Star Wars: The Clone Wars: Season 1 Episode 10: Lair of Grievous
What is it ? : Continuing the story from the last part, the Jedi are still tracking Nute Gunray. When the tracking beacon from the stolen ship turns up on an uninhabited planet, so Jedi Master Kit Fisto and his former apprentice, Nahdar Vebb, are dispatched to recover Gunray.
However, Gunray has escaped and the tracking beacon has been used to lure Jedi to a Castle belonging to General Grievous, who is to prove his worth by slaying a Jedi Master. Vebb and the Clonetroopers (literally red shirts in this story) are killed, and Kit Fisto escapes leaving Grievous victorious but not completely restoring Dooku's faith in him.
High Points : Grievous gets pretty badly smashed up in this one, and the episode shows his medical droid repairing him, which is a nice point that he can have his legs cut off, but be restored with only a few minutes in the medical bay, which I thought was taking excellent advantage of the cybernetic nature of the character.
Also on this subject, when he's getting operated on, he grunts and groans in pain, eventually screaming as the medical droid peels his damaged faceplate off.
The medical droid itself verbally belittles Grievous, complaining about him not being good enough to avoid damage, etc. Which I thought was interesting, not only can this droid get away with this attitude (Grievous needs it), but it seems the exact choice that Dooku would make to keep his henchmen in line.
When Kit Fisto (a Nautolan) and his apprentice Nahdar Vebb (a Mon Calimari) were introduced as the Jedi for the episode, I assumed there were going to be lots of underwater action in the episode, it defied my expectations by not having any underwater scenes at all.
Grievous's pet, Gor, a massive hulking cybernetically modified beast fights the Jedi. But when it's defeated, Grievous actually seems sad, as if someone killed his dog . . . which I really liked.
And finally, the constant fails by Grievous seem to be being addressed in story, in that he's having to prove himself worthy of keeping his job. Although he doesn't actually succeed in this episode, and at a wild guess it's going to be ignored in the future, it was nice to see the writers make an attempt to deal with this, and to acknowledge that his failures aren't just being forgotten about.
Low Points : I thought there was a missed opportunity to round out the personality of General Grievous. When they first enter his castle, they find statues and monuments to his actions before he became a cyborg. But these are only momentarily seen, and I'd like to have seen more of his background. If Star Wars can spend 3 films basically showing how Anakin became Vader, surely a single episode of what happened to Grievous isn't too much to ask.
Nahdar Vebb, was a bit too much of a stereotypical keen to fight, freshly knighted Jedi, and his demise was a little too obvious.
But apart from that, it
So what do you really think ? : A very good episode, nice action, good dialogue, and uses characters we've not really seen before, so this was definitely one of the good episodes.
A little disappointed that Nute Gunray basically escaped between episodes (show don't tell), but I suppose that they didn't need to link this episode to the last at all, so at least there was some kind of link between stories.
Final Words : Oh, again they kill off the good characters, the medical droid dies, and I'd so have enjoyed seeing him verbally abusing Grievous some more.
Score : 7.5/10
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