Ryan Shoots First: The Clone Wars (S7 Ep6) “Deal No Deal”
Ashoka is back for Part 2 of her arc for the final season of The Clone Wars and this week she finds herself deeper into the underworld with Trace and Rafa.
We pick up with Ashoka helping Trace work on a starship and trying her best to hide her Jedi past by saying she went to the Skywalker Academy. Trace tries to convince her to stick around as Ashoka really has no direction or goals right now. Rafa has a scheme and needs a pilot now so she recruits Trace and her ship the Silver Angel. Rafa confronts Ashoka as she wonders what her angle is. Rafa knows first hand everyone has an angle. I suppose we all will go back to Rise of Skywalker now to see if the Silver Angel is in the big fleet battle.
Trace accidentally enters military airspace and Anakin being on the command ship senses her presence for a moment. Trace is really annoying here as she refuses to listen to anyone who knows more trying to help her. Trace has never flown before and isn’t exactly open to pointers. Anyway they crew heads to the legendary Kessel. It’s cool to see the planet aesthetically sync up with what we saw in Solo. They are delivering “medicine” but they have to prove themselves before they land the contract. Ashoka is skeptical as the spice they are transporting can be made into many things beyond just medicine. Anyone who knows Star Wars knows spice running is an infamously dangerous job and Rafa also has never done it before. So Ashoka who has commanded armies is stuck playing dumb with these rookies. As they fly over the spice mines, Trace notices the droids working but Ashoka points out they are slaves. Ashoka discovers they are delivering to the Pyke Syndicate, Rafa again is curious how Ashoka knows so much. While they are fighting Trace again plays the genius and dumps all the spice into space because that’s the dumbest thing she could have done. They show up to the meeting with the Pykes and Ahoka stealthy uses her Jedi mind trick to convince the leader to give them the money. Before they can get away the Pyke’s patrol ships trap them in a tractor beam after they discover the empty containers as the episode ends.
Sigh… I want more for Ashoka, I’m assuming she will be going full on Jedi soon and need to expose her skills to Rafa and Trace but it’s moving very slow especially this episode. There really was no action in the episode at all and with the limited number of episodes in this season this felt like a waste. My hope is by getting in debt to gangsters maybe Ashoka comes upon Maul and learns he is working in the criminal underworld and reports back to Anakin. This leads to her commanding her own squad of troopers again. I am theorizing but all of that sounds much more exciting than Trace and Rafa doing one dumb thing after another. Trace is slightly insufferable, I get what they are doing with her character and I could even draw some parallels to how Ashoka was in the beginning of the series but she is really annoying right now and is holding Ashoka hostage story wise. I will reserve full judgement till the end of the arc to see where she goes but this episode in particular did not do much for her naive, cocky, dumb character. Even the visuals that I usually gush over did not give us much as there was so little action. Here is to hoping next week things pick up a bit and we can get out of this arc with something meaningful for Ashoka. If it does nothing than get her back in the game I guess that is something.