Star Wars: The Clone Wars has taken a circuitous route to arrive at a conclusion, but arrive it has. Starting tomorrow, the seventh and final season of the celebrated animated Star Wars show drops on Disney+, finally giving us an ending 12 years in the making!
Of course, that ending has to end where Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith begins, because this show explores what happens during, well…The Clone Wars. Still, within those constraints, showrunner Dave Filoni and his team have gotten very creative, introducing us to fan favorite characters like Ahsoka Tano, deepening characters like Anakin Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi, and introducing new elements to Star Wars mythology like the Darksaber, which recently showed up on The Mandalorian, which Filoni also works on. “I tried to do things that honored what we had been doing on this series when I was working with George ,” Filoni told Entertainment Weekly. “At the same time, I knew this had to have a sense of completion.”
"We always knew that it ends with the third film. There’s no escaping that. It’s this inevitability…We know what happens, [but] you don’t know precisely how it happens."
Indeed, when The Clone Wars premiered on Cartoon Network way back in 2008, George Lucas was directly involved. “I thought Clone Wars, like most animated series, was going to be a two-year three-year job maybe, where I would learn a lot, have a great experience, and then be back in Los Angeles,” Filoni said.
It wasn’t. The series ran for five seasons on Cartoon Network before Lucasfilm cancelled it. Netflix brought it back for a brief sixth season in 2014, and it will finally wrap up with season 7 on Disney+, where Filoni hopes it achieve things it couldn’t before. “We have tools and capabilities that we did not have in the beginning of Clone Wars, just because animation’s come so far,” he said. “There are many things that we can render with nuance and detail that we just couldn’t before.”
But the thing that matters most to a lot of fans is how things turn out for Ashoka, Anakin’s one-time Padawan turned Jedi warrior. She’s been the breakout character of the series, even appearing in Star Wars: Rebels, another series from Filoni set between Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope. In crafting an end to this leg of her journey, Filoni kept in mind what Lucas taught him about the themes of the Star Wars universe: “the struggle between selflessness and the darker path of selfishness, greed, and fear,” as EW puts it.
“It’s really the backbone ”. Filoni said. “It’s that personal journey. with Luke Skywalker, and we’ve seen Rey going on this journey. But for me now with Ahsoka, she’s been the student Jedi the whole time, and she’s finally being challenged by what she will do with her knowledge and her training and her abilities when faced with the ultimate test — which is what you’ll see at the end of Clone Wars here.”
The seventh season premiere of Star Wars: The Clone Wars, “The Bad Batch,” premieres tomorrow, February 21! As for where some of the original characters could end up next, well, we have some hopes:
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