SMC Director's Cut #2: Malevolence

The summary for Rising Malevolence is Jedi Master Plo Koon goes searching for the Separatists' secret weapon and finds it.

It doesn't go well.

Anakin defies orders again to mount a rescue operation, which is successful.

Immediately, several things jump out at us as we go through that.

I'm impressed with how the writers go back and look at some history of warfare to see what are the different components that go into a battle, and who is fighting, what's important to them, what are the objectives, why are those the objectives, and then go from there in analyzing what happened.

What jumps out in the first episode here, uh, is that things didn't go so well, of course, and Anakin steps in to try to fix the situation, and immediately gets distracted or remains focused on taking care of the survivors.

Now, it becomes clear that he's trying to rescue the master.

What was his name again? Plo Koon?

Plo Koon.

Plo Koon, trying to save him.

Why? Because of the humanity of the situation.

Because the people and their resources, clones or not, are very important.

It's a center of gravity, as they say, to them.

So no matter what else happens, preserving those resources to fight another day with them is very, very important.

But then there's the compassionate, humanitarian side to that.

These are people, not just commodities that we're talking about.

And [laughs] then finally, who is he saving? He's saving another Jedi master.

Those Jedis mean everything when it comes to victory or defeat, as we saw in the succeeding two episodes.

Is it a weakness? Is it a strength? What I found interesting in a subsequent episode is that we get some insight into the enemy's perception of what the Republic-

Mm-hmm

...

the Jedi side, what their strengths and weaknesses are.

And I find it interesting that the Jedis know that their people, their resources, their clones are the source of their power, and their enemies see that as well, and see that as a weakness to be exploited, and they fail.

One of the things that General Grievous does in this episode is, um, they have...

The Separatists have a specific type of ship to go out and destroy those little lifeboat pods.