Star Wars: The Clone Wars season 3 episode 8 review: Evil Plans
The tone keeps jumping. The chronology gets a little confused. But the latest episode of The Clone Wars is easily one of its most enjoyable...
3.8 Evil Plans
Although the title of this episode is Evil Plans, it could have just as easily been called Party Plans, as everyone’s favourite astromech and protocol droids are called in to duty. For they’re helping cater an event for Padme Amidala.
No, really!
At first, this installment of The Clone Wars is quite the sitcom, as See Threepio and Artoo Detoo peruse the underbelly of Coruscant looking for rare fruit (for the party, you see). These scenes are very reminiscent of their to-ing and fro-ing in the earlier moments in A New Hope (though some of us still call that one simply Star Wars).
It’s quite a delight, to be utterly honest. Very often, the Star Wars animated spin-off is very serious in tone (as it should be), with little humour. So this sideline of laughs, as Threepio and Artoo go for a robotic massage and oil-down, is much appreciated. Anthony Daniels stoutly performs his role, delivering laughs with every haughty line spoken.
But, there is another element to the episode: the titular element of “evil”. And who better to portray this sin than returning bad guy, the bounty hunter Cad Bane. Well, actually (and technically), he is not “returning” for this is another episode which takes place before a previous story.
In fact this one takes place before the season one finale (when we first met Bane) resulting in an odd ending for this story if you were unaware of its already broadcast ‘sequel’ (confused yet?).
The bounty hunter has been hired by the Hutts to acquire the plans for the senate, so that he may free Ziro the Hutt, and tracks them down to Threepio and Artoo, leading to their little party being abruptly ended. From the laughter of their friendship comes some genuinely unpleasant, but compellingly portrayed, torture scenes (seeing the return of a familiar bad droid from Jabba’s Palace).
I have to say that despite the jumps in tone (and chronology), Evil Plans is certainly one of the most memorable and fun episodes of The Clone Wars. The return of Cad Bane is most welcome (as is the introduction of the ganglord Hutts), and the cartoon buffoonery of the droids is pleasing in the extreme.
Read our review of the last episode, Assassin, right here.
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