Today’s the day. As it’s Star Wars Day, Disney Plus dropped the much-anticipated series finale of Star Wars: The Clone Wars and we finally got to see the last chapter in a story that’s spanned – on and off – 12 years. Of course, we also got an answer to the big question of how Ahsoka Tano and Darth Maul survived Order 66.
Last Friday’s “Shattered” saw the execution of Order 66, with Commander Rex battling his clone programming and Ahsoka managing to discover that the inhibitor chips are causing the clones’ betrayal of the Jedi. When we left her, she’d been forced to release Maul to cause a distraction while she operated on Rex to remove his chip, but a clone troop had broken into the medbay.
“A Victory and Death” kicks off with Ahsoka and the freed Rex blasting their way through the turncoat clones, only using non-lethal force. The same isn’t true of Maul, however, who slaughters his way through to the ship’s hyperdrive chamber, where he turns off the generators and forces the vessel out of hyperspace, meaning they never make it to their planned destination of Coruscant.
But being yanked out of hyperspace so suddenly throws the ship into turmoil as it hurtles towards a moon. Ahsoka, Rex and their droids hatch a plan to get across the hangar and steal the last remaining shuttle to escape. Here, they have to avoid Jesse and a band of clones, which allows the pair a moment to acknowledge the heartbreak they feel at this tragic turn of events.
They trick the clones, but Maul arrives and beats them to the punch by stealing the shuttle himself. That leaves Ahsoka and Rex surrounded, but the former Padawan uses her lightsaber to cut through the floor, where they discover a small fighter and flee the doomed cruiser.
Later on, the duo have buried some of the clones, marking their graves with helmets on sticks. Ahsoka is dressed in a robe, a callback – or, er, call-forward – to her look in the flashforward at the end of the Star Wars Rebels finale. Ahsoka knows that she has to leave her old life behind completely and drops her remaining lightsaber on the ground. And, many years later, that same saber is found by Ahsoka’s old mentor – Darth Vader!
Star Wars: The Clone Wars wrapped everything up in a way that gelled with the various other corners of the franchise and frankly, fans couldn’t have asked for a better finale.
