MAJOR SPOILERS for Star Wars: The Clone Wars. Consider yourself warned. Star Wars: The Clone Wars debuted more than a decade ago just a couple of years after the release of REVENGE OF THE SITH; it was a simpler time, long before Disney acquired the franchise and greatly expanded it with more films, spin-offs, and TV shows. Disney wound up shelving the series but later brought it back for a seventh and final season in order to wrap up several dangling plot-points. The final episode debuted on the Disney+ streaming service on May 4th, and creator/show-runner Dave Filoni spoke with Entertainment Tonight about the episode, particularly its final moments.
The final scene of Star Wars: The Clone Wars flashed ahead as it found Darth Vader coming across the graveyard which Ahsoka Tano and Captain Rex had built for the clones following Order 66 as well as one of Ahsoka's lightsabers. The Sith Lord reflects in silence, and then walks away. bringing the series to a close. Dave Filoni told ET that those final moments had been in his thoughts for a very long time.
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.
"I mean, I know why I did that and what it means, but I don't like to explain too much," Filoni added. "I love for the viewers to watch stuff and come up with their own theories — and they frankly come up with better things that I intended. But it's a way to have his character expressed without violating anything that happened in the films. It doesn't change anything about Vader. 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, must 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." Filoni added that those final moments were a nice way to bring a shape to the whole series, showing that "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 storm troopers walking around who are completely devoid of it." Filoni continued:
Everything is bleached out. Everything is pretty stark. Everything's washed away color-wise, which is what George did it 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.
All seven seasons of Star Wars: The Clone Wars are now streaming on Disney+.