As the final season of The Clone Wars teeters on the brink of release, Dave Filoni talks to Entertainment Weekly about the return of the much-loved show and his hopes for its last ride.
Much of this final season, he says, has been years in the making: The first few episodes will find Rex teaming up with the Bad Batch, a group of experimental clones with special abilities. The story line was already in development when the show was canceled back in 2013, and Filoni — who’s since worked on series like Star Wars Rebels, Star Wars Resistance, and The Mandalorian — says he’s thrilled to see these long-planned plots finally come to life. “We have tools and capabilities that we did not have in the beginning of Clone Wars, just because animation’s come so far,” he says. “There are many things that we can render with nuance and detail that we just couldn’t before.”
Other final-season story lines include the long-teased Siege of Mandalore and the return of Anakin’s former Padawan Ahsoka, whom fans last saw walking away from the Jedi Order. In crafting Ahsoka’s story, Filoni says he kept going back to what Lucas told him about the pillars of Star Wars storytelling: the struggle between selflessness and the darker path of selfishness, greed, and fear.
“It’s really the backbone [of the Star Wars saga],” Filoni says. “It’s that personal journey. [We saw that] 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.”
