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Star Wars: The Clone Wars: Season 5 Episode 5: Tipping Points

What is it ? : Following on from the last episode, the Onderonian Resistance begin getting the message out that the old King is supporting them, and the people of Onderon start to resist the Droid forces in the streets.
The new King and his Super Tactical Droid advisor decide the main problem is the Resistance, and that the people will fall back in line should the resistance and old King be killed, so they commit droid gunships to go into the Onderon Highlands and destroy the resistance.
The shielded gunships prove a massive problem for the resistance, tipping a battle between the Droid army and the Resistance, so Anakin visits Hondo Ohnaka and purchases rocket launchers to be delivered to the resistance. The droids track down the Resistance base location by tracking Hondo's ship as it makes the delivery, but the battle goes differently now the resistance can take down the gunships.
In the closing moments of the battle Steela Gerrera falls from a cliff, and Ahsoka grabs her with the Force, pulling her back towards safety, however a crashed gunship still has an active turret and fires, winging Ahsoka distracting her enough to drop Steela to her death.
In the hours after the battle, Count Dooku asks the Super Tactical Droid for it's conclusions on defeating the resistance, it informs him that it will be along process. Not willing to tie forces up on Onderon, he orders a full retreat, with the droid killing the King.
The old King takes charge once more, and there is a massive funeral for Steela the leader of the resistance which has freed the world, Lux Bonteri informs Ahsoka that he has been given his mothers old job of Senator, and will work to bring Onderon back into the Republic.

High Points : The action is well done, with the skirmish between the Resistance and the Droid Army being a particular high point, Hondo Ohnaka is always good to see, and we actually get to see part of Onderon we've never seen before, but there's nothing here out of the ordinary. It's all fairly well done, but not outstanding.

However the one thing I will point out is, it's nice to see Ahsoka get over the fact that Lux and Steela have a relationship, Ahsoka has always been the most reasonable of characters in Clone Wars, and for the last few episodes it's been annoying to see her flinch every time Lux and Steela showed any affection for each other. The cynic in me wants to say it was only because Steela was going to die later in that episode, and the writers didn't want Ahsoka to look petty towards a doomed characters, but whatever the reason, it was nice to see her enjoying a friends happiness instead of disapproving of it.

Low Points : This storyline has had a lot of possibilities, but ignored them, the possible growth to see Saw grow from a hero towards the broken man he becomes, we don't see. The chance of seeing the unique beasts coming from the moon of Dxun, the chance to see the deadly jungles of Onderon, all missed.
Instead we got a generic world, which could have been anywhere, characters unrecognisable from their appearance elsewhere, and a slow and very missable storyline.

So what do you really think ? : While I like the idea that Dooku required forces elsewhere, so just pulled his armies away from Onderon instead of wasting effort in a protracted war, it just appeared out of nowhere, and it would have been nice if this had been foreshadowed.
As it was, it just looked like everything wrapped up neatly because we were 5 minutes from the end of the fourth part of a four part story.

Final Words : I knew about the Onderon storyline with Saw Gerrera for a while, and was really looking forwards to it, and maybe that led me to have too high expectations, but this was a real let down.
Oh well, it's over now, onwards to hopefully better stories.

Score : 7.5/10

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