It’s been six years since audiences experienced new episodes of Lucasfilm’s Star Wars: The Clone Wars, but this Friday the series returns for its seventh and final season.
The revival comes following a nearly two-year wait since the #CloneWarsSaved announcement at Comic-Con International: San Diego (SDCC) in 2018.
When The Clone Wars came to an abrupt end in 2014, fans who’d followed the series since 2008 were left with a body of work that felt incomplete, and for good reason: The series was left unfinished, with planned episodes left in various states of development. Some of those episodes made it to Netflix as The Lost Missions, but the story was still lacking any real closure.
Season seven comes with a tall order: to complete the vision established by series creator George Lucas and executive producer/supervising director Dave Filoni, and to satisfy a passionate fanbase that regards The Clone Wars as some of the finest Star Wars storytelling in history.
Launching on Disney+ on Friday morning, The Clone Wars returns with “The Bad Batch,” an episode that is already familiar to many since it was previously shown at Star Wars Celebration 2015 and at starwars.com in an earlier, unfinished form. “The Bad Batch” is the chosen name for Clone Force 99, a squad of Clone Troopers who are “defective, with desirable mutations.” The footage seen in trailers is quite an upgrade from what was previously released and should kick things off with quite a bang as the final countdown spans three distinct story arcs.
The dozen episodes that will close out The Clone Wars are also dangling a tantalizing carrot for fans of the first Disney+ hit, The Mandalorian. As the timeline leads up to — and perhaps overlaps with — the events of Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith, audiences will finally witness the Siege of Mandalore, a devastating conflict that has been hinted at in The Mandalorian as “the great purge” and was directly referenced in Star Wars Rebels.
In flashbacks shown in The Mandalorian, we’ve seen the titular character as a child, separated from his family as they run from Super Battle Droids — an event that would’ve taken place within the events of the Clone Wars. Knowing that Mando wasn’t born as a Mandalorian, but was taken in as a “foundling” by his tribe, perhaps we’ll see the dots connect and deliver more insight into other characters who might have been in on the action, including Moff Gideon and The Child.
Star Wars: The Clone Wars features the voices of Matt Lanter as Anakin Skywalker, Ashley Eckstein as Ahsoka Tano, Dee Bradley Baker as Captain Rex and the clone troopers, James Arnold Taylor as Obi-Wan Kenobi, Katee Sackhoff as Bo-Katan, and Sam Witwer as Maul.
New episodes of Star Wars: The Clone Wars will debut Friday mornings on Disney+.
Photo: Lucasfilm/Disney+
