Star Wars: The Clone Wars Almost Ended Differently

The final season of Star Wars: The Clone Wars showed fans Anakin Skywalker’s last meeting with his former Jedi padawan, Ahsoka Tano, before his transformation into the Sith Lord known as Darth Vader. Series producer David Filoni has revealed that the final meeting almost went a different way. Speaking to Nerdist, Filoni says the scene almost went further in foreshadowing Anakin’s fall to the dark side. “I had it written differently at the end, the last thing she says to him. She used to tell him not to change. I felt that was just too leading. It didn’t feel real to me because it’s like implying that she knows he might change, which, I don’t think that’s what that is about. But since I gave them this little tit for tat instead, where he says, ‘With any luck, this will all be over soon.’ Then she, being his apprentice and being snippy with the comebacks as always, says, ‘Yeah, Obi-Wan says there’s no such thing as luck.’ That’s who they both are. They give each other a hard time, and they try to one up each other. He likes it, but he’s like, ‘It’s a good thing I taught you otherwise.’”

He also revealed that he almost played the appearance of Morai, the bird Darth Vader sees soaring over a field of clone trooper graves after Order 66, in a different way than how it ultimately appeared in the final episode. “I used to have different versions of that and the way it [Morai] landed,” he says. “There were always common things about it. At one point I had that bird perched on the Y-wing fighter and it wasn’t playing right. You have to play with it and it’s always a race to get it right before you run out of time and money. You have to be flexible and able to leap at opportunities that arise.

“I changed the ending as it went because I think a really important thing for me about the ending of the series was this is not about Anakin. It has something tangential to do with him, but it’s not about him. It really has to be about Ahsoka and Rex and their point of view. Anakin’s story is told. That was George. That’s what he did in Revenge of the Sith. So I don’t have to worry about that, but I can tell the story that needs to be told related to her. And so I had to be careful when it got to the ending that, you know, it’s not this distraught thing about her and is she thinking about Anakin and what happened to him. That all plays out however it plays out, but it’s not the most important thing. Then it’s like de facto telling Anakin’s story somehow again through her, which is not the voice I want in this. I think it all broke the right way. It was a thrill to work with everybody again and see everybody that had been there since the beginning.”

The Clone Wars has had a few false endings in the past, with it being canceled after its fifth season and then revived for a sixth season of “Lost Missions” on Netflix. This time, Filoni has said the story is truly finished. Anakin and Ahsoka’s story continued in the Star Wars Rebels episode “Twilight of the Apprentice.”

Star Wars: The Clone Wars is now streaming on Disney+.