Star Wars: The Clone Wars/Fridge

Fridge Brilliance

• Obi-Wan, upon seeing a holo of Savage Opress during "Witches of the Mist", initially thinks he's looking at Darth Maul and says so. At first it seems as if he thinks all Zabrak (Maul's species) look alike or that he was the only one of his kind, so it seems a pretty stupid thing for him to say. But later, we learn that Savage is Maul's brother. Your mileage may vary concerning this Retcon, and it may really bug you, but if there's a family resemblance between Maul and Savage then Obi-Wan mistaking one for the other makes a lot more sense.
  • It doesn't explain how Obi-Wan manages to confuse their build though. Maul was 1.75 meters tall and a really agile combatant, post-ritual Savage is a hulking brute who makes generous use of his superior physical strength.
    • Don't forget it's been at least a decade since Obi-Wan last saw Darth Maul. It's not all that far fetched that he wouldn't remember a guy he killed as a Padawan all that well.
      • Wait, he'd remember his face well enough to confuse him with his brother, but wouldn't notice that he was a completely different size?
    • Considering he's looking at a horned, tattoo-faced man engaging two Jedi in melee combat and winning easily, I don't think you can really blame him if his thoughts instinctively jump to "Darth Maul". And at any rate, Savage was showing plenty of agility in that fight. He kind of had to, since he was fighting people armed with weapons he had absolutely no way of blocking.
• A meta-version, as this happened during the production - Son is the embodiment of the Dark Side of the Force, and Sam Witwer was cast as him because he voiced Starkiller in The Force Unleashed, which was confirmed to Witwer as "Son is the Dark Side of the Force, so you might hear a little bit of Starkiller's voice in him". Witwer's response was that then you should hear elements of all of the different Star Wars dark side characters, because in a sense, Son is all of those characters.
  • Additional meta brilliance, in the same game he also voiced the Emperor. There really is more than one darksider in his voice.
    • Indeed, at some points, Son's voice changes into Palpatine's.
    • And it gets even better now that he's also voicing the resurrected Darth Maul.
• When I first saw the Star Wars: The Clone Wars season 1 finale, I was disappointed by how lame Cad Bane's ultimate goal was. He broke into the senate, took a dozen senators hostage... all so he could free that whiny pile of crap Ziro the Hutt? That was it? Until I saw the season 2 trailer. It all made sense. Jabba hired Bane to get Ziro free. The whole point was to show what lengths Bane would go to in order to complete his mission. He broke into the senate just to do some second rate job. HOLY CRAP. That makes Sidious hiring him in season 2 all the more suspenseful. Since if that was what he went through to do Jabba's job, then what will he do to accomplish Sidious' ones? - User:Emperordaein
• This troper found "Carnage of Krell" odd, since it is all about clones disobeying orders in order to kill the traitorous Jedi giving them. Especially since this is the 501st, who would eventually raid the Jedi Temple. Then I realized-Krell is exactly why they did it. Anakin is the Jedi they trust the most, and if he says the others have betrayed the Republic, Rex and the others would believe him. And they were the only clones to have fought Jedi before. It still is impressive irony.
• In the second episode of the Nighsisters arc, Mother Talzin warns Count Dooku that men are "easy to acquire, harder to control". Fast-forward to the end of the next episode, and both Dooku and Ventress, who had taken Savage's loyalty for granted, manage to lose him, while Mother Talzin is the one Savage turns to when he feels that everybody else's betrayed him. As it turns out, it seems that the whole trilogy of episodes was a gambit by the old witch to "acquire" the most powerful of "her" Nightbrothers and ensuring that he only stays loyal to her. "Easy to acquire, harder to control" indeed.
• In the "Clone Cadets" episode, Shaak Ti remarks how Echo fails to adapt to the simulation training known as The Citadel. The Jedi fortune cookie for the episode "The Citadel" is "Adaptation is the key to survival". And guess who doesn't survive the episode after that? And for me the Fridge only kicked in after I saw in on the main Trope page.
• How exactly did Pre Vizla, a non-Jedi with a Jedi weapon and barely a match for Ahsoka, manage to hold his own against Obi-Wan Kenobi? Well, Satine was watching them, and Obi-Wan is extremely averse to courses of actions that would make her despise him, and use of lethal force is amongst them. Hence why he let Vizla take the offensive, dodging and blocking his blows until he could see an opportunity to disarm him or bring him down using only his fists.
• Why did the writers give Darth Maul only a single-bladed lightsaber, when his non-canon counterpart in Old Wounds used a double-bladed lightsaber effectively, despite having the same kind of robotic legs? The Double Weapon, Maul's Iconic Item, represents who he once was; the single blade, the remnant of his Double Weapon, represents what he's become. In a way, the broken lightsaber is a metaphor for Maul himself. Both Maul and his lightsaber were cut in half by Obi-Wan. Both lost much of their potential. But both, when reactivated, are still fearsome killing machines.

Fridge Horror

• In the Mortis arc, the Father, Son, and Daughter all die. Anakin is said to have brought balance to the force on Mortis once that happens. Now if we assume that that applies to the real world of the show, the best way to balance the Force would be to kill every Force-sensitive individual in the galaxy. Now that's a Family-Unfriendly Aesop if I ever saw one.
  • Somebody already thought of that.
    • The movies end on a similiar note. The only force-sensetive surviving is Luke.
  • Much less of Family-Unfriendly Aesop if we assume that the whole dream logic reflects contents of Anakin's mind instead, but no less Fridge Horror.
    • Anakin is seriously messed up.
• You know, in the Pursuit of Peace, Padme was telling us about how, in addition to the war expendiatures already, making 5 million new clones would basically bankrupt the Republic, and that Padme's assistant's children were unable to bathe or read by light in the evening despite living on Naboo, which was a relatively wealthy planet. Considering the massive military overspending that Palpatine did for the Star Destroyer fleet (each one individually worth more than the GDP of some star systems), the Super Star Destroyer fleet, the various superweapons, one shudders to think at how the Empire proceeded to pay for all this.
  • Given the anti-nonhuman sentiment, it probably got taken out of their hides.
  • The particular number is just stupid, particularly as in the very same series we see mile-long warships with crews in tens of thousands being expended rather casually. However, there is no doubt that Palpatine's military spending was crushing and extracted by brute force.
• In Star Wars: The Clone Wars, you look at the end and see that Jabba gets his son back (who he genuinely loves), Anakin becomes friends with his annoying but plucky apprentice, Obi-Wan looks approvingly over all, Clone Captain Rex and Clone Commander Cody have won another battle... and then you realize that Jabba is strangled by Leia, Anakin tries to kill Obi-Wan, becomes Darth Vader, successfully kills Obi-Wan, and dies, and all the clones either die in Order 66 or at the very least become brainwashed soldiers for a corrupt government–whose main role is to die in amusing ways.
  • The clones already were brainwashed disposable war slaves. That was their entire existence. Except following the purge, their officer corps stops being a religious warrior cult and start being amoral tyrannical psychopaths picked for their loyalty to the new order.
  • Ashoka, Anakin's close friend and Padawan, not only is doomed to either die or vanish between the end of TCW and the start of Episode III, but it's going to happen in such a horrifying way that she is never mentioned again.
    • Or she'll never exist in the first place, hence no mention of her.
• One of the biggest questions in Star Wars: The Clone Wars is Ahsoka Tano's eventual fate. If she's not present in Episode III, what happened to her? Was it related to Anakin's Start of Darkness? And of course, Order 66...
  • Either she was killed during the Clone Wars, killed during or soon after Order 66, or survives to die sometime during the rule of The Empire. Considering the fate of some other popular Jedi, the latter is the most likely.
  • This is basically unavoidable when you set a children's cartoon before the in-universe apocalyptic climax. Every bit of Aesop about individuality, honor, and friendship is thrown out the window when Order 66 comes, since each and every one of those Clones are gonna slaughter their beloved and respected Jedi friends without so much as a second thought. Similarly, all those admirable moments Anakin has? Meet the new lord of the Sith.
    • A slight hope is given to minor characters, since due to their obscurity they will have likely survived the Clone Wars and (if they're Jedi) Order 66. However, the many Jedi that die during Order 66 were also originally obscure, one-off characters. The Clone Wars fully fleshes them out. This Troper had a serious case of Fridge Horror when he saw The Clone Wars first, then Revenge of the Sith.
  • Given that the Clone Wars lasted for three years, Ahsoka was only made a Padawan near the beginning of said war, and Padawans tend to stay Padawans for about a decade... she'll probably die in the Grand Finale of the Clone Wars series, since she's not seen in Revenge of the Sith at all. Anakin will just barely be able to not succumb to The Dark Side then, because it's not what Ahsoka would want. And then news will soon be given of Palpatine being kidnapped by Grievous...
• The creators say not to think to much about what the natives burn on the ice world Orto Plutonia. This, however, might not be an example of Bellisario's Maxim so much as a warning against potential Nausea Fuel. Any pioneer who walked the Oregon Trail back in the days when thousands of buffalo roamed the plain could tell you that dung is plentiful and makes a darn good fire, even if it is stinky. Now, how the animals on Orto Plutonia managed to consume enough plant life to produce that dung...yeah, that's where the Fridge Logic comes in. Maybe it's a good thing not to think about this too much...

Fridge Logic

• Padmé has handmaidens in the live-action movies, bodyguards who have in the past impersonated her in times of trouble and were shown to be fully willing to die for her in the line of combat. Where. The. Hell. Are they during the course of the movie and the series when Padmé is being her usual self? Specifically, trying to be either a hero or a martyr - it's hard to say which.
  • They served her during her tenure as the elected Queen of Naboo. Once she left office, she lost most of her handmaidens, but did keep some. This show has brought back one, Tekla, but don't expect very many because they're back on Naboo serving the new Queen. Unless they've been fired for looking too much like Natalie Portman.
    • Not sure how that is Fridge Horror since their job revolves around looking like the person they are supposed to protect. Every time Naboo gets a new monarch I imagine that the previous bodyguards, in this case the queen's handmaidens, are discharged from service, probably with a glowing endorsement for whatever job they try to get next. Their time as handmaidens ends when the queen's time in office ends.
    • They are a bunch of trained body guards who served the Queen faithfully and was trained to take a blaster bolt for the monarch if need be. Chances are the new monarch just kept them on staff in other needed positions.