"Star Wars: The Clone Wars" (television show) - season 1, episode 14 - Defenders of Peace - July 2023 review

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"Star Wars:  The Clone Wars" (television show)

season 1, episode 14 - Defenders of Peace

"When surrounded by war, one must eventually choose a side."

 

The pacifict group leader is adamant about not wanting to choose war and that he and his people would rather die. Well, here's their chance, because a Separatist ship approaches and lands on the planet.

And a Separatist general disembarks. Yeah, no mistaking that voice, it's George Takei. He declares that the planet is now under the "protection" of the Separatists. Speaking to Dooku, the general says that he picked this planet because it had inhabitants who could be used as test subjects. Oh, that's great. The general's new weapon destroys all organic matter but leaves droids intact. They test the weapon out first on a patch of sprawling foliage, after tossing two battle droids in there. Everything is wiped away but the battle droids are fine. Now, they want to test this out on the inhabitants.

There's one point where one of the clones - I don't know if it was Rex or Bligh - fell down and was in danger of getting eradicated by the weapon, but Secura went out of her way to save him. I was glad to see that, that she didn't think he was expendable just because he was a clone.

They steal one of the Separatist shuttles and go to the inhabitants to try to save them, but the leader refuses their help.

It's an interesting dilemma but definitely not one that hasn't been addressed many times elsewhere. You can try to stay out of conflict, but if the conflict is big enough, you eventually have to choose a side, and if you wait too long, you may no longer have a choice of sides. You can't reason with people who won't be reasonable, and not fighting back sometimes just gets you killed. (This whole topic made me think of Billy Jack, who was a character in a few movies back in the 70s. I was a big fan of those movies, and there was a whole side that advocated for pacifism in the face of any and all bullying and violence. Eventually, someone had to fight back.) I mean, at least the leader was willing to follow his beliefs through to the end, prefering to die than to compromising his beliefs, but younger members of the tribe did not agree and joined in to help the Jedi by disabling battle droids.

They steal and use shield generators so that the anti-organic weapon can't be used against them, and they would fare better in hand-to-hand combat. So instead of fighting them one at a time, why not Force push groups of them? Better yet, why not Force push a couple of battle droids to take out groups of other battle droids? Seems like that would be more efficient. Yep, I'm still fixated on Force push.

After the shields are disabled and everyone is in danger again, Anakin manages to destroy the anti-organic weapon. Some of the inhabitants help to disable some of the droids before Ahsoka dispenses with the droids.