Star Wars: The Clone Wars offered a high-stakes finale for a story that had gone through seven seasons, and it did so while honoring the show’s main legacy in Star Wars. After years of fan campaigns, Clone Wars was brought back for one final season on Disney+. With a production value higher than ever and cutting-edge animation technology at their disposal, the producers of Clone Wars had a chance to tell a few more stories before finally closing the Order 66 chapter of the Star Wars timeline.
In a way, Clone Wars has had three different finales. The first was “The Wrong Jedi,” the last Clone Wars episode produced for Cartoon Network before the show was canceled following Disney’s acquisition of Lucasfilm. The second one was “Sacrifice,” the final episode of The Clone Wars: The Lost Missions – a season that aired on Netflix as a way to release the episodes that had already been finished. Last, after Disney+’s revival of The Clone Wars, the show finally received a proper ending, one that celebrated its importance to Star Wars.
In the Clone Wars series finale, “Victory and Death,” audiences only follow three characters: Ahsoka, Rex, and Maul, and they all have one thing in common. Each of these characters was a major addition to the Star Wars universe introduced by Clone Wars. Of course, Darth Maul already existed, but his revival and how he broke free of the Sith influence to become a major player of his own were all done in Clone Wars. The show had dozens of characters at its disposal to use in the finale, but it chose to honor its most crucial contributions to the Star Wars canon: the creation of Ahsoka and Captain Rex and the rescue of Darth Maul's history. By having its final episode centered on these three characters alone, Star Wars: The Clone Wars not only acknowledged how important Ahsoka, Rex, and Maul had grown to become but also cemented the show’s legacy in Star Wars.
Throughout seven seasons, those three characters received almost as much attention as bigger Star Wars names like Anakin and Obi-Wan. Unlike characters that audiences already knew from the movies, Ahsoka and Rex were blank canvases in terms of what stories the creators could tell. In a similar way, bringing back Darth Maul ended up creating almost a brand new character; he was now alive and had a complex backstory, much more agency, and bigger plans than just being Palpatine’s pawn as he was in Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace. Having Anakin, Obi-Wan, and other famous characters like Mace Windu and Yoda in never-before-seen missions always worked to deliver great episodes, but it was in its original characters and storylines that Clone Wars sparkled the most. Rex, Ahsoka, and Maul help Clone Wars remain an essential viewing to Star Wars, with Solo: A Star Wars Story’s post-credit scene and Ahsoka’s cameos in The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett being great examples of that.
Whether it was intentional or not, the Clone Wars finale was a celebration of the show’s most important additions to the Star Wars universe. With seven seasons, dozens of characters featured, and many different arcs, Clone Wars’ had a plethora of possibilities for crafting its final episodes, and it chose the best of them. Audiences already knew how the stories of Anakin and the Jedi council ended, but not exactly what would happen to Ahsoka, Rex, and Maul – the three characters that perfectly represent what Star Wars: The Clone Wars’ legacy to Star Wars was.
