Star Wars: The Clone Wars: Season 3 Episode 6: The Academy
What is it ? : Ahsoka is instructed by the Jedi Council to go to Mandalore to educate the students in their Academy about the ills of Corruption, and also help root it out within the Mandalorian Government at the request of Duchess Satine.
After arriving and giving a lesson on the citizens duty to root out corruption, her students decide to investigate the food shortages on Mandalore, and discover there aren't any.
Apparently the shortages have been faked, and distribution is controlled by the Mandalorian military. The students report this to Duchess Satine, who happens to be one of the groups aunt, but she doesn't offer any help, so they contact the Prime Minister who agrees to meet them, but they are ambushed by the same military officers who had been organising the black market distribution, but are rescued by Ahsoka.
The students then inform Ahsoka, who discovers from their footage that the Prime Minister is behind it all, but also discovers that Duchess Satine is missing. Handing over the kids to pretend to be on the Prime Ministers side, she uses mind tricks to locate Satine, but on trying to rescue her she discovers that the guards are mind trick resistant and the Prime Minister was just testing her loyalty.
She then beats up all the guards forces a shock collar onto the Prime Minister, and Satine calls for her guards to arrest the Prime Minister, and Anakin arrives to collect Ahsoka and jokes with her about overthrowing a corrupt government single handed.
High Points : The episode is entertaining enough, and it passes the 25 minutes or so well enough. But the plot really doesn't hold together well. It does focus on the students for most of it's run time, and it's enjoyable to see these bunch of kids getting into a political scandal and being totally out of their depth. Something which would have been easy to get wrong, but is well handled here.
Low Points : Again the episode is commenting on the evils of corruption in Mandalorian society, commenting on the shortages and the evils of greed as the people try to feed their starving children. . .
When the students go to their Aunt to reveal they've discovered the shortages on Mandalore are entirely false, she doesn't offer any help. They've discovered a massive cover up, hiding millions of tonnes of import and she lets these kids continue the investigation without any help except an instruction to be cautious. Guess it's not her favourite nephew that's part of the group.
If there aren't any shortages, why hasn't a real black market appeared since there's plentiful supplies, and people willing to pay high prices then surely there's people willing to take advantage of this. Traders would bring in cargoes, people would steal from the warehouses and sell what they steal.
The population of a planet requires a lot of supplies to keep going, and covering up the existence and shipping of all those supplies requires a massive cover up, which no one has apparently broken, not a single warehouse worker, flight controller or dock worker has seen their families suffering from the shortages and decided to tell anyone about all these supplies, until a bunch of students sneak in and discover everything.
Speaking of the students finding out everything, by heck it's a coincidence that they happen to sneak into the exact warehouse that the Prime Minister just happens to be visiting at that moment. If fact Why is the Prime Minister of an entire planet hanging around in the exact warehouse visited by the students? Surely he has people to do that for him, why apart from needing to look sneaky by the storyline does he need to visit the warehouses at all?
So what do you really think ? : Part of my complaints above are reduced by the fact that Mandalore only has a population of 4 million, so the quantity of supplies needed are actually much less than I imagined, as I thought a world like this, with the massive domed cities would actually be around the 4 Billion mark. But Mandalore being such a low population world just raises more questions, why does anyone care about Mandalore at all, even if the entire Star Wars Galaxy only had the population of the Earth, Mandalore would have the political pull of Moldova (which I have to admit I didn't realise was even a country, I knew the name but thought it was one out of history, sorry Moldova please pardon my ignorance).
With Coruscant having a population of over a Trillion, Mandalore's insignificance is striking.
Final Words : As I state above, this episode isn't bad, it's quite enjoyable, but the plot doesn't bear any scrutiny at all. The bad guy does stuff for bad guy reasons (at one point he suggests he's doing it to raise money for humanitarian relief for problems caused by the Clone Wars, but no evidence is offered as to whether this is true or not), even the heroes just do things to force the story along (Satine ignores the Students even though this is exactly the evidence she's looking for. Ahsoka gets taken captive, then beats up a large group of armed and armoured soldiers).
Enjoy it, but don't engage your brain, or you might start not enjoying it.
Score : 7.5/10
Comments made about this Article!
There are currently no comments for this article, be the first to post in the form below
