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Star Wars: The Clone Wars: Season 2 Episode 1: Holocron Heist

What is it ? : So we begin the second season of Clone Wars, and the story picks up with Cad Bane still on Coruscant (which I suppose settles one of my gripes with the last episode), being hired by Darth Sidious to steal a Holocron from the Jedi Temple (Cad Bane is really stretching his title as a Bounty Hunter, first introduced to do a jail break, now a burglary, his title shouldn't be a bounty hunter it should be all around criminal). He gets a shape shifter (odd that Obi Wan should be surprised in Attack of the Clones when they seem to be more common than many other species) and a droid to help him, killing a Jedi and getting the shape shifter to take their place and infiltrate the Temple, and shut down security systems from the Library.
Meanwhile, Anakin, Obi-Wan and Ahsoka are fighting the invasion of Felucia, and are forced to retreat, an order Ahsoka refuses. To give her time to think she is assigned to the Library in the Jedi Temple as a guard, when she helps detect the infiltrator and catch her.
After security systems are shut down, Cad Bane sneaks into the temple using his rocket boots and the air ducts, sends his droid off to explode in the security office of the Temple, using that as a distraction to sneak into the Holocron vault, and make off with a particular Holocron.
The Shapeshifter reveals that Banes next target is a Jedi called Ropal, who is carrying a Kyber Crystal which can only be decoded with a Holocron, and stores the list of every force sensitive child in the galaxy.

High Points : It's a competent enough episode, but I'm having problems pointing to any particular area that it excels in. Don't get me wrong the entire episode is good enough, but it's only good enough, the story doesn't have any surprises but is fairly entertaining, the dialogue is reasonable but doesn't have any stand out moments.

Low Points : While the episode is pretty entertaining, it has a number of nitpicky little faults which I probably wouldn't mention if the plot or dialogue had been better, so I apologise for the moaning nature of a number of these.

Ahsoka gets assigned to guard duty to give her time to think over her actions on Felucia, but there are no lessons or instruction performed on how she could do better in the future, they just expect her to figure it out on her own. And lets be honest, she's all of 14 years old, and they're expecting her to make great military decisions. I know the Jedi as Generals are a pretty poor decision in the first place, who wants a bunch of untrained warrior monks in command of their armies, advisors yes, but leaders hell no. But putting only partially trained children in this role and not expecting disaster?

The Air Vents in the Jedi Temple are massive, I know that in most action movies they're much larger than in real life, and in Sci-Fi they're usually big enough to walk in, but the ones in the Jedi Temple you could drive car through in places. How much air do they really need? Even one leading to the top secret, ultra secure Holocron Vault is wide enough for a couple of people to walk down side by side.

The shapeshifter in the episode, disguises herself as a Jedi to help shut down force fields and security systems such as sensors. And where does she go to do this? The Jedi Library! Why are these systems accessible from their Library, why even have a Security Center (as is bombed later in the episode) if you can access the security systems from just about anywhere. The plot line wouldn't have gone particularly different if the Holocron Vault had been accessible only through the Security office, Ahsoka had been assigned as Guard there, and the Shapeshifter was disguised as Head of Security instead of Generic Jedi #12. Poor writing, or poor security systems, both are poor.

The massive air ducts allow Cad Bane to cruise around them in his Rocket Boots, which are absolutely amazing (I really should have put them down as a high point of the episode, he looks amazingly cool flying around with them), but makes me wonder why we've only seen Rocket Packs up till now. If you can get Rocket Boots which are this good, why doesn't everyone have a pair, it'd totally change the show, but would be amazing as Jedi and Sith rocketed around in their Rocket Boots, hacking limbs off each other. The low point here, is definitely that only Cad Bane has a pair, otherwise they're great.

At the end of the Episode, it's revealed that Banes next target is Ropal, who is carrying The Kyber Crystal (sure that should have been "A" Kyber Crystal, given that Rogue One reveals that the empire mines them, and they go into making lightsabers). The Crystal contains the names of every force sensitive child in the Galaxy, and if decoded will allow them to be presumably turned to the Dark Side, or killed removing the next generation of Jedi. Now, I've got 2 points about this . . .
Firstly why the hell is this list off out in the galaxy somewhere with some unheard of Jedi. Surely the council should protect this information, especially if it can only be decoded with a Holocron, and all the Holocrons are in a vault in the Jedi Temple which normally only the Jedi Council can access. Why would this guy even have the Crystal, Jedi get in fights all the time, even if you're sure that no-one will be able to read it, surely there's a concern that this Jedi will die in a fight, or be killed in battle, and the Crystal lost.
Secondly, the Jedi have a list of all force sensitives? Since when? When you read the background of most Jedi, it talks about how they were discovered and trained by their master, or taken to the temple after a Jedi senses their power. If there's some master list of all potential Jedi, then why are all these others just being found (Anakin is the most obvious example of someone who wasn't found early, but also Ahsoka was found by Plo Koon at three years old, so wasn't on any list). This just looks like a Macguffin to move the plot along, but rather than introduce some stupid idea, why not just have it be battle plans he's got, or some other important but not world changing piece of information.

So what do you really think ? : As mentioned above, I'm probably being more critical and picking minor flaws in it because the episode was only alright. There's nothing terrible about this episode, but it just didn't grab me, and to tell the truth it all seemed a little easy for Bane given his opponents are Mind Reading, Future Seeing, Mystic Warriors. Yoda predicted the Temple was going to be broken into, but even with that heads up, no-one sensed the Shapeshifters thoughts (furtive and worried about detection), and no-one predicted that a priceless Holocron with knowledge of the ages was going to disappear. I know Bane is the new cool bad guy on the block, but it was just a little easy for him, making his opponents look incompetent rather than him look skilled.

Final Words : We'll see how the second part of this storyline goes, as Ahsoka and Anakin set off to rescue Ropal, and stop Bane getting the Kyber Crystal. Clone wars has a pretty good reputation of making second parts to stories far better than the first part, which bodes well given there wasn't anything too wrong with this episode, hopefully the next part will be great.

Score : 7/10

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