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Star Wars: The Clone Wars: Season 2 Episode 17: Bounty Hunters

What is it ? : Ahsoka, Anakin and Obi-Wan are heading for a medical station around Felucia, when they find that it's disappeared, and a Droid Starfighter Station is there instead. Their ship gets damaged and they crash onto Felucia, finding a farming village which has hired Bounty Hunters (Mercenaries surely?) to defend them against some Pirates who are intent on stealing their crop of valuable Nysillin.
Obi-Wan is against helping the villagers, since the Separatists will come for the heroes soon, and then the danger from the pirates will pale before the danger from Grievous and the Separatist army. However in exchange for the offer of transport from the planet, the Jedi agree to help, especially after meeting the head of the pirates, Hondo Ohnaka.
The Jedi and Bounty Hunters bond a little as they train the villagers to help in the defence of the Village (3 Jedi + 4 Bounty Hunters, this is obviously the Seven Samurai, or Magnificent Seven isn't it).
The battle is fought and 2 of the Bounty Hunters killed before Hondo declares the fight to be unprofitable and retreats.

High Points : There's some lovely design work in this episode, the Droid Starfighter Space Station looks great, the bounty hunter designs while in a number of places derivative (the wide brimmed hat of Cad Bane, the Blaster of Boba Fett, the tiny guy in a human shaped mech out of Men in Black, etc), all look good.

Low Points : Hondo is back, and stands pretty much toe to toe with Anakin in a melee, which is pretty impressive for someone I didn't think would be much of a fighter.

The Nysillin, Obi Wan states "one of the most valuable crops in the galaxy", however not five minutes later the Farmers claim to not be able to give Hondo any cut as their margins are too thin. Sounds a little like diamond or gold miners complaining there's no money to be made out of digging up rocks.

I'm really getting tired of Clone Wars calling any hired gun a Bounty Hunter. In The Empire Strikes Back, both the Empire and Jabba had put bounties on the heads of the heroes (obviously in Jabbas case it was only on Han and Chewie), so the group of hired guns were legitimately called Bounty Hunters. However, we've had Cad Bane (bounty hunter) hired to do a jail break, and now we've got an entire episode named Bounty Hunters, about 4 of them being hired to protect a village. These aren't bounty hunters, they're not hunting bounties, they're fighting for money, so are Mercenaries, Hired Guns, Soldiers of Fortune or any one of a dozen other terms, but not Bounty Hunters.

So what do you really think ? : The episodes roots are definitely with the Seven Samurai, but it doesn't have time to build the characters enough for you to care about them, it's all over a bit quickly and it's all a bit rushed, not terrible, but a long way from great.

Final Words : That's a couple of not great episodes in a row, and there's only around 5 episode to go to redeem this season, fingers crossed that it all works out.

Score : 7/10

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