This episode should have been good/great. It had a lot of potential exploring the inner tension of Dooku as he's almost across the threshold of committing completely to the Dark Side. It does do this a little well, and obviously the episode explores Dooku's and Qui Gob's relationship as well as Dooku and the Council's relationship perfectly.
That being said, this episode falls completely flat in an extremely important facet of Dooku's turn.
His motivations.
Since the only part in Dooku's story we've been shown before this was "Justice" and "Choices" in this same shorts series, I believe those episodes act to establish an event that starts and shapes Dooku's motivation to overthrow the Republic.
But this episode throws that away.
Dooku does the generic mumbling about peace and order, but since when was that ever his motivation? What does that have to do with Senator Dagonet's planet from "Justice" and the revolutionaries on Raxus?
The problem with the Republic before The Clone Wars wasn't that it didn't have "peace and order", it was that the peace and order was corrupt, the so-called peace was merely subjugation of the people into poverty at the expense of the interests of the wealthy. Yes, Senator Dagonet did cause a fight, and the revolutionaries as well, but remember that the problem Dooku had wasn't that Dagonet fought some kidnappers or that the kidnappers kidnapped or that the revolutionaries killed the Jedi, it was that Dagonet and the other senator drove their planets into the ground through non-violent and legal means.
It's mind boggling how they made Dooku's motivation almost entirely contradictory within the span of just three shorts.
I anticipate some might disagree with this criticism, saying they will explain it in other material besides this series, but I think that's absurd. If you're telling a story, you don't start with an event that shaped a character's key motivation, then immediately make his motivation completely antithetical to what it was before, saying that you'll tell the rest of the story later in some book or comic. Since these are shorts, it's necessary to condense the story obviously, but what's left out of a simplified story is something that would flesh it out further, not something needed to fix massive contradictions in central parts of a character arc.
It also doesn't help that Dooku kinda repeats Anakin's initial reasons for not turning back as "I've gone too far already". Something as simple as "Ive gone too far and seen too much" would have helped differentiate Dooku more from Anakin as not turning back partially because he simply can't go back to the corrupt normal. Dooku is more proactive than Anakin as an idealist, not as reactive.
It's hard to rate this. Ordinarily I would rate this an 8/10. The dialogue is a bit iffy at many points, but Dooku's analogy for Qui-Gon's life is expertly crafted, the animation is gorgeous, and the plotline is good enough. However, Dooku's motivations and how he compromised his morales to achieve them is half of the story, and it's foundationally nonsensical. So I have to give a 4/10.
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