Star Wars: The Clone Wars Showrunner Teases How the Final Season Sets Up Revenge of the Sith

Star Wars: The Clone Wars Season 7 premieres on Netflix this week, bringing the series to its proper, intended, close. However, in the time since Clone Wars has been on hiatus, the Star Wars saga has continued exploring the ramifications of Anakin Skywalker’s fall and the Empire’s rise, in series like Star Wars Rebels. So while season 7 of The Clone Wars is indeed an ending, it’s also a crucial interquel piece, filling in some much needed events between the Star Wars Prequel Trilogy and Rebels. As Clone Wars showrunner Dave Filoni is now teasing, season 7 of the show will actually help better explain the events of Star Wars: Revenge of Sith.

To be more accurate, Filoni teased what the intrigue of Clone Wars season 7 is all about, given that fans know how events finally play out in Revenge of The Sith. As he tells EW: “We always knew that it ends with the third film. There’s no escaping that. It’s this inevitability. We know what happens, [but] you don’t know precisely how it happens.”

That statement may at first seem like a cop-out, but it actually isn’t. Star Wars fans have been pointing out the massive story gaps in the expanded Original Trilogy continuity – especially in the era between Revenge of The Sith and A New Hope. Thanks to Clone Wars, Rebels, The OT Trilogy, Solo, and other comic books and novelizations, there are now entire sagas of OT backstory for key characters like Vader, Darth Maul, Palpatine, Han Solo (and of course) Ahsoka Tano. Explaining how those same aforementioned character made it from the events of Clone Wars / Revenge of The Sith to the events of Rebels is something hardcore Star Wars fans definitely want to see.

To boil it down to just one person: fans want to especially see how Ahsoka went from being the lost and broken girl who left the Jedi Order, to the badass mentor and commander in the Rebellion we met in Rebels. Ahsoka Tano continues to be the most popular breakout character of the entire Star Wars animated franchise, and Dave Filoni has no qualms about admitting that season 7 of Clone Wars is really her story:

“It’s really the backbone [of the Star Wars saga],” Filoni said, referring to the light/dark struggle. “It’s that personal journey. [We saw that] with Luke Skywalker, and we’ve seen Rey going on this journey. But for me now with Ahsoka, she’s been the student Jedi the whole time, and she’s finally being challenged by what she will do with her knowledge and her training and her abilities when faced with the ultimate test — which is what you’ll see at the end of Clone Wars here.”

Star Wars: The Clone Wars season 7 streams on Netflix starting Friday.