Star Wars: The Clone Wars showrunner breaks down the emotional ending

The series finale of Star Wars: The Clone Wars aired on Monday, May 4, serving up a perfect and emotional ending to the much-beloved animated series. Toward the end of that episode, “Victory and Death,” former Jedi Ahsoka Tano and former clone commander Rex created a memorial to all the clones who perished when their Republic cruiser crash-landed on an unknown moon. These were soldiers who used to be their friends, but who turned on them when Darth Sidious, aka Emperor Palpatine, commanded them to execute Order 66.

Dark days, those days.

After that emotionally-charged scene, we jumped forward in time. We saw a snow-covered planet where the Empire was searching the crash site of a cruiser that was active during the Clone Wars. You guessed it, it’s the same ship that Rex and Ahsoka were on, and it seems like the Empire is looking for something specific.

Suddenly, a familiar black cape swirls in the snow, and the camera pans back to reveal Darth Vader. He marches toward the memorial Rex and Ahsoka built years before, he reaches down and picks up one of Ahsoka’s lightsabers, the one she dropped before she and Rex went into hiding. He ignites the blade, then slowtly turns and stalks away, his image reflecting in the visor of a clone helmet.

There are a lot of layers in that scene, like the fact that the clones who died in the crash were all part of Anakin Skywalker’s battalion, the 501st (later renamed to Vader’s Fist), and how Anakin had constructed the lightsaber he, as Vader, picked up and clearly recognized. Speaking to Entertainment Tonight, The Clone Wars showrunner Dave Filoni revealed why those final moments were so important, and how they came to be.

“That’s an idea that I’ve had for a very long time,” he said. “As I went over different ways to end the show, that was always one of the options I had. Ultimately, since Star Wars is a saga about the Skywalker family and Anakin plays a large role in the Clone Wars but also in Ahsoka’s life, I felt that if you watch the four parts, as much as Sidious has this hidden layer of character arc in the episodes, so does Anakin.”

"I wanted to draw a full arc for him where if you’ve never seen Star Wars, you hopefully will be able to understand that the young man that Ahsoka is very good friends with, that’s like a brother to her in the beginning, that the villain Maul says, “Hey, he’s going to turn out to be this bad guy,” in the end you see that, well, that was actually unfortunately true. The through line is the lightsabers that he worked on for her. There’s this symbolic arc of Anakin underneath that all."

Filoni’s hope for the final scene was that fans would be able to connect the dots from the Anakin they see in The Clone Wars to Darth Vader as he appeared in Star Wars Rebels, where he and Ahsoka — once great friends — joined battle:

“It doesn’t change anything about Vader,” said Filoni. “But it helps bridge into the work we did in Rebels, and you can see that whole arc. One of the tragic things for me is that, in her friendship with Anakin, much like him, Ahsoka is going to deny what certain truths might be and not accept certain things because they are terrible. All the way through Rebels, you see that she is not willing to accept what this truth is, even though it’s eventually staring her in the face.”

"It was a nice way to bring a shape to the whole series, that shows you a subversive thing about what the Clone Wars was really about for Anakin, how [Ahsoka] found her way through it intact — which is what I believe — and just show that the clones, for all their character and all their individuality, by the end also you have Stormtroopers walking around who are completely devoid of it. Everything is bleached out. Everything is pretty stark. Everything’s washed away color-wise, which is what George [Lucas] did at the end of Revenge of the Sith. A lot of things I do are just ways of taking what George did and reasserting them, enhancing them, showing that this is what his half of Star Wars is about, ultimately, and how the heroes will prevail through it, despite all of the wickedness of the enemy."

Filoni went into the final season of The Clone Wars knowing he’d have to address the fact that Darth Sidious would eventually activate the Order 66 chip in the brains of his clone army, but he didn’t want to focus on Sidious as a character because it would undermine what his shadowy, mysterious presence in the prequel trilogy. “One of the keys to telling a story in the prequel time period is that Darth Sidious is almost always a character in the background,” Filoni said. “Whether he’s actively in the episode or not, a lot of things that are happening are happening because of his machinations. He is very much the Phantom Menace throughout the entire storyline of the last four. It was intended that if you have never seen any other episodes of Clone Wars, these four episodes should be enjoyable on their own. That impacted the way I wrote it and the outcome. Yet if you have seen [the show] and you are a Star Wars fan, it should reach a level that’s much more immersive for you than just the casual viewer.”

The final four episodes of The Clone Wars began with the highly-anticipated Siege of Mandalore arc, where Ahsoka helps the Mandalorians take back their homeworld from the iron grip of Maul. The lightsaber duels between Maul and Ahsoka were some of the most visually stunning scenes in any Star Wars story, animated or otherwise.

And there’s a reason they looked so damn good. Filoni brought in the man who played Maul in The Phantom Menace and Solo: A Star Wars Story: Ray Park. While Sam Witwer returned as the voice of Maul, Park wore a motion capture suit and dueled Ahsoka’s stunt double, Lauren Mary Kim.

“That’s one of those things that you go, ‘This would be really neat,’ but you don’t know how it’s going to be pulled off,” Filoni said. “We had dabbled in motion capture a long time ago. There’s actually some other motion capture in this series — I mean, there’s literally one shot in the other six seasons that was motion captured and it’s one of the Wookies in the “Padawan Lost” arc — but that type of data tends to be so dense that it’s hard for a show like ours to animate to.”

"Well, fast forward many years and technology has improved a lot. ILM had been developing a lot of tools and when I was working on Mandalorian, I was doing a lot of pre-visualization in motion capture. So I was much more familiar with the technology than I was back when I did Clone Wars."

Park came in and did his thing, whirling and spinning so fast that it nearly broke the mocap suit. “Ray was so fast at certain spins and stuff that it would break the tracking. It just couldn’t track him,” Filoni continued. “The lightsaber would fly out of his hand, virtually, because it couldn’t keep up with him. It was a really fun time…I had the floor taped off with all those girders that they were balanced on and I said, ‘You can only step on these lines,’ and that just gave this really precarious sensibility.”

"But once you have that virtually, [director Nate Villanueva and I] could take the camera and go under the virtual floor and do all these up angles and get shots that would have been very hard for us to get otherwise. It was just an awesome experience, and I’m glad that people seem to have really enjoyed it."

All the extra work Filoni and his team put in paid off. It provided closure to Clone Wars fans who, like me, were extremely frustrated when Disney prematurely canceled the show after season 6 debuted in 2014. Now, the circle is complete.

You can stream every episode of Star Wars: The Clone Wars on Disney+.

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