The Clones Really Are A Fascinating Contrast To Stormtroopers. And I Don’t Mean Finn And The First

The clones really are a fascinating contrast to stormtroopers. And I don’t mean Finn and the First Order because they follow in the wake of The Clone Wars; I mean Imperial stormtroopers who dominated the Star Wars imagination first and the longest.

For decades, stormtroopers basically functioned like clones: they looked and sounded the same, even though we knew there were different people underneath the helmets they never took off; different faces, same personality.

Then actual clones basically inverted the model: genetically identical men used every opportunity to differentiate themselves, from their armor to their body modifications to their behavior; same face, different personalities.

The one place where the Venn diagram intersected was loyalty, but even then, they still inverted each other’s models. Clones designed to be unwaveringly loyal and obedient consistently questioned orders and their place in the galaxy. Meanwhile, stormtroopers from disparate planets and cultures unfailingly followed the orders of an impersonal Empire.

For all of Star Wars’s faults, for all the ways in which they dumb down or gloss over traditional scifi modes and themes, I can’t think of a more thorough exploration of cloning, the attendant questions of identity and free will, and the sociopolitical and metaphysical implications of a race of genetically identical men, of sameness in difference and difference in sameness, than the clone troopers.

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The reason The Lawless arc of The Clone Wars is so incredible is because narratively-speaking it forms a perfect self-contained tragedy no matter which character's perspective it's from:

For Satine, it's a political tragedy in the style of Richard II, focusing on a conflict between vying factions and the fall of a well-intentioned ruler, but also with echoes of Dido, Queen of Carthage in the sense that it's ultimately not the politics that screws her over as much as it is the doomed love story.

For Maul, it's a revenge tragedy like Hamlet, in which his desire for revenge on Obi-Wan ends up not only doing harm to innocents (like Satine) but also to himself and his own family (as with Savage's death).

For Obi-Wan, he's the object of the revenge tragedy while also being trapped in his own Orpheus-and-Eurydice "you can't save her no matter how hard you try" narrative.

For Bo-Katan, it's about how her pride and ambition prevents her from seeing right from wrong and from noticing the writing on the wall until it's too late to stop the events which have been set in motion and too late to save her sister. It's the idea of a royal house torn apart by betrayal, remorse, and the dashed hopes of reconciliation.

For Pre Vizsla, it's similar to Macbeth in that his desire for power and his designs on the throne end up being his downfall.

In these episodes, every character is the tragic hero of their own little disaster, and I think that is just so cool.

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