lazypadawan | Clone Wars Debriefing: "Pursuit of Peace" (Reply)

Padmé is once again the center of an episode about politics. Taking place right after "Heroes On Both Sides," Padmé and her bleeding heart pals try to stop an appropriations bill for more clone troopers. She seems to be making some headway, which of course gets Dooku to send a couple of bounty hunters to make sure these senators "get the message." Given that not even top tier bounty hunters like Jango Fett could kill Padmé I'm not sure why he thinks these low renters can do the job, but whatever. The soon-to-be-murdered Onaconda gets his arm broken. Bail is almost killed and Padmé gets a great speederbike chase scene, almost reminiscent of her daughter's chase scene in ROTJ. Still, Padmé is undeterred. Her attempts to further persuade her colleagues runs into a wall as cynicism gets in the way. Then she realizes her own handmaiden/servant Teckla has a sellable story that could be a game changer in the Senate.

I'll get to first what drove me nuts about "Pursuit of Peace." I've written about politicobabble in Clone Wars before and it comes back with a vengeance without making a lick of sense. I can't help it. A little kid will just shrug it off, but adults aren't. Naturally they are going to think about it. Padmé starts out kvetching about the debt the war is racking up and that "making" five million more clone troopers was too expensive for a Republic on the brink of bankruptcy. Fair enough, though I doubt that's why Padmé has been so desperately trying to end the war. Then she mourns that the money should be paying for "education" and "health care" instead, sounding more like a Democratic Senator from Vermont than a Galactic Senator from Naboo. So Padmé is trying to make a guns vs. butter argument and obviously, despite attacks from a homicidal Sith Lord and his parade of freaks all over the galaxy, she'd much rather churn butter. But I can't understand how the costs for five million clone troopers would be oh-so-much-more than having to fund entitlements ad infinitum just for the trillions of residents of Coruscant ALONE much less the entire Republic. Or why stopping the production of these clones would necessarily stop the war. If Palpatine really wanted to, he could recruit volunteers to fight or institute a draft without the clones.

Then there was Padmé's staffer Teckla. Having breathed the Potomac swamp gas for as long as I did, I know that personalizing issues by bringing out the unemployed truck driver, the grandma suffering from cancer, the orphan who needs expensive pharmaceuticals to live, etc. is used all of the time by all parties because it's effective. Given that Padmé herself used that tactic in TPM, I'm surprised it took her that long to figure out that Teckla could personalize her argument. While Padmé's speech is performed well and had nice stirring music to go with it, her claims about Teckla's family made me go, "Huh?" When I heard that her family is living worse than the poorest guy in Bangladesh--there's no electricity and her poor children can only bathe every two weeks!--I thought, "Maybe you're not paying her enough, Padmé." Padmé claims it's because of the war and hints that the Republic's war efforts are taking resources away from the people, leaving them to live like maggots. I have a few questions here. First of all, assuming Teckla is also from Naboo, why didn't Padmé know what was going on there? Wouldn't the Queen have told her? Wouldn't she have gotten an earful from her constituents? Why wasn't a wealthy world like Naboo able to support its own infrastructure? (If Padmé thinks a few million troops is too much money, providing basics like water and energy to the entire Republic would bust any budget). Half the damn place is water. Why this business with bathing only every two weeks? If things were in that bad shape, the planet would be rioting, the Queen would be deposed, and Naboo would be screaming to get out of the Republic. Whether or not Teckla is from Naboo, why wouldn't Padmé at least offer to bring her family to Coruscant?

Padmé--and the episode itself--would have a much more powerful argument by putting a human face on how the war devastated individuals because the war itself is destructive, not because guns take the butter away. Sheesh, how ham-fisted can you get?

And how can these people just be copacetic with the Banking Clan openly admitting it also funds the other side??

Okay, on to what I enjoyed about it. The animation is beautiful. The Coruscant models look amazing! And the expressions on the characters continue to improve. There's a wonderful moment where you can read on Padmé's face what she's thinking after she speaks to an Aqualish senator.

Padmé's chase scene through the city was fun to watch. I especially got a kick out of how she got arrested at the end of the chase for stealing the speederbike! I can see it now on the GFFA's answer to The Smoking Gun, complete with mug shot ;).

It was nice to see a handmaiden finally show up on Clone Wars and to have a little bit of insight into Padmé's relationship with one. Nice green nail polish, Teckla! If I'm not mistaken, Teckla was also the name of one of the background seen-for-a-second servants lurking about the lake palace in AOTC. By the way, sharp-eyed viewers would have noticed the picture of the palace, Padmé and Anakin's love nest, on the wall in her office.

And as predicted, Padmé's Separatist pal Mina is dispatched off camera. As soon as Padmé revealed her name to Palpatine in the last episode, I knew she had just signed her friend's death warrant. When Padmé dies, I'm sure Mina will be waiting in Purgatory to fix her big mouth.

The best part though is at the very end. For once, Padmé and her faction score a victory and a worried Mas Amedda asks Palpatine what they're going to do. In just a couple of seconds, we see revealed Darth Sidious the chess master, not just Palpatine the politician. At first he speaks directly to us, then we see Amedda present. Sidious knows that fate is going to take care of this little speed bump: "We must let the wheels of the Senate turn." And sure enough, the murder of "Uncle Ono" in "Senate Murders" shifts things back in his favor. It's a flash of what makes Clone Wars heads above a lot of other shows.