If it was, that’s the clone commander’s fault, not the droid’s. I simply don’t buy it that a droid would be placed inside the Jedi Temple for a mission without knowing the Temple’s layout. As much as the humanity of C-3PO and R2-D2 contributed to the charm of the Original Trilogy, giving a droid a personality doesn’t work to automatically give it a sense of history and humanity. The point-of-view character in “Secret Weapons” is WAC-47, a pit droid who arrives late to the briefing.
No principal characters are at stake – of course we know R2-D2 survives – and we don’t know what the Separatist transmission is about. The convoluted plan takes away any sense of threat. For a show called The Clone Wars, we’ve gotten surprisingly little about clones or Anakin and Obi-Wan this season. The first scene hinted that Aayla Secura, Tera Sinube, Anakin, Obi-Wan, and an Anx Jedi might also be involved, and I found myself wishing for them later. I might have agreed except that his size is played for humor, and he has two legs and two arms and a frog face. Commenters on Facebook before the episode aired said that the colonel’s size was an example of the diverse alien biology possible in Star Wars. The episode introduces a variety of new characters, including Colonel Meebur Gascon, a tiny alien. Assumptions like “small things are funny” and “droids running into walls are funny” just made me, as an adult viewer, unsure what I was supposed to be getting out of this. The show’s desire to target two different demographics, however, does not excuse an episode as unfunny and patronizing as “Secret Weapons”. The recent Young Jedi arc unified the child side and the adult side of the show very well, telling a story that was at times very serious and dealt primarily with preteen characters. Season Four was a perfect example, with its Wizard of Oz-meets- Droids episodes and the continuity-shaking return of Darth Maul.
It’s not new for The Clone Wars to be schizophrenic in its content, though. “Secret Weapons” is a light, droid-centric episode that feels disconnected from the rest of the season.
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