed into a single two-scene conversation, trimmed in a few places to avoid redundant dialogue and inconsistent group decisions (originally made just to punctuate each episode’s beginning and end). The Martez sisters begin with sadness and reflect on their parents, then we have a little re-establishing shot to allow time to pass, returning to them as Rafa is brainstorming but Trace asks Ahsoka for an idea, which Rafa objects to.
The final episode plays out almost in full. I did explore cutting some of the sisters stealing the spice, but there wasn’t a clean option here. I did, however, trim a little of their decision to come back to help Ahsoka, making it more out of their shared goodness than Rafa’s pettiness.
(The Martez sisters returning with spice effectively closes the now-still-open Bintu plotline, as far as I’m concerned.)

Onwards to the next episode, the Bad Batch, which is the only remaining one that actually needs any significant work done to it.